Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

90% of the challenge of making my personal webpage is picking the colours. I still hate the green and it drives me nuts. But blue is too comfortable and boring. Maybe an auburn?

Ugh. Is there a place I can share a link and get two minutes of free designer advice?

View on HN

Yes. Post it here and tell everyone it’s perfect and it’ll be destroyed in minutes.

(There are websites that have color palettes available for selection iirc)

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Destroy it: https://BUGFIX-66.com

Single CPU Linode cloud instance ($5 per month), single Go executable generating/caching/serving the simplest/cleanest HTML... could it be simpler or cheaper and still work?

If one of the things you wanted to "take away" was page margin, then sure.

Even at a time when the physical costs of production were far, far more significant than today's, people thought it was important to give a text block some air (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_of_page_construction) so this isn't a frivolous innovation. IMO doesn't have to be a big shift or complicate things; body { margin-left: 2vw; } here would do a lot. Hell, you could toss it as an inline declaration on the body element itself if you're morally opposed to style tags.

It's not about perfection, it's about beauty:

Beauty is the sum of the parts in arrangement, which eliminates the need to add, remove or change anything.

Johann Carl Loth

(translated from german, maybe some sense is lost)

Agreed, but commenter said "Call it perfect and HN will destroy it".

Agreed :-)

Sure. Line height sucks on your page. May be add a little bit of it. I would do:

    body {
        line-height: 1.6em;
    }

W3C actually publishes some nice stylesheets: https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/preview

Try https://coolors.co or http://colormind.io/

Green is also the most challenging one, since our perception of green is twice as good as with other colours. Blue, btw, is generally perceived darker than the technical brightness of the color would suggest. A general advice may be to dial down saturation: especially when applied to larger areas, colours tend to be more intensive as they may appear in a colour picker.

Here's a quick take:

https://i.imgur.com/B1vROtB.png

In my opinion this is an objective step forward. Thank so much for the ideas.

So:

- serif title to be more distinct and formal

- a calm blue (do you have the hex?)

- no borders

I'm thinking something isn't quite complete with the "latest posts" now that it's without a border. Maybe they need to be a bit more "condensed" so they don't bleed into eachother visually as much.

I'm going to experiment with your ideas!

Edit: I'm also deeply curious how someone looks at a page and decides things like "the title should be serif." In retrospect it looks so good but I have no clue how people get there. Just a good eye? Experience? Is it some sort of design rule/convention?

#84a0ca is the hex for that grayish blue. If you open up dev tools in chrome or FF they have a colorpicker and you can tweak in real time.

> I'm thinking something isn't quite complete with the "latest posts" now that it's without a border.

No doubt you could improve it further. The borders felt like too much chrome. You could also experiment with a subtly different background color for the cards... not sure if it would work. Or more padding, etc. Basically, the idea is there are many way to achieve visual "separateness".

> I'm also deeply curious how someone looks at a page and decides things like "the title should be serif."

The proper mixing of serif / sans-serif is a standard technique. If you look at pretty much any web page that looks really well-designed to you, they'll have a "font palette" just like a color palatte. Often it will be just two fonts but sometimes more, and it's typically a mix of serif and sans.

I am not a professional designer... I've just picked up a bit over the years.

The rabbit hole is fractally deep. Stuff like https://betterwebtype.com/web-typography-resources/ (so https://betterwebtype.com/articles/2018/08/15/guide-to-combi... though I'll warn you it's got a real annoying modal) scratches the surface of the stuff that someone might be thinking of... regarding type alone.

also, there is no reason why you need to have colors for your fonts. try to do black (or dark gray) and a lighter gray. maybe throw some colors around for some things but you don't need color everywhere.

A simpler alternative: Don't worry about the colors. Just provide text and links, and let the user's preferences handle color and style. If the user did not configure their own preferences, browser defaults tend to be readable and accessible.

Ahh about this. I recently found a very good Twitter thread about choosing a color for a non-designer. Sadly, I think I didn't save the thread and now I cannot find it.

Can someone help me find it?

Not only colour: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/events/879086180909764608

Was it perhaps https://twitter.com/kadlac ? I remember him for “non-designer” posts, and color.

https://paletton.com/

Try #FC0 or simply pick anything that matches the WCAG AAA compliance level and be done with it.

I'm working on an automatic designer. You just focus on the content and have instant preview how your website will look like in several different templates/designs.

There is Genetic Algorithm that can mutate styles of the current templates (that you liked) and generate endless designs till you find the one you like the most.

I love the sound of this!

Not a designer, but curious. Just comment a link.

It’s in my bio. :)

I’m not the biggest fan of the design but I don’t mind it. I want minimal. I just hate the colour. Maybe the font needs to be smaller too.

I quite like this guy's choice of green text and background shade of grey... from a post I saw here recently...

https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/nightdrive.html

But go with your choices, it can take time over a few sessions. Notice colours in the real world and notice ones you like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com