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Comment by alanbernstein | Hacker News Reader

> Pure black looks unnatural on a screen, and pure white is too bright.

Huh? Nothing about text on a screen is "natural". "Too bright" is completely meaningless, you have no idea what my motivations are for the brightness settings on my screen. The content should make use of the full range of brightness, and the user can then adjust the contrast to any point in [0, 1] as desired. This is like suggesting that an audio sample should only use 10% of the dynamic range allowed by the file format, because "speakers are too loud".

> some odd shapes have a visual centre that is different from their mathematical centre.

"Mathematical" doesn't really mean anything here. Are you referring to the centroid? If anything that is a "more mathematical" concept than a midpoint. The use of this word here makes it look like you want to eschew the technical perspective in favor of the emotional, aesthetic perspective. But a centroid can be computed.

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I think all of their uses of “mathematical” just means bounding box. It’s pretty reasonable because those are the numbers design software shows you for placement and uses to make guides. And you can calculate a centroid, but what about when the image has multiple colors, making one side look heavier than the other, or any other weird case? This isn’t rejecting math, just in this case it’s more effective to go with what looks right versus follow a formula. You don’t use a slide rule to catch a baseball.

This is the entire basis of the article. Use the word "mathematical" where convenient to sound smart, but never come close to defining the word. Sprinkle in a whole bunch more of these opinions-masquerading-as-facts, and there you have it.

Same thing with the "too bright". Too bright based on what? Too bright for whom? Doesn't matter. Just follow these opin- I mean rules.

"Mathematical" and "optical" alignment is not the best wording I think. It seems that "align by weight, not by width" would be a better way to summarize the author's advice.

But apart from that, it is good advice, and I think the post gives a few more good rules of thumb too.

I prefer to call it “optical” and “mechanical” alignment, rather than “mathematical.”

Indeed. That's how my brain reacts to it - it keeps nagging me that thing is not properly balanced and will tear everything apart when rotating, like a washing machine does when you throw a brick inside it.

“Mathematical" and "optical“ stems from design lingo and is AFAICS not an invention by the author. One can find these terms in most of design related software packages. “Mathematical” is also often described as “metrics”.

? Not only is there a very specific meaning to 'mathematical' the article is in fact dead-on example of good design rules.

'Mathematical' alignment would mean centering on the basis of width or height, whereaas 'optical' aligment would adjust for the 'visual weight' of the item, which often 'feels' different.

For example, a 100px wide container with a 50px wide image within it, may not be appropriate to sit at the 25px->75px range. It may need to be slightly adjusted depending on the visual mass of the images.

Honestly these are excellent rules for design, and it's a bit funny in fact to see all the comments from people unable to process ostensible ambiguity in the rules, as though they are looking for a 'precision algorithm'.

I would say to anyone having difficulty processing why these are helpful rules, that it would be worth looking into design principless overall, it'll be a fun experience.

The documentary 'Helvetica' is pretty fun.

A better wording than “mathematical” would have been “simple integer ratios”. Taking √sin(e) would also be “mathematical”, but probably not what the author meant.

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