Typography 2024: For America’s Best | Hacker News Reader

Typography 2024: For America’s Best

practicaltypography.com

94 pointsblueridge32 comments

From an aesthetic perspective, I actually like the Cornel West site. It's a blast from the past, as in a website actually trying to articulate anything. Especially, how West isn't just featured as a bystander in his own campaign (as in most other designs), but actually the visual pivot that brings the elements together to form a message. (You could say, the activity evoked by this design choice may be even shocking in comparison to other campaign sites.) The unusual color palette of the action buttons in the top right corner makes a great counterpoint, both separating concerns and balancing the over-all design, bringing it to life. There isn't any need for a dramatic font choice. — While it's certainly a risky outlier, I'd like to see more of this in general web design.

[Disclaimer: I'm a European with no (under)standing in/of any of the politics involved.]

I'm no fan of Republicans, but he's trying too hard to be funny. It'd be less boring to read if he just spoke about the font choices, and saved the political satire for Reddit.

I am a Republicans, and his snark was awesome and hit right on the (clown) nose.

I'm no fan of Democrats, but I feel the same way as you about the article.

I beg to differ, a clinical run down of which web sites use which fonts would be far more boring to read.

For all of the campaign's faults, the Clinton 2016 design and web teams did a fantastic job.

https://www.hillaryforamericadesign.com/work

It's modern and bold, it's just got a lot going on. It's hard to know what the hell to click on.

The archive site isn’t great for usability but the 2016 campaign site seems fine to me.

This is awful design, though.

How am I supposed to find what I want to click on with that page without hovering over everything? Not only that, that page is from 2016, the "young voters" already had phones by that point... how are you supposed to hover on a phone? (I assume the phone experience is entirely different here, fwiw).

This reminds me a lot of toy websites I made in the early to mid 2000s when I didn't care about accessibility or usability or discoverability, and made stuff that looked cool for the sake of cool. I cringe at those things I made when I didn't know better.

It seems like you’re focused on the archive site, which I agree isn’t great for usability.

> The website blends the 1970s classic Grouch with possible future classic Glacial Indifference. (Based on those font names, I’m detecting that Hutchinson may be the victim of a prank by a web designer less loyal than Brad Parscale.)

1. Incredible article

2. Whoever built this website and did this, I salute you

I’ll never be able to take seriously a website about typography that hyphenates so aggressively. It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and the word breaks dramatically impair comprehension.

Loved it. Since it seems to be slanted to humor. Wouldn't mind seeing some ranking/point system for each, and then a score indicator for Republican's/Democrat, like an election count. Who is winning the Font Wars.

Or build a website that lets you pick any candidate and any style to display them - and then you could look at all styles with your preferred-or hated-candidate.

The site's choice of using a degree symbol to represent anchor links needs to be ripped apart.

It IS seemingly needlessly nonstandard, but I’ll actually take it over the infuriating default all so-called “UX designers” insist on today, which is links differentiated solely by color, and an almost identical color to the surrounding text. Underlines are great. Using a recognizable color is great. The fact that it makes links stick out is a feature, not a bug. continues to bang head on table

Interesting piece but is more just a bunch of personal feelings on various sites.

> The website looks like the default theme that shipped with WordPress in 2009

Butterick doesn't know, this is actually a compliment.

But I'm guessing none of the candidate websites opted to show links as undifferentiated text with the º symbol.

Oh, is that what those circles sprinkled liberally around the text of the article were? Reading this on a phone, I was completely mystified by them. Thought it was some font rendering issue.

I can't get over how quant https://rondesantis.com/ is – it's like they time-travelled an intern from 2005 to do it.

I can't agree. I think it's pretty fresh, clean, fast, does the job. I actually like it.

source: I play a web designer on TV.

At least it's responsive and works on mobile.

To be honest if a candidate embraced 90s style web design I would be far more likely to vote for them.

I don’t think a candidates choice in web design will affect most voters’ likeliness to vote for them. It is much more important in attracting g volunteers and donators.

I actually quite like it. I don't agree with the author's point that it gets "sludgey" in the middle of the gradient either. It's fast and the contrast holds up and it isn't too busy.

I do not like Ron at all but his web team/person did a good job IMO.

To be fair, the only major complaint I have with that website is the gradient background (the strong red and strong blue) are both relatively the same perceptual brightness and tend to lead eyesight away from the content. Else, it looks like somebody's 2010s political blog; it works fine, although it could use more content.

Works great for those trying to get the vote of the older folk. Hate the bigoted, sexist, and racist views of the candidate, but I can't hate on his election website too much.

Also, given he's trying to get older folk to vote for him, his webdev should consider 16pt (not 16px, this isn't a typo) for the text. As we get older, our eyes get fucking awful.

"I’m running for president because decline is a choice" is a great slogan though.

Clicked on Kennedy's website because the screenshot looked like he was winking on the homepage. I wanted to check. He's not, but there's no https, which breaks the link used in the article.

Here's another write-up:

Typography 2020

https://practicaltypography.com/typography-2020.html

thanks, i laughed a lot!

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