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19 pointssusam28 comments

> … forces use of ‘house style’ by adding dipthongs in words like ‘encyclopædia’

Nitpick: firstly, it’s spelled ‘diphthong’. Secondly, ⟨æ⟩ is a ligature, not a diphthong (at least in English). Diphthongs are sounds made up of a smooth transition from one vowel to another, so I can see what caused this mistake… but it’s a little jarring to see the term misused in an essay about typographical conventions.

In typography the term diphthong also. Means the character itself - "a digraph representing the sound of a diphthong or single vowel". I can't speak to the possible typo in the word itself, but I believe it might be a old spelling of the same word.

All I can say is that I’ve never seen this usage before.

No, it cannot be an old spelling, since it comes from Greek: an initial "di-" (δι- from dual, two) and then phthong (φθόγγος, voice). So the two initial letters of the second part are phi and theta.

Some words (and maybe with British spelling) look unearthly this way. Manœuvre. Diarrhœa.

But that’s ⟨œ⟩, not ⟨æ⟩. They’re different letters.

In the same alien alphabet.

One of the stated goals was "Be light" and yet the author managed to make a 1.2Mb page for what is just text.

Another one is "Beautiful typography" and yet there's a justified text without hyphens that creates some atrocious spacing.

This site has incredibly good intentions and plenty of room for improvements.

I agree that the justified text isn't always creating good outcomes. This is particularly true with the margin notes. I like margin notes, but when there's a lot less horizontal space to play with, the justification can cause some really awkward spacing issues.

All of this somewhat undercuts the sentence spacing argument. I think sentence spacing is interesting, and I agree that it should have had more support from css and html, but if your word spaces range from tiny to enormous and vary on each line, it's hard to even really see the sentence spacing.

Yeah the side notes are especially painful and they become really hard to parse with those gaps.

As for sentence spacing, I honestly don't understand what the goal is here. Especially because in this case the sentences are all wrapped in spans and then are not spaced at all.

The only spacing is between p so why bother doing the whole sentence wrapping.

Yeah, I highlighted those (and most of the other points in the comments here) last week in my critique: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36625742

Presumably Dave just hasn't gotten around to it - that's how personal sites are, they fit only into the cracks of one's time-energy. No one to report a bug to but yourself...

re: your site, don't you think the standard for epigraphs (and quotes in general) should be non-italicized, i.e., left to how they were originally written, with or without emphasis?

Maybe, but if you don't italicize them, they risk looking a lot like blockquotes, and lack a good way of distinguishing the ascription/source. Italics are nice and often used for epigraphs, so it's not a weird choice.

Personal sites are a tricky beast. Especially if you’re someone who’s obsessed with details. I spent way too much time on mine but to get to a point where I was happy it took me years. So I’m sure Dave will get there eventually.

Yeh justified text reads horribly almost always online. It has it's place but doesn't work well here in my opinion.

The way paragraphs and lists are wrapped around big letters doesn’t look like beautiful typography to me: https://imgur.com/Yc7pkss unless it is trolling and I can’t comprehend tongue-in-cheek humour there. Well, anyway...

I can't speak to the OP's particular use of them, but initial capitals are a long standing typographical feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial – CSS even has a ::first-letter pseudo element to help style them.

Yes, but then maybe some thought should be put by author into lists behavior around them on devices that aren’t phones? Just maybe...

The site claims to be using https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond but something has gone wrong with the italics (at least on my screen), they are just an oblique version of the roman version of the font, whereas the Google Fonts page has a much nicer actually italic version (e.g. compare the lowercase h on the Google Fonts page above vs the linked page).

I’m seeing the same thing. Sorts Mill Goudy also comes in a single weight and it looks like the author is forcing CSS font-weight values beyond 400 for their headings.

Off-topic: I think UX blogs give me the heebie jeebies.

> I think UX blogs give me the heebie jeebies.

Interesting. Why is that if you don’t mind me asking

This reaction isn't targeted toward all UX blogs...but some of the one's that I've come across go a little too far with their rhetoric. Some of them have this overt "romanticist" bend to them that can come across as overblown from a user's perspective. The constant appeals toward aesthetic ("beauty, elegance") and emotion ("sparking joy") put me off.

I don't mean to downplay the effects that good and bad UX design have on people. It matters, but where it matters most (rental property portals, banks, healthcare industry, etc.) is where things like "beauty" and "joy" matter the least. This leads me to question the type of software, web pages, etc. that these sort of designers/bloggers are speaking on behalf of and how these kind of blogs run parallel to other hand-wavy bodies of writing authored in the tech industry, or any other industry for that matter.

Granted, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic appeals and the like, but if you're going to make one it shouldn't sound like a Steve Jobs WWDC keynote speech generated by Bard. I feel like there's an intangible quality to expressions on aesthetics in a way (although most of the time there are identifiable reasons for their appeal if you think hard enough). Some UX blogs lack that.

I felt like this was one of them.

The typography is almost great but it full justifies all text (at least on mobile) which looks horrible. Web browsers have limited hyphenation and don’t do any kerning or other adjustments (like hyphenation) to make full justified text look good like it does in a book.

Typography tips:

Don’t separate a paragraph by both indenting the first line and also adding top margin.

Don’t use both increased font size and bullets to emphasize a paragraph.

(The above are special cases of the same general rule informally known as “pick one”. Another special case of the same rule is why we never use multiple factors, such as font style and font weight and color and underline, simultaneously to emphasize a span of the text.)

Unless you are careful about hyphenation, don’t use full justification unless your lines are sufficiently long to avoid awkwardly large word spacing.

(No one is going to notice your fine-tuned sentence spacing and other flourishes of typography when word spacing is so annoyingly inconsistent from line to line.)

Saw this and laughed. While not entirely the same, I made a website with similar goals earlier this year. I am another Dave, another designer.

There's a funny part about being a web designer and then having to build your own site. You sort of want to drop all the bullshit, and just focus on typography and spacing. No color, no tricks, just simple stuff. It can be surprisingly hard.

I went with Astro, which I think is much better for this kind of thing, and let me write very, very simple HTML + CSS with only a small bit of JS.

https://www.davesnider.com

i'm of the stylistic critiques that (1) one should resort to using one set of alternates (a letter or word) per page at most, if the conditions are appropriate for using them at all, and (2) opt out of the typographic convention of side/margin notes in favor of the traditional[1]: footnotes, captions under figures, navigation, if necessary, at the top of the main body, etc - hyperlink references exist for some of these reasons. but otherwise, i recently came across a neat eb garamond alternative: tribute by frank heine[2]

1. my non-designer peculiarity: by using side/margin notes, by factor of them being in the peripheral of the main text and therefore it's imposed cognitive addition to the reader, one is already, implicitly, making the claim that the side/margin note is a must-read, which, in that case, one might as well incorporate it in the main text

2. https://www.emigre.com/Fonts/Tribute

I agree typography could be a lot better on the web, in general.

I wonder if the author has thought about their use of bullet lists containing paragraphs and article headings. I think both the main page and linked article would look much better without them.

If it’s a paragraph or heading it doesn’t belong in a list, IMO

Why is it every time I visit a blog which focuses on UX design, there's always an article which talks about Windows 95 dialog is superior than modern dialogs.

Not everything needs to be black and white and uniform.

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