Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

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News flash: technical worker thinks more resources should be diverted from non-technical matters to technical matters. Film at 11. ;-)

The people who design interfaces and the people who do branding and identity work are rarely the same people. I've done both (and was developer all over the stack for a decade,) but never at the same time. Branding and identity work is usually done by specialized agencies, and they're usually the ones who make decisions about the type stack.

What you and most other developers don't realize is that these things do actually matter— just not in ways that non-designers consciously pick up on. When looking at an individual website, most folks might not see much difference between a poorly kerned system font and a really expensive 'pro' font painstakingly hand kerned over months or years. However, when people are encountering a brand on a whole, having a uniform, polished look across media dramatically affects how it comes across, and that is hugely consequential. Think about how differently car dealership websites land than car manufacturer websites? And they're selling literally the same fucking product! A knowledgeable designer could write an essay on the difference in the two designs while a layperson would likely shrug and say "it looks... smoother I guess?"

It's really no different than performance for developers. Most people don't consciously notice the difference between a website that's really really streamlined and optimized and one that's just kind of okay... But the meh site will not inspire positive feelings about the experience. If your competitors do better, you likely won't be the one getting their business even if the customer didn't consciously reject your business because of it.

So I could be wrong about their point because they used SQL schema as their comparison but the commenter does question typography specifically so I think this is more "why is topography so focused on?" not "why is design so focused on?". At least that's the more interesting question to me.

For example this page. First thing you see is a hero image showing their font in use. It's a pretty important element that takes up the whole screen. It's blurry and pixelated. Not the worst I've seen but definitely gives me more car dealership not car manufacturer vibes. It's a 1.3MB png that looks just as good converted to an 80KB jpeg and imo even better as a 20KB avif. If it was instead a 1.3MB jpeg or avif starting from a high quality source that thing would look crisp and super car manufacturery.

There is also a section in the page where the text goes blurry because they've included a table as an image. Or I should rather say it's both blurry and an image because they could have just included a higher res image of the table. They have plenty of other images where it looks fine. Again something that gives me car dealership vibes. Actually I would say blurry text image table is specifically a dodgy second hand car dealership level of vibe.

Now you could say that the typography page isn't user or customer facing so its not that important but I see plenty of shitty blurry images on otherwise polished looking pages all over the internet, and also if they covered images in their design system like they do typography then it wouldn't matter. They'd just be in the habit of only using high quality images and have some process in place to deliver them in appropriate formats.

So while backend vs frontend or functionality vs polish are imo boring and played out webdev topics, I am super curious as to why they care enough about inspiring positive feelings through web design to make an entire custom font, have a page of guidelines on how to use said font, but dont have the same level of care for images. And why I see this contrast enough to consider it reasonably common in the industry.

> What you and most other developers don't realize is that[...]

Generalizations like this are just so bad. My biggest beef with design/"product" folk in the tech world is this thing that many of them do, where they justify their existence as a group of people and a business function by bad-mouthing developers.

> Generalizations like this are just so bad

> this thing that many of them do

Lol. You can't just qualify a generalization with "many" to make it a non-generalization.

Before getting into design, I was a full-time back end developer for 11 years and worked in dev organizations in ops/support rules for a decade before that. The job market over the past decade had coddled developers so much, and made them so fragile and arrogant. Even intimating that my professional opinion on design is more informed than a developer's opinion on design often yields a intellectual temper tantrum.

>News flash: technical worker thinks more resources should be diverted from non-technical matters to technical matters.

Good one, but that's not my point just to be clear! I think this kind of documentation tends to happen in organisations that already spend so much on enterprise licences that a team of designers doing "graphical profile" work for a year is almost a rounding error, and I don't mind that it happens at all. It's just weird that it happens to such an extent around typefaces, of all things.

Large corps pay dearly for Dell servers, kubernetes solutions from IBM, even the HR-systems are shoved to the cloud. Fortunes can be saved doing those things in-house, but the thing that happens in-house is - replacing Arial with something that looks almost like Arial.

Isn't that a litte weird? (Even if it is also wonderful) :)

Designers really like to nerd out about typefaces because it's such a minute detail that average people don't notice.

And because they like to nerd out so much about it, they put more effort into it.

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