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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever, but the font is just so terrible that I find it hard to get past the first paragraph, which makes me doubt the validity of any further (possibly quite clever) design solutions that are being presented.

Design serves a single purpose, which is to present information in the clearest possible way. Any design choices you make which don't serve that purpose are hubris. (And yes, the conveyance of some information requires invoking emotional triggers via more complicated and hard-to-fathom design; this is not one of those exceptions. Clarity, please!) An article about reducing some immense design complexity to visual simplicity should strive to present itself as clearly as possible, not use a goddamn webfont from the 90s.

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I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice.

This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition.

> But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that's unnecessarily harder to consume, by a large portion of people otherwise interested in their thoughts.

Anti-design[1] is a movement which rejects the over-sanitation of design. Type a random query into Google and click through the first few links. What will you see? An endless sea of black-on-white, sans-serif, grids of text.

Anti-design is effective in making things memorable and engaging. When I attended Davis, I first thought the Social Sciences Building[2] was a bit of an eye sore. It was intentionally designed to be challenging. Now it is one of my most vivid memories of the campus.

1: https://99designs.com/blog/design-history-movements/anti-des...

2: https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_B...

You find it difficult to believe? The person clearly worked hard to achieve this aesthetic. The font even sort of matches the illustrations. This is clearly intentional from my pov. This aesthetic was more important to the author than ease of reading/consumption.

Design is the process of bringing ideas into form. It is intentional creation. This process does not necessarily include intentional communication: it can be purely utilitarian. The form itself is what unavoidably communicates the values of the designer.

I do agree that clarity or efficiency are not necessarily the highest values to strive for.

I don't think the designer is the authority on whether a design is good or not. Just like a novelist, director, or composer doesn't get to dictate whether their output was creatively successful.

Paul Graham's essay on taste sums it up pretty well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Fair enough and I also agree. Got sloppy towards the end there

Also, to title it "The Tetris Effect" and then ramble on about a 3d version of Tetris first seemed really odd. I only skimmed some of the article (due to the horrible font), but I'm not sure what the point of it was.

In chrome: Right click on the body, "inspect element" to open the debugger thingy, and see the terrible font as "font family" in the bottom right.

Uncheck the box next to "font-family".

There, now it's readable. You can close the chrome debugger thingy.

> This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever

It isn't, the proposed 'solution' to the obscurity problem is at least as unreadable as the font.

The first part of the article, at least, works in reader mode.

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