[belated stub for offtopicness]
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
p { font-size: 400%; }
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.
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 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...
I do agree that clarity or efficiency are not necessarily the highest values to strive for.
Paul Graham's essay on taste sums it up pretty well:
Uncheck the box next to "font-family".
There, now it's readable. You can close the chrome debugger thingy.
It isn't, the proposed 'solution' to the obscurity problem is at least as unreadable as the font.