Comment by defanor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defanor | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the title, I suspected that the typography will be messed up. And indeed, instead of my preferred configured font size, it is overly large and set in pixels, the line heights are higher than I would prefer as well (the font I use, Noto Sans, already has a pretty high leading). The situation with colors and margins is similar, to accompany that.

And the reason I guessed it to be that way is because it is like that much of the time: once people focus on something that is not broken too badly, more often they mess it up, rather than improve. I think a much better advice would be just to not touch it. Maybe go roll your own crypto if you feel creative, but stop messing up fonts, colors, and the rest of interfaces: plain HTML is good and sufficient for most web publishing.

Edit: though learning about typography still should not harm. Just applying it poorly--as done most of the time--may be annoying. Also same as with colors and adjacent design subjects.

This is obtuse. Why are you going from one sentence, saying the font size is disproportionate or whatever, then saying your font is Noto Sans? It's fine to pick Noto, that is not my disagreement. But if you are having one setting by the typographer and then choose to override them... yeah, it might be ugly. Because you changed it and are not a typographer. A typeset might not look good in every setting. That's why we have typographers to turn them into visually appealing fonts.

> But if you are having one setting by the typographer and then choose to override them... yeah, it might be ugly.

This can be equally viewed from the other (user's) perspective: I had the font set (along with a comfortable size), then apparently the website tried to override it, though I did not notice that. Now I had to both allow custom fonts and enable JS to see its intended font, and it is even less comfortable for me to read, adding serifs, while still having overly high lines.

The reason I mentioned Noto is to better describe what I see, though perhaps it was unnecessary. That is, I saw it in a shape I liked a little more than the one it was intended to be in.

I can agree with the parent comment that the typography on that page is atypical and not in a good way. Too large to make it easily readable on mobile, not enough margin. Perhaps that's forgivable since it was written 17 years ago before the mobile era. But even in desktop mode, size of typefaces jumps around for seemingly no real reason. Repeated use of the same graphic of historical typesetting for no apparent reason

No idea what it looked like in 2006 (what domain did they use before ia.net?), but here’s it in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170322053052/https://ia.net/to.... No ridiculously large text, no gratuitous/injudicious hero image (inappropriately chosen automatically for legacy content and not reviewed or excluded), no gross inflation of low-size images (“mobile-first”), just basic sensible design. It’s the usual, a redesign/reimplementation that meshes poorly with existing content (… and honestly probably new content too, just not so badly). I bet it’s been through at least four redesigns since it was written. And there’s no way the text would have been anywhere near that big in 2006.

Thanks for pointing that out, makes way more sense that it was a site-wide re-design

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