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Comment by creesch | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a tangent to the subject of the blog, but something that has been bugging for a while. What's up with all these blogs that choose fonts that are just not that good for readability? In this case, monospace. It's not code, it is not formatted as code, making it a bad choice for comfortable reading.

Are these people not writing blogs to be read?

And just to be ahead of it, just because you are able to read it doesn't mean it wouldn't be easier and more comfortable to read in a more suitable font.

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> What's up with all these blogs that choose fonts that are just not that good for readability? In this case, monospace. It's not code, it is not formatted as code, making it a bad choice for comfortable reading.

That's a subjective opinion.

I vastly prefer monospaced fonts. They're easier to read!

Not really, there have been various studies that have shown that for the majority of people and cases sans serif fonts are the better choice for reading.

There are some exceptions. Obviously, code is one of these, as code is explicitly differently structured. Dyslexia is another one where monospaced fonts might actually increase readability.

But overall they decrease readability compared to other font types.

> Not really, there have been various studies that have shown that for the majority of people and cases sans serif fonts are the better choice for reading.

... so therefore thinline grey-on-gray text is ideal! Good meeting, let's do lunch.

You can nitpick the linked site, but it is amazingly readable compared to sites that feel compelled to adhere to modern fashions, like having blinking, throbbing nonsense in the field of vision making it impossible to concentrate on the actual text, or making the text too small unless you have exactly the same ultra-retina 8K HD phone the author does, or thinking "contrast" is a city in Turkey.

Well that is one way to go over the top with a counterargument. I am not advocating for any of that, just that maybe a sans serif would have been a more suitable choice.

It's odd how you insist that sans serif is more readable when body text in every book (OK, every grown-up book) I've read has been serif, as far as I can remember.

This very much feels like an arguing for the sake of arguing type response to me. Given that, what I am typing isn't obscure knowledge in the slightest. Anyway, assuming you are honestly just curious. Sans serif has shown to be the better readable font type on displays. Granted, on modern displays with higher density pixels that is less important.

Either way, both are a better choice compared to a monospaced font.

I'm just unconvinced that UI experts know what good user interface is given the utter monstrosities UI experts create, or advise others to create.

The whole field is trend-driven, to the point good advice becomes bad and vice-versa on a cycle. For example, voice activation is now trendy, despite being known as a horrible UI and not accessible besides; it struggles with accent, dialect, and speech dysfluency, but it's in fashion, so it must be a good interface, right? Previous gurus, such as Jef Raskin, are ignored, and regressions (flat UI) are held up as progress.

> I'm just unconvinced that UI experts know what good user interface is given the utter monstrosities UI experts create, or advise others to create

Sure, I agree with you there. However, text and more broadly readability are not purely UI. Readable text should be part of a good UI, but it is a field in itself and which actually has been quite extensively researched. Unfortunately, as you aptly point out, a lot of people ignore this sort of thing in favor of what is trendy or (in the case of this blog) specific aesthetics.

There are a few things that are quite good understood about what makes text readable on a display. These have been reaffirmed by research spanning decades at this point. Yet they are often ignored in favor of other things.

I always think that if I prefer to enable Firefox's reader view on a blog, they _really_ messed up: a bland, basic, generic syling is preferrable to their custom one. It's what happens with most blogs, sadly

It is indeed what prompted me to go on this tangent. I see so many blog posts being posted here that are just unnecessarily uncomfortable to read. It's just baffling how a person can spend time and effort to publish something on the internet, clearly wanting people to read it, and then not consider the bare basics.

It’s a retro nod to newsletters like NTK and Popbitch, I believe.

I get that it is an aesthetic choice. One I can't really understand given the main purpose of a blog, I think anyway, is to be read.

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