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Darkness

stories.wegnerdesign.com

73 pointsyesplorer23 comments

Very nice. Run a spellchecker though, the number of mistakes really broke up the immersion, which is otherwise nicely done:

r/dieing/dying

r/exaustion/exhaustion

r/meaningfull/meaningful

r/fleating/fleeting

r/James'/James (multiple places)

(Couldn't find how to contact author...)

The last correction is a little tricky. Out of the seven occurrences of the string "James'" only two are incorrect. In the other cases "James'" shows ownership, although there's some debate on if it should be "James's" instead.

Sorry for nitpicking, but my name is James, so I've dealt with this a lot over the years. :)

Hey davedx - I never ran spell check, because the piece wasn't really finished. Someone chanced upon it and shared it before I was even done with the design.

I've got a couple things that need my attention right now, but I'll put in those spell checks ASAP. Thanks!

Fixed - thanks Davedx!

https://github.com/josephwegner/stories.wegnerdesign.com/com...

No problem! Yeah, it sometimes happens that people stumble across things that aren't finished and post them up here. I think it's a pretty nice signal you're doing something interesting though!

It's broken on Android Chrome ( http://imgur.com/l0m9z15).

I would've read the entire article if it weren't for the gimmicky bullshit of the background changing colors for no god damn reason. What, is this 1996? Are there <blink> tags further down in the page? Save that shit for your wanna-be-geocities site.

reminds me of one of my favorite poems

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/philip-larkin/aubade/

nice effect, but suffers from 'medium disease'. font size is 'unreadably' big, I find it very difficult to read such texts on my normal 1920x1200 24" monitor.

My thought: "Finally a website that gets font size right."

Your browser lets you modify a pages text size. ctrl/- and ctrl/+ here.

Medium gets font sizes right. It's one of the few sites that do.

seriously, why ? are our eyes getting worse ? have centuries of publishers gotten it wrong all this time, and should everything have been 'large print' edition from the start ?

I'm 40+ and I should probably wear glasses for reading, but I really don't 'get' the big font hype.

I don't know about you, but I don't read a screen nearly as closely to my face as I read a book. If, for example, you normally read a screen at ~2x magazine distance, it stands to reason that screen type should be around ~2x bigger than magazine type, no?

The best article I've seen on the subject is this one:

http://ia.net/blog/100e2r/

And maybe follow-up with this one:

http://ia.net/blog/responsive-typography-the-basics

Thanks everyone for the comments! I didn't intend for this to get shared yet, because it was a work in progress - apparently Hacker News thought differently. I appreciate all the compliments and feedback!

Based on the url, I thought it was about design, then decided it wasn't, and now realize that it also was :)

Very good, thank you!

Cool implementation. Really going to be cool seeing what people experiment with when eye-tracking starts gaining traction.

I really love the initial scroll! How the page just says darkness and then that becomes the header

The effect doesn't work nearly as we'll on an iPad (where I read it) because the onscroll only fires after the momentum stops when the user's finger lifts from the device. So at the beginning the text was scrolling under the "darkness" header floating in the middle of the screen. It also made the text color and background transitions a bit jarring too.

Virtually all scroll effects don't work well on iOS devices.

I enjoyed reading the text but I enjoyed the design even more

Amazing design!

i too came here to say "use a spell-checker".

because yes, you need to do that, and not just expect that davedx did all of your work for you.

you still have a typo in the very first sentence!

and another closely follows, in the next paragraph.

i would also suggest you learn about em-dashes.

plus, aside from spelling, there is at least one text error with a side-effect, and it is comical.

all of this detracts from the design point i think was the purpose you had in mind with this exercise -- the use of scrollmonitor.js to enhance the text.

as to that particular point, it seemed to me that the switch back to a black-background occurred at a point which was neither the best or most obvious, namely the paragraph containing "day commonly does".

(which, by the way, is a phrase that sounds... odd; indeed that whole sentence sounds rather clumsy, and it's not the only one. but i'll give a pass on that, since you've said that the piece isn't actually done.)

at any rate, i didn't even attempt to find the reason, if there is one, why the shift didn't occur "correctly", because the specifics of that could get very fuzzy fast, but since it _is_ your point, you'll want to dig deep.

overall, though, i think that even despite these flaws, you achieved the point you wanted, about scrollmonitor.

-bowerbird

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