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Comment by danbucholtz | Hacker News Reader

As a developer who plays the role of designer in my start-up (www.gopaperbox.com), I must say that typography is insanely hard.

Getting the right heights, weights and style to look visually appealing is probably the hardest part of the whole thing. Making graphics is pretty easy in today's world with icon fonts. I have been rolling with Proxima-nova lately - but I'm not tied to it.

Can you guys check out the fonts on my page and give some feedback? I would love to switch to a free Google font.

Thanks!

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First, give this a read: http://practicaltypography.com/

I like your design. I just have a few nitpicks...

* Only center titles; don't center body text!

* Your body text should be 90 characters wide, max. The paragraph under the photo is much too wide.

* Spacing under titles seems too small to my eyes.

* Triangles as bullet points look a little odd (this is really subjective)

* The login button is in a bit of a weird place. Right-aligned is nice, but it looks misaligned vertically with the logo.

My take on this stylesheet would be...

    .headline { margin-top: 0; }
    .h1, h2, h3 { margin-top: 0.7em; margin-bottom: 0.7em; }

Remove text-center from any body copy. Use <ul> tags for lists.

Regardless of the above, your work looks great.

Partially off topic, but page layouts like the one you linked to really come off as unnatural to me. Specifically the way the margin for annotations is used in the centering of the main content is distracting. It's like you are giving equal relevance to sporadic notes as to the main article. I'm surprised to see it in a typography book.

Fiddled with it in with the web inspector, here's a mock up of what I think might look better (was going to send you the edited css but the tab crashed while I was taking the screenshot..)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/324756/PaperBox%20%20%20...

I think it might be a good idea if you could cut down the copy you have for the featurettes by about 1/3

---

edit: also, if you can swing it, a quick video demo might be a nice alternative to swap out the image e.g. http://www.domo.com/company/what-is-domo and http://monanetwork.com/

And welcome to five grands worth of consultancy, courtesy of a skilled practitioner, a lunch hour, and HN

This is what amazes and inspires me about open source and places like HN - the value of community and respect is greater than rubies - yet had the GP offered five bucks for a quick look everyone would have been outraged.

Good luck with the fonts !

Wow, way cool! I agree, your design looks much cleaner and more sophisticated! Thanks!

Glad you liked it :)

I don't typically do design either but got hit with a string of marketing-microsite gigs of late and have a sort of formula down. (basically things my designers yelled at me to fix - spacing, font weight, font size)

Best of luck with your startup! And if at all possible consider Google Drive integration? This is actually something I would use (would love to be able to easily scan receipts and chuck'em ), except dropbox is $10.99/month for 100G, while GDrive is $1.99/month for 100G, kind of a no brainer as a cheapskate :P

I think you need more whitespace on your website. Even the very top banner looks cluttered, with the logo super close to the name, and both right above the buttons, and all of it right above the image. No space to breathe, especially when you mouse-over the buttons.

Farther down, I'd work on the "You need PaperBox if..." section - the way the right bullets are aligned under the "p" (on my screen) makes it look like the title is not centered. I might add more vertical space before the bullets, and potentially also move the bullets all closer to the center / allow them to be more than one line.

The last section, with the colored fonts and images, looks better than the earlier parts. I'd play with adding a little more vertical space before each header and image.

Hope some of this advice is useful to you. I know you asked for advice on the fonts, but I thought since you're looking for advice I might as well offer some.

Some comments on your PaperBox logo. The font feels a bit thin and spindly. Gives me the impression of delicate or fragile.

Might want to look at Kerning. The capital P is to far from the a, and the r is too close to the capital B.

The blue graphical logo is also too close to the text and possibly too big; it feels cramped and to some extent overpowers the name.

See LinkedIn [1] or Thompson Reuters [2] for examples on how to make your font more substantial and how they balance the graphical image verses the text.

[1] https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/branding-guidelines...

[2] http://thomsonreuters.com/site/reuters-brand-attribution-gui...

Unrelated to fonts specifically, but the white text on the image is extremely difficult to read, I suspect due to being over a fairly busy background. The entire thing is simply fuzzy.

Looks like a really good product. I've been thinking about writing something like that for some time. I'll give paperbox a shot !

Hire a designer

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