The billionaire’s typewriter
practicaltypography.com
practicaltypography.com
Amen. Finally, someone has put this simply. The issue here has nothing to do with type. The author does a pretty good job of pointing out why Medium's pandering to design is clearly B.S. — but most importantly it's a complete ruse. It's a distraction from the fact that they own you.
Edit: If you'd like to downvote my viewpoint, I'd appreciate that you offer some kind of insight into why.
1) Many people do not care to maintain a blog
2) Many people do not plan on writing regularly; maybe once every three months may even be a miracle, in which case a shared platform is preferable.
3) Writing on your own blog is like building your own restaurant in the desert instead of a strip mall, it will take a lot to get people to find it.
4) Sometimes you just want to share something, and you just do not feel like having your own blog is necessary for it.
5) Many who claim that Medium will own their content do not end up writing anything, hence their ideas, which could be truly beneficial to society, end up dying as a distant memory.
2) Some car owners only drive once every few weeks yet still own a car instead of renting one. Don't make simplistic assumptions. There are benefits in ownership even for casual users.
3) Ever heard of Social Media ? Word of Mouth ? If you have good content, you will get linked, re-linked, and bookmarked.
4) See 1.
5) "Many" ? Who ? Where ? If anyone is serious about sharing their ideas, they can do it in multiple forms. You can write a book, you can do a presentation in front of folks, you can join a club - a blog is only one way of sharing stuff, not the ultimately most efficient one, depending on what you are passionate about.
I have never used Medium, and most likely never will, but I would love a Medium built inside HN. That, I would use.
No they don't.
They don't own the work you choose to publish through their platform in any way whatsoever. By publishing it there you give them permission to use it[1], but no ownership of it. They have absolutely no claim on you, your future work, your past work, or any benefit you might receive from publishing with them. You can delete a story after you've published it, and you can publish it unlisted so it won't appear in any listings or publications on their site.
If you believe that's the same as owning you then you have a very strange definition of "owning you".
[1] https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
[1] https://github.com/Medium/Policy/commit/198049bacef485f21cbb...
It manages to find the perfect balance of minimal barriers to productivity, absolute power when I need it, and seriously professional grade results. It's like writing with iAWriter or similar tools, except I still have some basic structural options in the interface, and the end result generated is downright professional grade.
I think the "WYSIWYM" approach that LyX takes on, combined with the power of LaTeX underneath and the powerful customization possibilities that brings, kinda makes it a silver bullet for a writer in my book.
As for the LaTeX underneath, well, I've seldom needed to muck with it. LyX abstracts out a lot of the undercarriage and lets me get on with things in a more GUI-friendly way, though the fallback is always there if I need it (usually just a few extra tags here and there). If I were doing more custom template work though, I probably would need to dig more into LaTeX proper.
Blogging? There are a approximately a billion choices, but lately I have been playing around with Scrivener. It is a little overkill for a blog entry, but it is one of the few programs to not treat a computer as just a typewritter with more fancy font, spellcheck and better correction - instead it allows your to sorta weave your story together, piece by piece.
The bulk of my writing though has traditionally long-form (I'm not great at maintaining a single-interest blog, and social networks are better for personal musings most times), and for that I don't think I'd use anything else but LyX, especially if I were self-publishing (which I generally have been).
Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without the added complexity of full LaTeX.
Thanks for the comment
In the past year or two I actually took out my copy of the Lion Book and sorted out what I'd been missing with LaTeX. I realized that a decent set of templates was much of the issue, and now have a basic book and article template that I use for most of my work. And while futzing with specifics of layout can keep you from a final output, it won't stop you from writing. And that's the key problem most of the time.
I've also been exploring Markdown (thanks to reddit, Ello, Diaspora, and numerous other sites which rely on it), and Pandoc, which is nowhere short of amazing and astounding.
More often than I care to admit I'll take content from a website and either reduce it to its HTML core or, with depressing frequency, straight ASCII text, add back some light Markdown, and present it as PDF for reading. Web design has gotten that freaking annoying.
On the Medium discussion -- I find the site pretty good, actually, and disagree with the arguments Butterick raises against its minimalism. Good design is light design, and Medium is among the most minimally re-styled sites I visit. Changes?
.highlightMenu { display: none; }
.metabar--affixed { position: static; }
.metabar--bottom { position: static; }
.notesMarker { display: none; }
.postContent { color: black; font-weight: normal; }
Mind that I don't publish on Medium (at least, not yet). Though I've considered it.
As for "typewriter habits", among the advantages of the typewriter -- as a composing interface -- is that it simplifies input. Tools such as LaTeX then perform the job of transforming typewriter input into typographic output. Most often with very minimal additional directives from the author. Tools such as Markdown reduce that still further.
Two spaces after a full stop? Absolutely. Why? Because in my typography it helps me to distinguish between stops following abbreviations and sentences. Which is a useful thing. Mr. Brown. The first stop terminates an abbreviation. The second an entire sentence. About the only of the conventions that I need to consciously apply is ``quotes'' around quoted passages, though search-and-replace of "straight quotes" is actually pretty easily accomplished with some regex magick. Markdown removes the need entirely.
Here we are arguing if we should let authors stylize text. Does this restyling of text help communicate more efficiently? Typically no, a long wall of text just needs to be set in a readable style.
Even this choice of presentation was supposed to be the reader's, not the author's. I do not care one bit about links appearing in a ♢ weird new way. Links should appear the same way, everywhere on the web. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com just needed some padding, nice font rendering, line spacing and you'd get Medium.
To the reader, Medium promises consistency of presentation that the rest of the web does not. That problem should really have been solved on the browser's end, by a style that applied to all articles, chosen by the user from existing templates.
The style should serve a functional purpose to the reader, be slower or faster to read, reduce eyestrain, etc.
The web was supposed to be more extreme than frozen pizza, more like astronaut's food paste. Skeuomorphic pizza in any form distracts users from the real purpose.
As far as Medium controlling your content, if the web was smarter you could put it somewhere else and the links would magically work. Centralization is a technically simple way to exploit a dumb network and the network should be fixed.
You just type some stuff into the text box, submit the form and you've got a web page:
It's remarkably similar to jottit, a tool built several years ago by the late Aaron Swartz:
Exact same thing: you type some text into a text box, submit the form and you've got a web page:
And I think the diamonds next to the hyperlinks on this article is a neat design flourish (because it is still intuitive and usable... although admittedly most other designs that do away with the standard underlined text are a usability loss).
Unique designs serve a functional purpose, helping you remember where you read something, who authored it. That purpose can be served a different way.
And philosophically, I'm not sure I should care about who wrote it. One author having a prettier template than another adds bias. A set of various authors using the same template can make the mediocre ones appear more trustworthy than mediocre authors using an ugly template.
If I chose the template for everyone, I'd judge them by content faster, since I'd be used to the look and new pretty typography wouldn't distract me.
Apparently he considers underlining a sin against typography [http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html] as one of the "bad typewriter habits" [http://practicaltypography.com/typewriter-habits.html]. That might be why.
Which is funny, because one of his other rules is against abusing ALL CAPS [http://practicaltypography.com/all-caps.html]--which he does for internal links.
The site is also full of other absurd usability choices, like using the blank edges of the page for navigation [http://practicaltypography.com/how-to-use.html].
The author might know good typography for books, but has gone way overboard applying it to his website.
[1] check the a.xref stylein his CSS: http://practicaltypography.com/styles.css
Underlining in the typewriter style is a sin against typography. :) I don't like the way Butterick's chosen to do links here, though; the lozenge mark seems kind of twee, like he's choosing to make a stand against both underlining and color changes at the expense of both readability and learned behavior. (Most of us by now associate both underlines and blue inline text, whether in conjunction or separately, with "click this to make something happen.")
But only as a way to add emphasis. The last point of the page[1] implies that he is ok with underlining links.
Certainly some 'rules' are broken, and it can ruffle feathers. But I don't think any progress is made without feather-rufflage. This book is a really great example of a readable, usable piece of literature, published on the web, and feels like a next-generation book. I like it.
The way this article is displayed, however, is not only distracting, but a perfect example of how dogma-like design choices can take away from the functionality and usability. I understand why the author doesn't believe underlines should be used to represent links, but the diamonds are the most distracting and confusing design I've seen online in a long time.
I agree with the author's fundamental concerns about freedom.
I imagine some years in the future the same people heralding Medium will become its harshest critics. How many times does it take for people to be burned by proprietary apps/services before they stop using them? In the case of Medium, there are ample alternatives.The author is right that marketing Medium really is what Medium does best.
I can't say I agree 100% with either author. On the one hand, Wichary shows some 'gorgeous' LaserDisc snippet and lauds it as some return to the good old pre-typewriter days. I don't think that automatic drop caps, mandatory line widths, 'smart' quoting, etc help any authors express anything at all. Sure, the typewriter example is bad, but was the fake image grain necessary? Did it show how striking the keys harder slightly bolds the text? The LaserDisc example is not at all like writing with an italic pen, where you can express stylistic choice. Cramming everyone's text into some StandardPrettyPrintNFormatter [1] so your website looks pleasing to readers is pretty much the complete opposite of fostering creativity. It's a website for readers, not writers. Can I upload a scan of calligraphy? Maybe draw a title in bubbly block letters? Use a red pen? Of course not. Everything looks the same, and Butterick points out why
The goal is to create the illusion that everything on Medium belongs
to one editorial ecosystem, as if it’s the New York Times.
[1] Much like gofmt. That kind of conformity is great for coding style (can't read your crazy indentation), but it's just like how the constraints of the typewriter lead to a style of writing that eliminates stylistic differences (can't read your handwriting) so you can focus on content. Medium just adds another layer of conformity.
The goal is to cre the il that every on Medium be-long
to one ed ecosys, as if it's the New York Times.
I saw something like that (dropped characters) on another site, as well.
Only with Chrome, neither with IE nor Firefox.
The only exception I can think of to this rule is for highly visual medium like graphic novels. In this case, typesetting and layout are inseparable from the medium. That being said, I don't think Medium is designed for that type of use case
There may be other cases where creative choices in typesetting and layout may enhance the writing, but this usually isn't the case. Normally, when an author tries to "spice up" their writing this way it ends up looking like a crappy MySpace or GeoCities page.
As an aside, George RR Martin apparently uses WordStar 4.0 to write his books. I don't know if this proves or disproves the argument. Maybe if he had more control over the typesetting and layout, he would be done with Winds of Winter by now.
I understand that a lot of authors don't have the background for this sort of thing, and that LaTeX's basic philosophy here is a good one (i.e., don't screw with the defaults and your paper will look good, and even if you do screw with them you have to put a bit of effort in to start making things look crappy). And Medium will look better than slapping up unstyled HTML.*
But that means neither that you necessarily want everything to look like Medium's default -- which, unlike LaTeX, cannot be changed even a whit by authors -- nor that that your choices are only "write with Medium" and "learn professional typography." It's not difficult to slap up a WordPress or Ghost installation and choose from hundreds of themes, many of which have at least reasonable, if not amazing, typesetting standards.
Lastly, Butterick's point about Medium's business model is certainly worth paying attention to.
*Whenever I talk about how typography matters, I usually get comments (not necessarily on HN) about "content is king" and HTML 2.0 was good enough and how can typesetting possibly matter? Well, sure, content is the most important, but think about an audiobook. It could be read by a professional voice actor, it could be read by the author, and it could be read by your computer's text-to-speech software. Same content each time, barring mispronunciations, but the chances are you'd rather hear the one read by Stephen Fry than the one read by Siri. Typography and graphic design is the visual equivalent. In theory, every print novel could have been reproduced by printing in 12-point Courier and slapping them in three-ring binders, but isn't it nicer that they weren't?
Just as many people treat youtube as a get-go place for their video/music content needs (many people start to treat it as their TV, especially kids), Medium hopes people will, in time, treat Medium as the only magazine/newspaper/blog-place they need - and that should also push traditional media to utilize it (same as happens for TV channels and youtube). This is a long-term plan, but given how Internet tends to favour natural monopolies (see Google, Facebook, YouTube) it might actually work. Even if they will fail at this someone else will probably succeed.
What about the risk of association between their writing and the Medium brand detracting from the writers' impact?
Even if it's just a small percentage of potential visitors for whom Medium is an anti-signal, why risk it?
I guess the Medium network may bring in more readers than the Medium brand bounces. Does anyone have information about what quantity and quality of readership the Medium network offers to an individual article or author?
The large majority of people have terrible taste in design. I think design constraints on platforms like medium just serve to prevent people from actively ruining their content with bad design.
"If they ♢ sometimes act as if they discovered typography like it was the Higgs boson, we can forgive their excess of enthusiasm."
I find both of these conventions very irritating. If you want to be edgy with your link styling, I find Wired's use of a thick, light underline (e.g. http://www.wired.com/2015/02/microsoft-third-party-cloud-ser...) to be both pleasant and not confusing.
As it is, it's fairly ugly and breaks the text unpleasantly.
After initial novelty wore off, I now decidedly tend to not read articles on Medium. It has become one of the countless sites I wouldn't miss at all.
I also miss typewriter fonts. Yes, I know I can get typewriter fonts, including the typewriter font that HD uses for its text entry boxes. I mean the unevenness of it due to mechanical variations, variations in the ribbon, etc., leading to every impression being slightly different.
Computer fonts are too perfect.
If I was designing ebook software, I'd support a rendering that would ever-so-slightly mis-position each letter, and in fact have a dozen incarnations of each letter, all slightly different, and pick one at random each time.
I'd also make the background not quite perfect white. It'd be tan with a bit of variation in it, and maybe adding tiny specs of dirt.
So it looks like a real book!
It wouldn't be hard, either.
Sounds like whatever font renderer Mozilla was using on my university's old Solaris workstations. Whenever you'd select text it'd change again. I don't think it was a design feature though.
Your basic concept is a page full of type. I actually care a lot about footnotes or endnotes (I read a lot of nonfiction), indices, and bibliographies. Books lacking in any or all of these get strong demerits.
It's virtually impossible (and very expensive) for books to present distractions. Static black-and-white or color images are about the limit, pop-ups or fold-outs are possible, and as a novelty, perhaps an electronic gizmo pasted to a page or cover, though I cannot think of a single published book I've got which has such. Some technical books that came with CDROMs, but that's almost a completely passed phase now.
There are aspects which speak to age and printing technology -- the slightly blurred type of most pre-1950s 20th century books, and increasing sharpness of type and copy since (starting up-market). Typeface, though modern and sans-serif faces pretty much always annoy me. Large-print books for seniors. Different styles -- picture, comic, and children's books with lots of illustrations. College and high-school textbooks, increasingly almost useless with their call-outs, images, and other visual gimicks. Flashy, yes, but not all that informative.
Or look at Harry Potter and the animated magic newspapers. If I were to run into that I'd scream -- looks fun for a second on a movie screen. Rage-inducing in real life.
Your eBook suggestion is possible. It's really easy to overdo, and a little bit goes a long way. You're also limited by technology, and would likely find that you're getting noise at two levels -- the pseudo-analog noise (see LaTeX's coffee stain macro: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349 http://texblog.org/tag/coffee-stain/), plus accumulated digital noise -- bad pixels or damaged e-ink.
Websites which use background images under text virtually always get it removed by me locally using a personal stylesheet manager.
Note that most people scan at 300 dpi, that doesn't look good, and is uncomfortable to read. 400dpi is much better.
Compare: https://medium.com/@willgossin/the-uncanny-valley-race-merit...
To:
http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html
[Edit: Also - no HTTPS? And No Favicon?]
Unrelated, maybe it's a platform-specific problem? I found his site to be quite readable. Things like line-height and line-length appear to have been chosen with care, and he takes great pains to get all the typographical details right. The use of a "◇" to indicate links is...eccentric, but whatever.
PT is just very unwelcoming for me to read - both the diamonds all over the place (which reminds me of the PCL printout when you didn't have the correct font installed), and the assault on my eyes. Perhaps on a higher-resolution retina display it works out better (and perhaps Medium suffers somewhat in comparison)
I second this sentiment! He's a much better typographer than he is an author. An early paragraph reads, in full, "So, a few words about that." I also disagreed with all his points (e.g. I'd love to just type text as I'm doing into this comment field here with almost no formatting input choices, and get an article like his.) What he would call "eating out of the peanut butter jar".
The way he ended his essay was weak and not convincing. (I don't want to make money off of my writing directly.)
But the typesetting on his byline. Wow.
I was blown away by the typography and found it an absolute pleasure to read. I'd love to have my writing typeset as well. I read through his whole essay despite not agreeing with much (any) of the content.
As for the 2/3 empty white space, that is an attempt to have a measure (line length) [1] that is readable. A general rule of thumb is somewhere around 70 characters per line is comfortable to read for single-column text. Now, I tend to think that 70 characters per line feels pretty short on the web... in my personal experience, around 100 characters feels a lot better.
Anyway, if you're interested in typography, take a look at Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style.
Alas, constraint wins - https://siteanalytics.compete.com/medium.com/
I could certainly get behind an article arguing that Medium is bad for writers because of the centralization, loss of control of audience, etc. But this one isn't it, because it doesn't appear to acknowledge that some writers don't want to automate their own Wordpress themes (except with the dismissive 'if you really believe that' aside which I'm not counting).
Minimalism is not about offering less. Minimalism is about offering more, and presenting less — "more" here meaning depth of experience, in the broad sense. I think that is what he is suggesting, especially easy to discern in the context of his main thesis (that Medium isn't minimalist, it is homogeneity).