What the heck, is it the unofficial Unreadable Site Day today? First https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9460277 and now this.. damn.
This site has nearly black serif type on a peach-ish white background. The layout, type choice, and color scheme seems to address pretty much every objection that I've seen the "I can't read light-colored text on any background" crowd advance.
Edit: Here's a screenshot from my machine: http://i.imgur.com/W2QcLAp.png (Chromium 41 on Linux)
Can you explain exactly what makes the site unreadable for you?
What do you mean by "square alignment"? Are you talking about the full-justified [0] body text? If you are, then:
1) This confuses me, as this is exactly what the "I can't read light-colored text on any background" crowd says that studies show improves readability.
2) What about the full-justified body text makes it difficult to read?
If you're not talking about the body text, then what are you talking about?
Thanks in advance! :)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justified
Kerning is a good thing, it increases readability. In a perfect world everything would be hand kerned for the best results, but that's not realistic. The compromise is automatic kerning, which isn't as good, but isn't too shabby. However, when you full justify text you're forcing the computer to abandon its best attempt at good kerning. Like newspaper on silly putty it gets stretched into spacings that aren't clean. Even if it leaves the spacings between letters untouched that forces it to make large and uneven spacings between words.
Some people might prefer that, and some people might prefer copy set to look like random letters. It's hard to have generalized rules that fit everyone. In general though I think it the standard position taught typography is to not justify text except in special situation.