

Andy Rutledge: Quiet Structure - pg
http://www.andyrutledge.com/quiet-structure.php

======
pg
This is the kind of thing we emphasize at YC. Step 1 in web design: don't have
irregularity by accident. Only make stuff vary when you want to draw attention
to it.

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gibsonf1
A very impressive and convincing presentation for letting graphic form follow
function - letting the content rule.

~~~
bootload
_"... impressive and convincing presentation for letting graphic form follow
function ..."_

It's not a bad article but barely scratches the surface ...

Typography:

The immediate example used (CNN) is pretty poor. Why? The number of different
type faces (above 3), the very poor contrast (red on white has less contrast
than say black on yellow or white on black) and the mixing of case (count the
number of upper case, lower case and mixed case words).

Also the type sizes are all way to small for _'tired eyes'_ straining to read
8-10pt with inconstant type cases. This is exacerbated by the media. Though we
do see chunking of data to allow scanning via headlines.

Colour:

See any use of green? Oops there goes your 10% of your male readers. Do you
see lots of colour contrast & grading to indicate things - another No, No -
Colour blindness makes it difficult to see gradations (
<http://tinyurl.com/2vwxj6> ) There are tools ( <http://tinyurl.com/62lz5> )
to improve colour design for colour blind readers (eg: alternative style
sheets with colour-blindness limitations ). Do we see any in the examples of
these constraints in mind?

Layout & noise:

This bit the article gets right. I've been looking at _print layouts_ pretty
carefully lately and the article does a good job characterising easier to read
layouts. It is something you can view every day looking at a broadsheet
newspaper & their weekend magazines though.

Media:

And finally media. Your average monitor has nowhere near the resolution of a
printed page. Yet we still try to design for on-line reading cramming as much
information on the screen as possible at the same time failing to acknowledge
the limitations of the media, namely the monitor.

Aesthetics at the expense of fundamentals & new media?

My chief bug with _'graphic design expert'_ articles like this one, is the
attention to the aesthetics at the expense of some the fundamentals - the
technical stuff they don't teach in your typical & atypical _visual arts_
based design courses (but more likely game design schools). Problems, that are
historically solvable in print, but not electronic media. Like a square peg
into a round hole, old _print hacks_ are highlighted as new media solutions.

Now an article I would like to see is how the author tackles 'craigslist'.

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rms
Why use the tinyurl's? It means I can't tell where the link goes without
clicking on it.

~~~
bootload
_"... Why use the tinyurl's? ..."_

reduces readability using 'n' length urls ... but point taken, here they are:

\- colour blindness: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red-
green_color...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red-
green_color_blindness)

\- tools: <http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html>

~~~
ivankirigin
I usually just put them at the end of a paragraph or sentence. So I could
write about X, Y, Z, and put:

X: url

Y: url

Z: url

with extra line breaks here because of odd news.yc formatting.

~~~
bootload
hmmm did that & got crucified because it's _"so over the top"_ and _"too
formal"_ \- I'll stick to what I'm doing ~
[http://www.google.com/search?q=sbootload++%22Reference%22+%5...](http://www.google.com/search?q=sbootload++%22Reference%22+%5B0%5D)

