

Ask HN: What's with the giant & clunky web designs? - yarone

Today Freshbooks began testing, with its paying customers, an "updated" look:
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2011/12/14/new-redesigned-header-emails-and-login-screen/<p>The feedback has been mostly negative (189 comments as of now).<p>The most visible difference is the new header area (logo, primary nav, secondary nav), which, among other changes, has been stretched vertically, occupying more pixels and pushing down the important stuff (you know, the actual content).<p>I've seen this over and over again with recent web designs: enormous fonts, images, excessive white space, etc.<p>My theory is that the folks designing this stuff have massive hi-res Apple Cinema displays, which make the designs look reasonable to them (I've seen this firsthand a few times).<p><i>Any ideas what's going on here?</i><p><i>Is there a practical basis for these (what I perceive as giant and clunky) designs?</i>
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jsundquist
Yep. Totally agree with you. The same is with the new Gmail. Looks great on my
Apple Cinema display...way too huge on most other computers. It has got to be
that these designers are using huge displays with resolutions to match.

Same thing happens to programmers...work on a very fast machine, and never
realize how slow something is on an average users computer.

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Wilduck
Gmail has become nearly unusable on my 11" Macbook air. I wouldn't mind it so
much if you could A) minimize the top bar or B) have it not scroll with the
page. However, as far as I can tell, these aren't options.

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da_n
What I have found as a designer/developer is that usability trumps design, and
users I have worked with prefer having large, readable text and buttons as
well as plenty of white space. 90% of what a web design should be is about the
content, not the decoration. Yeah, it might look cool having 10 point text
everywhere on menus etc in a highly compressed layout using every available
pixel etc, except when you get to be over a certain age and need a magnifying
glass to see it (I have great eyesight and prefer big text). I now often use
17pt text just for the body text alone and have scaled up other elements to
suit. I do not think this is a negative trend.

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caw
I wonder if it has anything to do with touch interfaces? People need big giant
buttons so they can punch them without a mouse. I don't know if Freshbooks
really had this in mind, but it could be the basis of the "trend" that sites
are redesigning for. Then you get the "me too" site redesigns that don't know
what they're redesiging for.

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yarone
FreshBooks blog post and discussion RE: new design:
[http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2011/12/14/new-redesigned-
hea...](http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2011/12/14/new-redesigned-header-
emails-and-login-screen/)

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unhillbilly
All of the above, and the enormous boomer demographic is hitting the age where
eyesight is fading.

