

Web Design is 95% Typography - ashitvora
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period/

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elbenshira
What's up with these typophiles? They walk around thinking they're the most
important member of the club.

The truth is, design is complicated because it is not (yet) a science.
Typography is important, but it is not king. What we really need to do is get
inside the user's head and model their thought process. This is probably
impossible, so we should do the next best thing: learn empathy. Be the user.
Not some one-trick pony.

~~~
potatolicious
Typography is precise, but slow in terms of comprehension.

That's actually one of the things that worries me about Windows Phone 7's UI -
it's very heavily text-based, which facilitates first-time usage (no getting
things wrong there, unless your text really sucks), but punishes
expert/frequent users.

Text takes up a disproportionate amount of screen real estate compared to,
say, iconography. They are also harder to scan, their location harder to keep
consistent (due to document flow), and given that most people's memories are
visual first and linguistic second, harder to remember and make an impression
upon.

On small devices, loading your page up with text is generally a bad idea.
Obviously unavoidable in certain circumstances (say: reading an article), but
there are a _lot_ of things out there in the design world that isn't
typography.

~~~
ciniglio
I actually think that text has a fairly high information density rate compared
to iconography. The perfect example of this is the command line. Power users
tend to prefer a terminal because it is more concise than clicking around in a
gui. I think that the problem lies in the fact that we have very few universal
icons, especially for something like a phone interface. This means that while
an icon for 'unread mail' would be smaller than the text describing it, no one
would know what it meant without a description. Since there is no real limit
to the actions we want our phones or computers to perform, text seems to be
the way to go. Of course, some actions (e.g. save, cut, paste) have icons that
have been in use for so long that it might be fair to call them universal. You
can see an example of what I mean in most mac os x applications, where the
buttons generally have icons with labels.

Disclaimer: I work for microsoft, but nowhere related to the phone team.

Edit: My point is more about interfaces than design. I know nothing about
typography.

~~~
silentbicycle
I suspect that _writing_ text to convey information to the computer (command
line) has very different trade-offs than programs _presenting_ information
textually to users, and lumping them together probably misses important
details.

Also, textual interfaces usually make it easy to say, "now group that set of
operations and give it a convenient name" (scripting), while graphically
interfaces usually don't, and users are stuck with whatever individual actions
the UI designers added to menus.

Neither tendency is _inherent_ in using text or graphics, but it usually works
out that way. I've wondered about this for a while, but text vs. graphic
interface discussions ("keyboard vs. mouse", which often overlap) usually miss
that distinction, much like they do "approachable to new users" vs. "efficient
for committed long-term users".

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armandososa
I'm tired of people citing Khoi Vinh’s Web Site as _the best web design in the
world_ just because it's simple, typohraphical, monochromatic, and grid-based.

Face it people! if all the internet looked like this it will be _boooring_ ,
not beautiful. It's part of subtraction's aesthetic and hardly works anywhere
else.

I love Khoi's site, but I simply can't stand any other that uses his theme
(<http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/>) because they look so dull, impersonal
and pretentious.

Where's the David Carson of this generation?

~~~
Dramatize
I would rather be bored by the design and amazed by the content than vice
versa.

~~~
armandososa
I'd prefer to be amazed by both.

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al_james
Web design is 95% Typography to typophiles, 95% graphic design to graphic
designers, 95% usability to UX experts. In short, people look at and notice
what they are interested in, but to the average punter each of these things
makes a much smaller contribution.

~~~
pchristensen
Don't forget 95% functionality to programmers :)

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jackowayed
An exaggerated headline is 95% of getting traffic.

~~~
nooneelse
A witty retort is 95% of a comment.

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leonpaternoster
The context of this statement is important, I think. Back in 2006 web sites
were all about Flash, widgets, fancy graphics etc. All Oliver was saying is
that these things are unimportant if your text is unreadable.

And by typography he means a lot more than whether it's georgia or helvetica.

~~~
eswat
The context is important. A lot of popular websites are still unreadable
messes (thank you Instapaper & Readability) but it was more prevalent when
this article came out, when many web designers thought “typography” on the web
was just choosing a typeface—any typeface that wasn’t Times New Roman—and
changing the default leading.

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jacquesm
Web design (and I'm saying that as the owner of one of the worst designed
sites in the world) is compromise.

Design, form and function compete for limited space and try to advance towards
that goal by picking the perfect mix between conflicting goals. It should look
good, it should work and what text you've got should be readable.

But not all websites center around the written word, and user experience is
not just reading text on a website.

Hint: Less text is better. So good Web Design is to avoid having the problem
that 95% of your web design centers around typography or any other single
metric.

It's the total package that matters and typography is but one (minor) element
in there. If it isn't _just_ the right font but it is readable you're already
90% there, the remaining 5% may or may not be important to you.

I know great sites that use 'courier' or some other minimalist approach and I
know sites that suck that have been designed by the best in the industry, they
look great but they're like super nice wrapping on a shitty present.

Strike the right balance, don't worry too much about any one factor,
especially not typography. After all, the screens we have are direct
descendants from the 8x6 dot matrix fonts of not that long ago, the
availability of information is what drove this industry, not the availability
of high resolution display for typographical purposes.

We don't call them graphics displays for nothing, pictures _still_ paint a
thousand words.

~~~
phpnode
It's not that "less text is better", actually, depending on your page and what
you're trying to sell more text is often better. If you can write a long,
engaging sales pitch it's much more likely to convert users than a short one,
because those that read it all have will have already invested time and effort
in your site or product and want to get something out of that investment. The
key is in finding the right balance - don't overwhelm the user with a giant
wall of text, give the already "pre-sold", impatient users an easy way to
convert and let the more cautious users keep reading and scrolling down.
Typography plays it's part in establishing the content hierarchy, but to say
it's the most important part of the design is pretty silly - it's one of many
important parts. The actual physical arrangement of page elements is far more
critical. (Of course, awful typography can ruin a site, but so can many many
other factors)

------
cmod
The followup (Part 2) is here:
[http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/webdesign-
is-95-typog...](http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/webdesign-
is-95-typography-partii)

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gaylordzach
I think one should extend the scope of classic typography slightly to
understand where the author is coming from. To me it makes perfect sense. If
you can't structure your text right to get the message across, then fancy
designs and widgets won't help you either.

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aw3c2
This article's weird off-center placement on the right side with empty space
on the left made me feel uneasy. That's 64% a layout issue.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
That didn't bother me as much as the quirky use of red for links which seemed
to go against the theme of the article (having typography support the
content).

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oloolo
This shocked a lot of flash boys and neck beards back in 2006.

But nowadays...

Luckily, I had a chance to prove it many times.

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jules
I have to admit that this page looks very good, unlike many other articles
that claim to know the secret to web design. It would be even better if it
weren't right centered.

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dasil003
Or in the case of this article, 100%.

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nervechannel
People can bang on about typography all they like, but any browser that won't
let me override the designer's choice of fonts with ones that actually render
nicely on my display won't get used.

(I'm looking at you Chrome)

Over here, font fanaticism is (sensibly) restricted to images.

How can a web designer have any idea what will look nice on a display with
completely different visual characteristics to his own? Especially if the OS
has a completely different font rendering library to boot.

~~~
teilo
This article is not about fonts.

~~~
nervechannel
Let me explain this slowly.

From the article: "Optimizing typography is optimizing readability,
accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance."

If you lay out your text in a way that only works right when viewed in the
typeface and font size that your own browser is using, then you'll fail in
terms of readability, accessibility and usability.

The Vinh pages that the article holds up as a shining beacon of good
typography are particularly bad in this regard.

On my display at work, they are mangled in various amateurish ways, presumably
because my browser is using sufficiently different fonts from the designer's.
Words overlap where they shouldn't, or run past the edges of the elements they
are supposed to be contained in.

It's not a browser standards problem, this is an up-to-date Firefox, but with
font overrides in place in order to make sure that I don't have to suffer
because of fonts that render poor on my monitor and OS.

I contrast this with HN itself, which is a great example of typography that
works pretty well no matter what fonts you're using.

Is that clearer?

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Dramatize
This article, back in the day, got me started exploring minimal design.

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tokenadult
Web design to meet the users' needs might be as much as 50 percent information
architecture. When I go to most websites, I'm looking for information, not eye
candy.

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shalmanese
No it's not.

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dstein
He's correct. 95% of the time it's Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, or
Verdana.

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Zak
People who say X is 95% of Y are 95% wrong.

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thomaslebas
60% of statistics are false.

