

Content focused design: type edition - snippyhollow
http://blog.getprismatic.com/blog/2012/4/18/content-focused-design-type-edition.html

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cemregr
> We found that what we liked best in a Müller-Brockmann book or on the screen
> in photoshop was not what we liked best on real data. Photoshop type
> rendering is pretty poor, which is another reason going straight from print
> to code worked well for us.

Really good call to omit Photoshop altogether from design endeavors like this.
It's a waste of time copy/pasting actual data into your comp, whenever you
want to change part of your design, you have to repeat it manually with all
the other elements on the page, the fonts render poorly...

We lately try to go from sketch to simple HTML mockups. Having actual data
readily available while designing is such an eye-opener. Thanks to web
inspector, we can tweak the styles and see the changes get reflected in the
entire page. Sometimes when we want to play with the layout, we take a screen
grab, cut and move things around in Fireworks.

Nicholas Felton, about the Facebook timeline design: "You can come into a
meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it
that way,’. But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you
pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks".

I don't understand how Photoshop is still considered a web design tool. Unless
designing a marketing site with no content, it hinders good design more than
it facilitates.

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liyanchang
Some serious attention to detail. Most people would have just used Helvetica,
a closely related decedent of Akzidenz-Grotesk, and called it a day.

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nollidge
If anybody else is curious, here's a discussion on the history and differences
of A-G and Helvetica (plus Univers and Arial, both closely related):

[http://www.freddesign.co.uk/2010/04/archive/the-
differences-...](http://www.freddesign.co.uk/2010/04/archive/the-differences-
between-akzidenz-univers-helvetica-and-arial/)

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cateye
Seems to me a perfect example of "Parkinson's Law of Triviality"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality>

I'm not saying that details aren't important. But I think there are more
important problems for them to figure out now like "how are we going to
determine what people are interested in by mining Tweets and Facebook posts.
These information could be totally fallacious."

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bradfordcross
The higher level product design problems you're talking about are super
important, and we'll write articles about that soon. We're really into
interaction design.

We're not figuring these problems out now. Our user research started over a
year ago, and we've iterated with many different versions of the product ever
since. Our engagement numbers are fantastic.

However, being smart about product design and optimizing engagement does not
preclude the attention to detail we demonstrate in this post on type.

The role of type in a content focused design is just a worthy topic to post
on, and there's no more to read into it than that.

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cateye
I don't want to sound like an asshole but:

1\. The homepage really doesn't prove the attention to detail thing. It can be
improved a lot. By the time someone wrote this blog post, he could have fixed
that. (I really liked reading the post, do not get me wrong.)

2\. Aesthetics is important. But would it really be less appealing if it was
plain Arial/Helvetica? Would you bet your money on it by A/B testing? I
wouldn't.

These discussions end always in: design is important versus code is important.
But that is completely not my point.

My point is that it is often, not very wise to spend disproportionately time
to trivial considerations. I don't know your "proportions" so I may have no
value judgment about that.

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jaysonelliot
You're trying to refute the importance of the design through assertive
statements like number 2 above, and yes, you are making the point that design
is not important by calling the typography a "trivial consideration."

The fact that you don't understand why it's important to do typography well,
and think that it's okay to just use Arial, doesn't mean that it is a trivial
matter.

That's the kind of thinking that led to the look of Windows 3.1, and I would
argue that while Windows might have been the winner at the cash register, it
was a lesser product.

I applaud the Prismatic team for focusing on quality. MVPs have their place,
but eventually you have to stop counting beans and think about making
something great. That's hardly trivial.

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state
Somewhat unrelated — I'm not sure why 'request an invite' bounces me to an
OAuth page. Perhaps it needs to be clearer what's going on when I enter my
email.

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bradfordcross
If you scroll down, you should see a bunch of info about how Prismatic works
and why you are signing up w/ Twitter...and some testimonials from the
community.

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state
Thanks!

