I agree that a lot of them don't make much income but it is basically a cash economy and many self earners don't report it. I mean if you go there and see the price of things and what people are buying, you know that have to be making more than RS. 200,000. The average BATA shoe store had products costing more than I paid in Target here and I was seeing brisk sales.
I didn't say that. I said cheating on taxes is a national pastime. And that only 2 - 3% pay taxes. Two different assertions in the same general subject domain. I apologize if my choice of words led you to conclude I was saying 98 - 97% are cheating: that was not my intention, and if you re-examine my comment I think you will understand.
The article you reference basically says that of those who owe taxes the only people who don't cheat are the few who work for large corporations who handle the filing of taxes for them.
>>only people who don't cheat are the few who work for large corporations who handle the filing of taxes for them.
People in large corporations are well known to turn in fake rent receipts, produce medical receipts of their relatives/neighbors to claim tax benefits. So whatever 2-3% might be paying, aren't paying it completely.
>> "The bevel is bad" is not a very good argument, either.
While I don't like the logo at all, I have to agree with this.
Yahoo's logo isn't designed for logo and design aficionados, it's designed so that the masses can easily associate the shapes and colors of the logo with the company (which leaves me to wonder why they fixed something that isn't really broken). Most people don't think much about the logo beyond that.
The exercise of rebranding itself is just a PR stunt to tell the world that Yahoo's not the old Yahoo.
Traditional (i.e. Paul Rand era) logo design was trying to distill a company down to a minimal essence. Having bevels leaves in a decorative element that makes in non-minimal. That it should look good in 1 color is fundamental to traditional logo design.
Yes, but it is going to be used on the screen 99% of the time, you say. But people who violate that rule end up with logos that are just a little bit tacky to a graphic designer.
Much of UX design is suck. People can't tell a difference, not at least in detail. If I were to change color of a button, maybe you'd think no one cared.
I think you just proved the point, most people will not notice, nor care, about a change in fonts from one family to another if they are similar.
If one were to change a button from red to a slightly different red, which is a detail, then most will not notice nor care. Change it from red to green then there could possibly be a change in response; be it good or bad.
Even if they don't care or consciously notice, the small details do make the experience. Even the reader who can't name even one font of knows what serifs are will experience the different fonts differently. One site will make his reading a little less comfortable, maybe make him tense some small facial muscles, and after a few minutes he just closes the tab because for some reason he doesn't even care to articulate he just feel slightly annoyed with the site. Another site has a design with a calming and harmonic color scheme, few distractions, a font that can be read without strain and our reader finishing his reading in a good mode and adds the site to his RSS feed. :)
Of course the most perfect site won't save crappy content, but the ugly site's content may never be read. It's similar to all the non verbal clues in human interaction. The tone of your voice and even the color of your shirt do make a difference.
But you are talking about several elements across the board that I would agree would have some sort of impact.
I'm just saying that changing from one font to another that are almost identical, and to the layman are identical, will not have much impact in the long run.
1. The point is that websites shouldnotspecifyafont.
2. The fullsize screenshots are nearly as ugly as the scaled-down versions. I searched for the text and the Wired article is rendered nicely without funky subpixels blurring everything for me (on Xfce/Opera, 1440x900). If the standard of font rendering on other devices is as bad as appears to be shown in the screenshots, this would be yet another reason not to worry about specific fonts but fix the rendering first.
> The point is that websites should not specify a font.
Seriously? One of the most important aspects of your design, and you want to leave it up to the browser? Web design is 95% typography. If your website doesn't specify a font you aren't doing your job as a designer.
> Seriously? One of the most important aspects of your design
Most websites need a lot less design than they have. There are properties that, for branding or other reasons, need to exert full control of their look and feel that need strong design, but most websites don't, and over-design gets in the way of disseminating information to users.
> If your website doesn't specify a font you aren't doing your job as a designer.
Not every website needs anyone doing a job as a designer. There certainly are very important places for design on the web, but the web as a whole is an information dissemination platform, not a full employment program for graphic designers.
You and I are using the same word, 'design', to mean two completely different things. To me, design is all about disseminating information to users. That's why designers should care so much about typography - readability is absolutely key to a good design.
I wish there were a good specific word for what you're referring to as 'design'. It's very prevalent, and in most cases it's actually a great example of poor design.
> You and I are using the same word, 'design', to mean two completely different things.
I don't think we are. We just have different opinions about the need for it.
> To me, design is all about disseminating information to users.
Design is about presentation of information to users, not dissemination.
> That's why designers should care so much about typography - readability is absolutely key to a good design.
Readability is subjective and not essential to dissemination; design is about controlling presentation, rather than leaving it to system through which the user accesses the information. For information that doesn't have specialized presentation needs, this will make the presentation worse for people that have their defaults well tuned for themselves in the name of making it better-than-untuned-results (ideally) for the average user.
> I wish there were a good specific word for what you're referring to as 'design'.
Readability is not subjective. Small font sizes, low contrast, bad kerning, and many other things objectively decrease readability.
It sounds like you think the web should be a collection of RSS feeds and APIs. That's interesting and all, but that's not even remotely what the web is. The system through which the user accesses web information (aka browser) is only well-tuned for a very small minority of users, because the vast majority don't even know that they can tune their browser, let alone think that they should. Further, I've never seen a browser where the defaults make for excellent readability. In every case I've seen, they don't even make for acceptable readability.
> There is. "Design".
Appreciate the snark, but I was talking about a specific word for what I understood you to be talking about. Design is the exact opposite of a specific word. It's so general as to be downright vague. (Also, since you said you didn't think we were talking about different things, this comment really isn't useful.)
> Small font sizes, low contrast, bad kerning, and many other things objectively decrease readability.
There are elements of design which affect readability more consistently across individual users than other elements of design do, but that doesn't stop readability from being subjective.
I am not a designer, thankfully, or even more people would hate me.
I am fine with the usual serif, sans-serif, monospace etc. declarations, but I think that it should be left to the user/webbrowser to decide which particular serif font they prefer, as it is the user that has to read the text set in this font.
You will be surprised about how many people actually know that you can change your default fonts on browser. For normal non-nerd users, you make choice of good defaults.
And then you get a completely inconsistent viewing experience across browsers and operating systems. The whole point of having a designer work on content presentation is that they can actually know what type is appropriate for the content they're presenting. You're probably going to want to use different type depending on whether you're in a header, navigation, paragraph-heavy body copy, or bullet-point lists, because different type is more readable in those circumstances. The designer also needs to be considering things like how many characters per line are displayed, because it's much easier to read copy when there are 75-80 characters per line than when there are, e.g., 200. These are all things that the browser does not do for you. Sites like c2.com's wiki are what you get when you let the browser handle everything. That is not an optimal reading experience.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ‘inconsistent viewing experiences across browsers and operating systems’. Different operating systems are, by definition, different, and so are different browsers. Of course the ‘viewing experience’ will differ between Opera Mobile on a 4" Android device and Firefox on a 30" screen, and also between, say, Lynx and Firefox on the same screen. Differing viewing experiences are the only reason people choose different browsers.
And of course you want to use different type depending on whether you’re typesetting a header, navigation or paragraph. That’s what serif, sans-serif, monospace and even cursive and fantasy are for. You tell the browser which general family you would like to have in a particular place, and the browser/user then chooses the best family from this set depending on their device, font rendering settings etc. etc. (If you are seriously suggesting to use one serif type for the header, another serif type for the body and a third serif type for bullet point lists all on the same page I will have a hard time not trying to violate your physical integrity).
Furthermore, it is obviously important not to cram too many characters in a single line. However, if one font at a given size (which, again, you should only specify relatively to the browser’s default size) manages to fill a line with as little as fifty characters, another font will have a hard time filling that same line with considerably more than 70 – both of which are perfectly fine line lengths.
Again, I am not saying that CSS is evil and that you shouldn’t use it. I am saying that you should leave things to the browser that are best left to the browser.
I understand what you're saying, I simply disagree with you. Typography is the most important design decision that a content site makes. Leaving something that fundamental to the browser simply strikes me as an exceedingly poor choice.
(One minor point — type is much more than just font-family, as your second paragraph seems to assume.)
I know I lost this argument sometime in 2004, but it'd be nice
if people stopped trying to control where everything goes.
A recurring source of amusement (or frustration?) in the CIWA newsgroups back in the 90s was the young web designers whose questions began with "How do I force".
I never was able to determine if the decrease in the amount of these questions during the early 2000s was due to the decreasing popularity of Usenet or the increasing popularity of Flash.
The point being, if it takes 3x magnification and careful examination (after having been coached) to spot any difference, it's hardly worth worrying over, let alone admonishing use of one over the other.
Very interesting that you should bring flat UIs up. I monitor my father's inbox[1]. I noticed earlier today he got an email to confirm the creation of a Microsoft account he needed. Instead of clicking on the flat blue "Verify xxxx@gmail.com" button to confirm his email address, he replied to the email saying "verification". It then bounced, predictably, and confused him even more.
I haven't spoke to him yet, but I'm guessing that the flat blue button with some text, in the email didn't seem "clickable" to him.
Flat UIs do indeed seem like a serious step backwards in usability.
What I find funny is that now, when we finally have a proper CSS support for gradients, shadows, rounded edges and so on, we're going into design style that could be easily achieved in the '90s :)
Although not a designer, I have a suspicion that the ability is precisely the driver of flat design. When gradients, shadows, rounded edges, etc, were HARD, then using them showed a degree of effort and technical capability.
In other words, gradients, shadows, rounded edges, etc were a form of credential.
Now that they're easy, they've lost that credentialing effect and (over)using them is akin to a 90's myspace page with an abundance of glitter and flashy clipart.
I personally would like to see a middle ground with tasteful use of gradients and shadows as opposed to the flat design. But then, there's a reason I'm NOT a designer (for example, I like skeuomorphic design, I think it's fun and playful)
This is just wrong, without CSS3 Flat UI would be limited to plain squares and rectangles, even if you hate the style you must at least admit there is a lot more to Flat UI than that.
We're back to mystery meat navigation. That is Web 1.0. I would also argue that a lot of designers implemention flat ui do not have an augmented sense of typography and layout to compensate.
Anyone earning below Rs. 200,000 is exempt from Income Tax
I wouldn't generalise.
http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-india-pay-income-tax-...