• Content
• Design
• Recommendations
• Etc.

Design by Writing

Content

• Good Writing and Editing Is Part of Great Design
• Content is the hero
• Content as Medium
• Words
• Reminder: Design is still about words
• Subcompact Publishing

Design

• Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design
• Learning to See
• Blogs for Readers - Hacker News discussion
• This is my favorite website
• The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard from 2006
• This is a motherf*cking website
• The Honest Web Design
• Optimal Characters Per Line
• Responsive Typography - The Basics
• Web Typography
• Fonts Have Feelings Too
• The importance of emotion in design
• Reader First Internet
• Re-thinking linking
• The Value of Content
• http://www.typewolf.com/cheatsheet
• Readability
• https://www.readability.com
• http://www.pearsonified.com/typography
• http://www.studiopress.com/design/google-font-combinations.htm
  http://backstage.pickcrew.com/update-blog/
• http://www.codeitpretty.com/2013/05/blog-font-style-with-css-spacing.html
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/20/typographic-design-survey-best-practices-from-the-best-blogs/
• http://typographica.org
• http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.php
• http://typecast.com/blog/a-more-modern-scale-for-web-typography
• http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/blogpost/339/27Jun2013/Resolved-Experiment-with-fonts-and-CSS

Recommendations

• 55 to 75 characters per line on desktop/laptop
• line height of 140 to 160 percent
• font size of at least 20 px
• letter spacing of 0 to 1 px depending upon font type
  • letter-spacing: 0.01em; ??
• paragraph spacing? twice the line height? more than two times line height?

What often gets missed is proportion. On every device, our H1s are three times (3em) the size of the body, every H2 is 2.25em, and so on.

After a lot of experimentation, 35–40 characters per line on a typical smartphone seems to me to provide the best balance for more legible and readable text.

Etc.

This page works because it easily provides information that is useful for interested readers. No web-abusive aesthetic cruft is used to infuriate the reader. This single page is more superior in web design than the web sites of Twitter, Pinterest, etc. because those giant properties abuse normal web behavior that has existed for more than 20 years. We don't need websites to act like native apps.

http://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6549018

Blogs are my newspapers, thats why. For me accessibility and downwards compatability outweigh the "product" a lot. I have a low-end smart phone for which most "products" are ununsable. Why do people throw away expensive hardware that woks perfectly fine? Because the modern software doesn't run on it.

Take for example the opposite: http://blog.fefe.de

That is a product that meets my demands: I can read on any device, using multiple clients. I could read this page with a dual-core as well as with a gameboy. Serve TTF font's, maybe I rather use bitmap fonts? Doesn't matter.

I could read that blog using Mosaic, lynx, w3m... kindle displays... It also works fine for braille terminals.

I guess I am more interested in powerful systems than the pityful products of the App-bubble. After all I am a programmer.

http://the-magazine.org

#design - #writing - #reading - #web