Design by Writing

Content

Design

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 -- (oct 15, 2015 : i don't know why i included The Magazine)

My Sep 8, 2015 ToledoTalk.com comment in a thread about the Toledo Blade's new mobile web format where I mentioned what I would like to see in a Blade web design for article pages. My entire comment:

I'd pay nice money for a Blade subscription if the article pages looked something like this:
http://toledotalk.com/last-alarm.html - (blatant copyright violation. will remove later.)

... instead of this:

http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2014/01/31/Last-Alarm-rings-for-fallen-heroes.html

... and instead of this:

http://m.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2014/01/31/Last-Alarm-rings-for-fallen-heroes.html

I don't need a printed paper version. I don't need an app. I prefer one website that responds comfortably on all devices and loads fast with no mountains of JavaScript bilge, no huge irrelevant images, no ads, and no trackers and other gobbledygook that bog down page load speed.

It would be nice if the article page contained a large-ish font size and a lot of negative space. I don't understand why some responsively-designed websites use a tiny, uncomfortable font size on mobile.

I see no need for a bunch of navigation links in the header and footer areas of an article page. No fixed areas. No hamburger or similar menu icons, like I use here. The only link needed is a link to the home page. The reader can find all the site's link cruft on the home page.

Outside of links contained within the article, the only other acceptable link would be to a separate page that contains the Facebook comments, pertaining to the article. If I'm a buying a subscription, I do not want to see Facebook comments loaded on the same page as the article because that slows down the page load and fouls the overall look of the page.

On an article page, I want at least 99% of the page to focus on the article: Title, secondary title, author, contact info, publish date, and content.

Give non-paying customers the hideous views, and give subscribers something worth buying. Until this utopia exists, I'll continue reading with JavaScript disabled, which improves the web-viewing experience a lot.

While not perfect, some good design concepts for an article page can be gleaned from this site.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

The humorous content is directed at web designers/developers. Excerpts:

Let me describe your perfect-ass website:

Shit's lightweight and loads fast

Fits on all your shitty screens

Looks the same in all your shitty browsers

The motherfucker's accessible to every asshole that visits your site

Shit's legible and gets your fucking point across (if you had one instead of just 5mb pics of hipsters drinking coffee)

This is a real, naked website. Look at it. It's fucking beautiful.

What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves.

Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

"Good design is as little design as possible."
- some German motherfucker

My follow-up comment

#design - #writing - #reading - #web

From JR's : articles
920 words - 6418 chars - 5 min read
created on Mar 24, 2015 at 10:25:01 am
updated on Oct 15, 2015 at 07:41:55 am - #
source - versions

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