5 ms·

The "no defaults" rule is super important. It gets you out of the habit of just leaving stuff as-is, and into the habit of making design decisions. That's all d

by rriepe 17y ago

The "no defaults" rule is super important. It gets you out of the habit of just leaving stuff as-is, and into the habit of making design decisions. That's all design really is: A series of decisions. If you're not making them, you're not designing.

zokier 17y ago
On the other hand your users will lose flexibility and choice if you force some property. If you are unsure of your design, why not follow the users preference then instead of forcing something you guess looks nice. Specifying serif/sans-serif is always somewhat ok, but I don't see the need to be more specific. edit: what I meant was if you aren't going to put any thought on actually selecting some nice font then I don't see any point in specifying some generic fonts (like arial/verdana in the example) just to not use the default. You end up looking generic anyways, but when using default fonts (serif/sans-serif), then you look at least the way your users prefer. edit2: bit unrelated; I noticed that the example specifies font-size(and other properties) in pixels (px). I'd think that's bad practice, as I try to promote resolution independence.
- panic 17y ago
  Very few users change the default font on their browser.
- samdk 17y ago
  The point in specifying fonts that you might consider "generic" is visual consistency. Different fonts end up being very different on the screen, and, as a designer, your goal is to make your site look good across browsers and operating systems. If you have no way of knowing what fonts they're using it is very difficult to do that. Plus, the number of people who actually change their web browser font defaults is vanishingly small. Also, absolute font size specification used to be bad practice because browsers couldn't zoom very well. Now that all modern browsers (including IE7) have good full-page zooming it doesn't matter, and using exact pixels allow you to avoid browser rounding inconsistencies.
- Groxx 17y ago
  I'll generally agree, as I like my preferences followed, and I'll generally disagree, as truly good design hinges specifically on many minor things like that. Not that other setups wouldn't work better, or that there aren't equivalently effective styles that are entirely different, just that minutia really adds up in a really polished product. If generic / "just" functional is truly your goal, then yes, I like serif / sans-serif too, but the defaults on some systems just don't read well, and a lot of people don't know how to change them. Yeah, I know, I'm being contradictory no matter how you look at it. There's no "happy medium" in this, though, everything sacrifices something. @edit2: same here. Especially as it only specifies the height of the font, and different fonts could easily take up more or fewer lines, breaking rigid constructions at least as severely as different heights. I think a lot of it comes from designers largely working in pixels, and slicing images to be recreated as a relatively static website. Many artistic people are quite bound by physical medium, which can't stretch like a website can. Add to that the hideousness of earlier IE versions, and browser incompatibilities, and static, pixel-based formats make life easier for a lot of people, despite being technically inferior in a lot of cases. edit: oh, and slightly unrelated (though on the site), I despise different colors on text links, unless ALL links are clearly links (like this site). They break up my quick-parsing of a document, and I read too much to waste more time than necessary (curse you, hacker news! You've devoured my life!). Of course, this is controllable by me through a user stylesheet, but some sites get it right, so I don't want to break those...

by rriepe 17y ago

zokier 17y ago

On the other hand your users will lose flexibility and choice if you force some property. If you are unsure of your design, why not follow the users preference then instead of forcing something you guess looks nice. Specifying serif/sans-serif is always somewhat ok, but I don't see the need to be more specific. edit: what I meant was if you aren't going to put any thought on actually selecting some nice font then I don't see any point in specifying some generic fonts (like arial/verdana in the example) just to not use the default. You end up looking generic anyways, but when using default fonts (serif/sans-serif), then you look at least the way your users prefer. edit2: bit unrelated; I noticed that the example specifies font-size(and other properties) in pixels (px). I'd think that's bad practice, as I try to promote resolution independence.

panic 17y ago
Very few users change the default font on their browser.
samdk 17y ago
The point in specifying fonts that you might consider "generic" is visual consistency. Different fonts end up being very different on the screen, and, as a designer, your goal is to make your site look good across browsers and operating systems. If you have no way of knowing what fonts they're using it is very difficult to do that. Plus, the number of people who actually change their web browser font defaults is vanishingly small. Also, absolute font size specification used to be bad practice because browsers couldn't zoom very well. Now that all modern browsers (including IE7) have good full-page zooming it doesn't matter, and using exact pixels allow you to avoid browser rounding inconsistencies.
Groxx 17y ago
I'll generally agree, as I like my preferences followed, and I'll generally disagree, as truly good design hinges specifically on many minor things like that. Not that other setups wouldn't work better, or that there aren't equivalently effective styles that are entirely different, just that minutia really adds up in a really polished product. If generic / "just" functional is truly your goal, then yes, I like serif / sans-serif too, but the defaults on some systems just don't read well, and a lot of people don't know how to change them. Yeah, I know, I'm being contradictory no matter how you look at it. There's no "happy medium" in this, though, everything sacrifices something. @edit2: same here. Especially as it only specifies the height of the font, and different fonts could easily take up more or fewer lines, breaking rigid constructions at least as severely as different heights. I think a lot of it comes from designers largely working in pixels, and slicing images to be recreated as a relatively static website. Many artistic people are quite bound by physical medium, which can't stretch like a website can. Add to that the hideousness of earlier IE versions, and browser incompatibilities, and static, pixel-based formats make life easier for a lot of people, despite being technically inferior in a lot of cases. edit: oh, and slightly unrelated (though on the site), I despise different colors on text links, unless ALL links are clearly links (like this site). They break up my quick-parsing of a document, and I read too much to waste more time than necessary (curse you, hacker news! You've devoured my life!). Of course, this is controllable by me through a user stylesheet, but some sites get it right, so I don't want to break those...