4 ms·

The content at the link is simply a poor adaptation of Tufte CSS. The text block has been made too narrow, lots of bloggy little headers and footers have been s

The content at the link is simply a poor adaptation of Tufte CSS. The text block has been made too narrow, lots of bloggy little headers and footers have been sprinkled everywhere, and marginal notes are used in a frenetic way that competes with the text. The original design of Tufte CSS is good, but even that won’t convince a reader to take a super bloggy blog seriously (and I’m a fan of super bloggy blogs). The design has to match the ideas and the writing. For comparison, here’s a one-off article of mine that I published using Tufte CSS: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.html https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.... It’s my own thing, so obviously I’m biased. But I can say objectively: A) I didn't dick around with the original Tufte design, B) I rewrote it for a year until I felt it was telling a coherent message, C) to me it is much easier to look at than the above (why would that be?) D) it was very well received E) in the 3 (?) years since I wrote it, I haven’t written anything else for which I felt like Tufte CSS would be a good fit. (Another thing to consider: the ET Book font in Tufte CSS just doesn't look very good on low-DPI displays.)

NikolaNovak 8y ago
That is fascinating, impressive, inspirational - thank you for the link & the article. And yet, it's also demotivating to the point of being depressing. Clicking through the chain of links culminating with Polen and Racket, the sheer depth of the stack required, the learning & work, to create beautiful digital+printed books, feels like it has much to be desired :-/
- velcrovan 8y ago
  I know that feeling! It just means you have a lot of reading and tinkering to do. Design+publishing is inherently complicated and that complexity is conserved; you make one part of it simpler, you necessarily make another part harder. This is true of print publishing and it is true of web publishing, and they each have their own stacks. Any attempt to combine the two is going to have its own complexity. For this reason most people aren't interested in going there, so the tooling can seem very rudimentary compared with the tools that exist in either medium in isolation. Pollen and Racket seemed arcane at first. But both are elegant, well-documented tools with extremely helpful communities. Delving into them has been probably the most rewarding experience I’ve had with anything computer-related, and that experience is still ongoing.
7192DF8F 8y ago
Aside: Your header interacts unexpectedly with the sidenotes and some of the images -- https://imgur.com/a/bgLRcvD https://imgur.com/a/bgLRcvD I tested on Safari 12 and Firefox 66; The book flipping video did not demonstrate that behavior.

NikolaNovak 8y ago

That is fascinating, impressive, inspirational - thank you for the link & the article. And yet, it's also demotivating to the point of being depressing. Clicking through the chain of links culminating with Polen and Racket, the sheer depth of the stack required, the learning & work, to create beautiful digital+printed books, feels like it has much to be desired :-/

velcrovan 8y ago
I know that feeling! It just means you have a lot of reading and tinkering to do. Design+publishing is inherently complicated and that complexity is conserved; you make one part of it simpler, you necessarily make another part harder. This is true of print publishing and it is true of web publishing, and they each have their own stacks. Any attempt to combine the two is going to have its own complexity. For this reason most people aren't interested in going there, so the tooling can seem very rudimentary compared with the tools that exist in either medium in isolation. Pollen and Racket seemed arcane at first. But both are elegant, well-documented tools with extremely helpful communities. Delving into them has been probably the most rewarding experience I’ve had with anything computer-related, and that experience is still ongoing.

7192DF8F 8y ago

Aside: Your header interacts unexpectedly with the sidenotes and some of the images -- https://imgur.com/a/bgLRcvD https://imgur.com/a/bgLRcvD I tested on Safari 12 and Firefox 66; The book flipping video did not demonstrate that behavior.