5 ms·
Read Me
- sigsergv 6y ago“However, by the end of the 1960s, computers with led screens had become relatively mainstream.” What? Sixties? Anyway, I've read a lot of materials about readability and some authors provide very different recommendations. A lot of subjective opinions that are supported by questionable researches. Perception of text changes and you simply cannot use the same methods evaluating people from different generations or cultures. In USSR for example all books for children MUST BE printed using sans-serif fonts because some “scientists” decided that serif fonts are harder to read for kids.
- rstuart4133 6y agoIt's a page discussing readability of text. Perversely I found the way it was presented made it very difficult to read.
- WA 6y agoI stopped reading exactly for that reason. It's like a designer toyed around with annoying things to make it somewhat "special", which distracts from the text and its message.
- coffeeiscold 6y agoIronically unreadable with Firefox for Android. Lots of text is cut off. Possibly due to not handling text scaling (accessibility) correctly.
- ibiuebeii 6y agoThe information presented was interesting, and the way it was presented was playful and kept me reading despite me being currently exhausted. Soooo, that's a positive from me!
- xmprt 6y agoThe article put in so much effort in all the wrong ways. Things were moving all over the place and there was no consistency between sections. I had to retrain myself every time I read another paragraph. The only interesting parts for me were the interactive elements. This is the same article except much easier to read: https://readymag.com/designs/1961839/ https://readymag.com/designs/1961839/ For me, there are only 2 things that would make an article better to read. 1. Better, more concise writing. 2. Interactivity And if the goal is read through rate then perhaps this method will work (if only because people are more likely to scroll blindly through an article to see all the animations). But if the goal is education then sometimes boredom is what's needed.
- barnaclejive 6y agoonly two things? generous
- occamrazor 6y agoThis version is much better indeed, with “boring” but ergonomic fonts, images, and typography. How did you figure out the URL?
- xmprt 6y agoI clicked around their page and looked at some of the templates they were selling.
- wodenokoto 6y agoFor content where readers arrive from other web properties, it also helps to be frank and upfront about what the theme and content of the article is. TFA is called “read me”, which is a term many technical people connect with documentation. It starts of talking about Reader retention on the web and changes into a deep dive of what typography is and the history of web and digital typography. Of course you are going to lose readers who expects an article about documentation, or readers who think this is a meta article about web content. For content, where readers mostly come from within the web property, you can be more certain that readers will read the article because they trust the sender, not because the theme interest them and for such a medium, I think there is more room to play with introduction and themes.
- daledavies 6y agoFor an article concerned with readability, I thought the text was quite difficult to read!
- barnaclejive 6y agoyea, no interest, showing off your js skills while telling me whatever my audience likes is wrong and bad, all while doing it with an extremely difficult to read and totally inaccessible page isn't a great way to get me to care about whatever your position is, idek, didn't get that far. I realize this may been an attempt at irony, either way it is done so badly. I really hope it is meant to be ironic.
- denysvitali 6y agoThis seems to be a shared thought in pretty much all the comments so far, and I agree as well. The entire article is based on how readable your text should be, yet they managed to not follow some of those rules themselves. i honestly liked the design of the page, but readability was certainly not on focus here, which is just ironic.
- jek0 6y agoSome bits of text are missing (because of badly written CSS I assume), stuff floating in front of the text... I definitely stopped reading before the average 40% of content: annoying layout.
- kissgyorgy 6y agoThe author uses the word "problem" multiple times. Is it really a problem? It feels natural and right to just get the information you need and move on with your life.
- asalahli 6y ago> Read Me Well I can't, because apparently my browser (iOS 10) isn't supported. I wonder what advanced JS features the page is using, that are only available on the latest browsers.</snark>
- scandox 6y agoToo many words. Too few insights. Too little information. We're drinking from thimbles and pissing Oceans.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoNone of the whiny losers in this comment section will ever know what the inside of a vagina feels like.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y agoThe fad success of the "Snow Fall" by NYTimes has created a generation of confused writers who think they're artists. Even the NYTimes has moved on from the all over the place interactive format for articles because it's not good for readability. If you are confident about your writing you should focus on the writing itself instead of trying to package it in all kinds of bells and whistles. It just signals insecurity.
- dredmorbius 6y agoBlank page (JS disabled). Given others' comments here, I'm thankful.
- nop90 6y agoIs this supposed to be satire? Start off all about readability, but all the text is written like an ingredients label to the side.
- jrockway 6y ago> However, by the end of the 1960s, computers with led screens had become relatively mainstream. Can someone point me to these mainstream LED displays? Are we talking about calculators, or were there 80x25 terminals that used LEDs? (Also interesting fact... "LED" was displayed capitalized on my screen but copy-pasted as lowercase. Indeed, in the DOM, the text is "led". I'm extra confused as to why someone would do that!)
- wrs 6y agoI was trying to parse that too. “Computers” were themselves not commonplace, and even within that rarefied subcommunity, “screens” were CRTs, not LEDs. LEDs were limited to seven-segment digits and individual dots. I think “LED” is in small-caps, which is correct for typographical purposes, but requires the underlying text to be lowercase.
- egypturnash 6y ago“ More and more text-based content is shared over the Internet, but not everything is thoroughly read. In fact, by the time this article reaches the next screen, a significant share of you will have already stopped reading.” All of this is crammed into a tiny column on the right side of the iPad I’m reading this on. When I start scrolling to read more it starts flickering and jittering because... this article is full of huge amounts of JavaScript doing shit whenever I scroll, and making it move super slow. It also breaks Safari’s “reader view”. Which honestly is about where I usually say “okay does the first paragraph of this illegible piece of the modern web feel worth the next level of hoops I’m gonna have to jump through to read it”. This is an article that does not want to be read.
- boring_twenties 6y agoSometimes these kinds of crap pages work perfectly fine if JavaScript is disabled. This particular one just displays a completely blank page, however. I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion.
- comfyinnernet 6y agoI can't tell if the joke is deliberate.
- tgvaughan 6y agoI don't understand why most of the things discussed in the article continue to be the responsibility of web page authors. For print media of course it makes sense for publishers to hire typesetters to agonise over font size. But for online content, please just send me the text itself and let _me_ choose how to most comfortably read it! Doing anything else is pretty obnoxious.