4 ms·

Honestly, I wish websites here were more information-dense. Many sites seem to have gone all-in on adding as much whitespace as possible, making them much harde

Honestly, I wish websites here were more information-dense. Many sites seem to have gone all-in on adding as much whitespace as possible, making them much harder to use on (say) smaller laptops.

ghaff 4y ago
Current design fashion tends toward whitespace, a lot of iconography, less text, and often thinner and lighter typography.
- samstave 4y ago
  Yeah, and it sucks - and I think any web designer who does this is not deserving of the term "designer" There is a lot more to "design" in web than some stupid visual trendiness ; its the entire reason we have two different phrases: UI & UX... UX is how we experience the content, UI being how content is presented to us. Good UI builds a good UX. Good UX builds understanding and relationship to the user's mind to the content.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    One of the things you're fighting against is that a lot of people just don't engage if there's a lot of text. I write a fair bit for our marketing department and we basically never publish the 3000-4000 word whitepapers that were routine when I joined the company any longer. Even reports I write based on survey data are fairly light on the word count because people just don't read the longer pieces.
    - jasonhansel 4y ago
      The problem isn't that websites should have more text; it's that they should have more content, using things other than whitespace to establish a visual hierarchy.
      - samstave 4y ago
        Exactly ; the real sublime is that the human mind, in its current iteration is a Pattern Recognignation Engine With Amnesia but the key skill that the Human has is the speed between visual correlation to cognition of the library of thoughts available. So obviously a person who does not have that connect, will fail to real-ize the scenario visualized.
samstave 4y ago
+1!!!! This is what killed Digg, and is killing Reddit, under Reddit's new design. I have posted quite a bit about how old.reddit is so much more important because with the +RES you can tweak the overall information density, as well as visual guides to where you are in the thread (the border highlighters to nesting comments: https://i.imgur.com/oWiweis.png https://i.imgur.com/oWiweis.png And when coupled with hover zoom (or whatever extension you like) allows you to not even click on an image: https://i.imgur.com/nkvPUb4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nkvPUb4.jpg) And then, either turn off thumbnails in titles and you get a great density that allows one to consume more info -- this is why Digg died, and Reddit is "Diggifying" them selves with their lame new layout -- which Ironically is how reddit had a huge spike in users after digg 2.0 --> Also whatever happened to Kevin whatever from Digg who was on a bunch of magazine for being some web visionary, and now he has dissipated...
- brianshaler 4y ago
  > Also whatever happened to Kevin whatever from Digg He went on to become a crypto bro https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/kevin-rose-nfts-cyber-crime-spear-phishing https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/kevin-rose-nfts-cyber-crime...
hackeraccount 4y ago
There's an expression "I would have written a shorter letter but I didn't have time." - that's what websites are ideally trying to get at. Information dense is the goal but a poem can be very short and very information dense while a poorly written novel can take 80,000 words and still not convey the same information as that poem.

Honestly, I wish websites here were more information-dense. Many sites seem to have gone all-in on adding as much whitespace as possible, making them much harder to use on (say) smaller laptops.

ghaff 4y ago

Current design fashion tends toward whitespace, a lot of iconography, less text, and often thinner and lighter typography.

samstave 4y ago
Yeah, and it sucks - and I think any web designer who does this is not deserving of the term "designer" There is a lot more to "design" in web than some stupid visual trendiness ; its the entire reason we have two different phrases: UI & UX... UX is how we experience the content, UI being how content is presented to us. Good UI builds a good UX. Good UX builds understanding and relationship to the user's mind to the content.
- ghaff 4y ago
  One of the things you're fighting against is that a lot of people just don't engage if there's a lot of text. I write a fair bit for our marketing department and we basically never publish the 3000-4000 word whitepapers that were routine when I joined the company any longer. Even reports I write based on survey data are fairly light on the word count because people just don't read the longer pieces.
  - jasonhansel 4y ago
    The problem isn't that websites should have more text; it's that they should have more content, using things other than whitespace to establish a visual hierarchy.
    - samstave 4y ago
      Exactly ; the real sublime is that the human mind, in its current iteration is a Pattern Recognignation Engine With Amnesia but the key skill that the Human has is the speed between visual correlation to cognition of the library of thoughts available. So obviously a person who does not have that connect, will fail to real-ize the scenario visualized.

samstave 4y ago

+1!!!! This is what killed Digg, and is killing Reddit, under Reddit's new design. I have posted quite a bit about how old.reddit is so much more important because with the +RES you can tweak the overall information density, as well as visual guides to where you are in the thread (the border highlighters to nesting comments: https://i.imgur.com/oWiweis.png https://i.imgur.com/oWiweis.png And when coupled with hover zoom (or whatever extension you like) allows you to not even click on an image: https://i.imgur.com/nkvPUb4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nkvPUb4.jpg) And then, either turn off thumbnails in titles and you get a great density that allows one to consume more info -- this is why Digg died, and Reddit is "Diggifying" them selves with their lame new layout -- which Ironically is how reddit had a huge spike in users after digg 2.0 --> Also whatever happened to Kevin whatever from Digg who was on a bunch of magazine for being some web visionary, and now he has dissipated...

brianshaler 4y ago
> Also whatever happened to Kevin whatever from Digg He went on to become a crypto bro https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/kevin-rose-nfts-cyber-crime-spear-phishing https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/kevin-rose-nfts-cyber-crime...

hackeraccount 4y ago

There's an expression "I would have written a shorter letter but I didn't have time." - that's what websites are ideally trying to get at. Information dense is the goal but a poem can be very short and very information dense while a poorly written novel can take 80,000 words and still not convey the same information as that poem.