4 ms·

I'm far from a designer, but I still like to think I appreciate good design. 1. The color combinations are really bad. Dirty-yellow on blue/dirty-yellow on gre

I'm far from a designer, but I still like to think I appreciate good design. 1. The color combinations are really bad. Dirty-yellow on blue/dirty-yellow on green is close to what a designer would chose if they were planning to make something deliberately look ugly. 2. The titles are in grey while the content text is in white. Why tone down the most important thing on the page? 3. The spacing between all the objects is weird. The space between the comments is huge - it was likely made that large since they would otherwise flow into each other. They should have separated the comments using other methods in addition to just making the space between them huge. 4. For long comments with multiple paragraphs and links it can be hard to see where the next comment begin, since the links (in the comment) and the links to the user profile/permalink to post look almost the same.

simoncion 12y ago
I am not a designer, but I know that I do appreciate good design. Even back in the early 2000's, Metafilter's simple, clean, relatively information-dense design was a welcome change from most news aggregators out there. Metafilter is supposed to be a place for thoughtful medium-to-long-form discussion. I feel that its clean, consistent, text-focused design serves that purpose well. Honestly, remove comment nesting, move the comment credit line under the comment, and change the color scheme to white and gold on blue, and HN's comment page looks pretty much exactly the same as Metafilter's.
- kristofferR 12y ago
  Your last paragraph basically says "remove the biggest flaws with Metafilter's design compared to HN's - and then they are pretty much the same". ;) I won't go into the color scheme since I guess that is a matter of taste, but at the same time I don't think it's an accident that you don't see the same color combinations used anywhere else ;) The comment nesting and placement of the comment credit line(s) is actually really important. It is vital to make the different comments easy to visually separate from each other. HN has one line above and one line below each comment, effectively boxing them in. That, plus the comment nesting, makes HN's comment threads easy to read and skim over. Metafilter on the other hand has just one line below each comment. Unlike on HN, where the line has a lower contrast/eye focus than the comment text, the line on MF is using the same colors as the links in comments. That is completely counter-productive, and objectively bad design. Since MF doesn't have comment nesting it should do something else to visually separate the comments. Most other sites subtly change the background color, but there are also other ways to do it. High contrast/big size should be used for things that should be focused on, and small contrast/small size for things that shouldn't be focused on. On HN the contrast between the color and size of the objects mostly make sense (although self posts should have darker text), but on MF it is all over the place.

simoncion 12y ago

I am not a designer, but I know that I do appreciate good design. Even back in the early 2000's, Metafilter's simple, clean, relatively information-dense design was a welcome change from most news aggregators out there. Metafilter is supposed to be a place for thoughtful medium-to-long-form discussion. I feel that its clean, consistent, text-focused design serves that purpose well. Honestly, remove comment nesting, move the comment credit line under the comment, and change the color scheme to white and gold on blue, and HN's comment page looks pretty much exactly the same as Metafilter's.

kristofferR 12y ago
Your last paragraph basically says "remove the biggest flaws with Metafilter's design compared to HN's - and then they are pretty much the same". ;) I won't go into the color scheme since I guess that is a matter of taste, but at the same time I don't think it's an accident that you don't see the same color combinations used anywhere else ;) The comment nesting and placement of the comment credit line(s) is actually really important. It is vital to make the different comments easy to visually separate from each other. HN has one line above and one line below each comment, effectively boxing them in. That, plus the comment nesting, makes HN's comment threads easy to read and skim over. Metafilter on the other hand has just one line below each comment. Unlike on HN, where the line has a lower contrast/eye focus than the comment text, the line on MF is using the same colors as the links in comments. That is completely counter-productive, and objectively bad design. Since MF doesn't have comment nesting it should do something else to visually separate the comments. Most other sites subtly change the background color, but there are also other ways to do it. High contrast/big size should be used for things that should be focused on, and small contrast/small size for things that shouldn't be focused on. On HN the contrast between the color and size of the objects mostly make sense (although self posts should have darker text), but on MF it is all over the place.