4 ms·

I find the screammer websites very nice (even though it wouldn't hurt to split off the manual/api to its own document). The crane website I find utterly horrib

I find the screammer websites very nice (even though it wouldn't hurt to split off the manual/api to its own document). The crane website I find utterly horrible. Reminds me of the typical Node.js or Ruby websites and that makes me shiver. A software library is not a consumer product. Design for a lipstick brand can not be used for an airplane company. Software deserves a professional "no-bullshit" design. All three have a crucial mistake in common: Lines wider than 40em. A line must have between 8-12 words on avarage. And that is a typographic law, don't question it, we have known that since we wrote bibles. The thing with "modern" web design is: I rather have no CSS then BAD design. And fact is 99% of all web developers are not worth their salt. They completely ignore the lessons of hundreds of years of typography. My father is a designer and to my luck he taught me about typography. Everyone who touches a website should have read Jan Tschichold. There is no way around it, you will only repeat past mistakes.

bshimmin 12y ago
I don't know if you're a Common Lisp guy, but comments like "99% of all web developers are not worth their salt" aren't really going to help your cause. If you personally dislike "the typical Node.js or Ruby" web sites, that's fine, but a lot of people who write software for the web these days clearly do like those sort of web sites and don't like an unformatted wall of text, even if the lines are a readable length. (I had a quick look at your site and was vastly disappointed to see that the lines were, indeed, 8-12 words on average, thus precluding my saying "Physician, heal thyself".)
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  I know it sounds harsh but fact is that today's web design ignores past science. Book design is a very well understood design problem which has its roots in ergonomics and not in graphic design. I don't mean to discredit the "99%"s graphic design skills, in fact I find many graphic design works on the web astonishing and have huge respect for graphic designers (because I really suck at it, but love it a lot). Their book design education appears to be underdeveloped though and for websites ergonomics are more important than graphic design. Thats just the way it is. Book design is an amazing field by the way. For latin characters it was pioneered by hand written bibles in the medival ages. I only know a few things about it, barely enough to see that its a dying art. :( Edit: Oh and you cannot "personaly dislike" a book design work. Its the only art I know which has definitive right or wrongs, black or whites, yes or nos. There is only one correct way to typeset any given text.
  - njr123 12y ago
    I am soo glad that viewpoint is on the way out, and we no longer have to live on the web equivalent of a brutalist concrete cube.
  - julian_t 12y ago
    Hmmm… I certainly do have the freedom to personally dislike a book design, whether the authorities say I should or not. And if that makes me typographically illiterate, then so be it ;-) In fact, I find the line lengths in many properly typeset works too short for me to read comfortably. For me, longer lines make for easier reading!
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    People don't read websites, they skim them. Web design is much more akin to poster or presentation design than book design.
tbirdz 12y ago
Would you mind elaborating more on what you mean by "Everyone who touches a website should have read Jan Tschichold". A quick search showed that Jan Tschichold has written many books (and many books have been written about him), in German, so I was wondering if there was a particular (preferably English) book you were referring to?
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  I have "Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie". Yeah not much of his work was translated, its sad. Maybe you can find similar/related/inspired authors who wrote or write in english. Its important to note that Tschichold made a U-turn at some point, while he was a big proponent of modernism at first, he later dismissed his opinions and became a proponent of classic typography. So I would go for writings from that later era.
  - mhd 12y ago
    That's a bit of an issue I've got with Tschichold. As there's a lot of "taste" involved in this, it's hard to separate rational judgement from just getting old and more conservative. And one should note that even old Jan was there way before digital typography on the web, heck, even way before DTP. Don't get me wrong, I really liked his typography for laymen booklet ("Erfreuliche Drucksachen durch gute Typografie", a title that really can't get both more quaint and Germanic). But he's really supremely conservative in there, warning everybody about the dangers of color, sans-serifs and lauding the beauty and composition of medieval woodblocks. So, yeah, cum grano salis as they say…

bshimmin 12y ago

I don't know if you're a Common Lisp guy, but comments like "99% of all web developers are not worth their salt" aren't really going to help your cause. If you personally dislike "the typical Node.js or Ruby" web sites, that's fine, but a lot of people who write software for the web these days clearly do like those sort of web sites and don't like an unformatted wall of text, even if the lines are a readable length. (I had a quick look at your site and was vastly disappointed to see that the lines were, indeed, 8-12 words on average, thus precluding my saying "Physician, heal thyself".)

mrottenkolber 12y ago
I know it sounds harsh but fact is that today's web design ignores past science. Book design is a very well understood design problem which has its roots in ergonomics and not in graphic design. I don't mean to discredit the "99%"s graphic design skills, in fact I find many graphic design works on the web astonishing and have huge respect for graphic designers (because I really suck at it, but love it a lot). Their book design education appears to be underdeveloped though and for websites ergonomics are more important than graphic design. Thats just the way it is. Book design is an amazing field by the way. For latin characters it was pioneered by hand written bibles in the medival ages. I only know a few things about it, barely enough to see that its a dying art. :( Edit: Oh and you cannot "personaly dislike" a book design work. Its the only art I know which has definitive right or wrongs, black or whites, yes or nos. There is only one correct way to typeset any given text.
- njr123 12y ago
  I am soo glad that viewpoint is on the way out, and we no longer have to live on the web equivalent of a brutalist concrete cube.
- julian_t 12y ago
  Hmmm… I certainly do have the freedom to personally dislike a book design, whether the authorities say I should or not. And if that makes me typographically illiterate, then so be it ;-) In fact, I find the line lengths in many properly typeset works too short for me to read comfortably. For me, longer lines make for easier reading!
- nostrademons 12y ago
  People don't read websites, they skim them. Web design is much more akin to poster or presentation design than book design.

tbirdz 12y ago

Would you mind elaborating more on what you mean by "Everyone who touches a website should have read Jan Tschichold". A quick search showed that Jan Tschichold has written many books (and many books have been written about him), in German, so I was wondering if there was a particular (preferably English) book you were referring to?

mrottenkolber 12y ago
I have "Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie". Yeah not much of his work was translated, its sad. Maybe you can find similar/related/inspired authors who wrote or write in english. Its important to note that Tschichold made a U-turn at some point, while he was a big proponent of modernism at first, he later dismissed his opinions and became a proponent of classic typography. So I would go for writings from that later era.
- mhd 12y ago
  That's a bit of an issue I've got with Tschichold. As there's a lot of "taste" involved in this, it's hard to separate rational judgement from just getting old and more conservative. And one should note that even old Jan was there way before digital typography on the web, heck, even way before DTP. Don't get me wrong, I really liked his typography for laymen booklet ("Erfreuliche Drucksachen durch gute Typografie", a title that really can't get both more quaint and Germanic). But he's really supremely conservative in there, warning everybody about the dangers of color, sans-serifs and lauding the beauty and composition of medieval woodblocks. So, yeah, cum grano salis as they say…