This is a weird read. I think what the author means is that sometimes your design needs to "step out of the way" of someone else's design. This happened all the time for me in my early-20s doing band websites where there was usually album art, merch, logos, etc etc that were highly stylized... was it a bit of a challenge to deal with those assets? Sure... but when I realized that I just needed to "get out of the way" as the UX strategy things got easy.
Frankly, looking at the site that is being discussed I would call it "good UX" for being simple and "getting out of the way" of the original artist's work (which is the point of the site anyway). I do criticize making me download 2-3Mb pictures when they should be thumbnails though - but really outside of that gaff it's a fine site.
TLDR: Going on a "bad UX" rant feels disingenuous/silly when most designers would absolutely consider this good UX for getting out of the way of the original artist's work.
Your estimate is correct: I try to keep out of the way best I can. The covers are amazing if you ask me. It would be stupid to 'compete', and I am not even a designer. Besides, they did not want the 'professional' feel - they wanted the 'shop' described in the about page. As they add more content, the site will look like this shop and will be hard to use. This is why I use the oxymoron.
But I guess I tried to make a more general point. Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated. Both in terms of technology and interface. Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional. And professional often means the quite opposite of personal. Headache Comix just want to post stuff. Actually, one comment was that they don't care if things, in the end, would be hard to find given way more content. And that the people reading the magazine expects this. No, even wants it. Like walking in a museum as they should be (in my view), paintings all of the place - not perfectly aligned, not perfect degrees and lots of whitespaces and so on. :) I don't know if this explanation helped to clarify my take here, but... yeah.
I guess this is your point also, kind'a. And thank you btw! But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then? :) Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones. That's the beauty of the Web if you ask me.
Before I respond to your points - I conflate UX and design in my mind as I see UX being a subset of design by definition.
> Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated.
You're not alone in this, and good design is achieved when you can't take anything else away from something because the only components that are left are necessary to function.
> Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional.
Ain't that the darn truth =|
> But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then?
As a design-capable engineer I think you're painting with too wide of a brush in this blog post... and even against your own interests/ego. Sorry to get preachy but I love engaging people on these topics for learning.
You state: "and I am not even a designer" - but you clearly are capable of solving a visual problem in a functional way. At some level, you are now a designer. And, frankly, it feels like you're dealing with some impostor syndrome here.
Your post felt like it was weird with "bad UX is good" then positing a very good example of UX that problem solves in an appropriate way for both your client and your audience. You did an outstanding job of creating functional design, which is aesthetically pleasing, given the constraints of the web/the original art/etc. The simplicity of it all means that it is functional to both your client and your audience - I can't stress this enough.
If I were to write a post on your post it'd be entitled, "designer hits mark 100% for client/audience but isn't sure it's good design because we over-complicate UIX in 2020". Or, "Let's all stop being so pretentious because people are conflating simple functional design with bad design..." Sorry if I sound aggressive. It's just a damn good site and I refuse to even remotely label it as "bad" outside of your image optimization issue.
> Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones
You're talking to someone who browses neocities daily because it's interesting so 100% agree!
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All-in-all sorry if I was too harsh but I think you're being too harsh on yourself by writing this. As a 15 year design professional - You nailed it, and I'll be happy to crucify anyone who thinks otherwise. This is the definition of "good design". Period.
Just - whatever you do. Keep doing what you're doing - we need more people with your same design ethos out here building great tech experiences that are respectful and tasteful like your Headache Comix site. <3
Imposter syndrome. I feel it all the time as a programmer. But I don't if it's a necessarily bad state. Doesn't it matter how we relate to it? This is my view. Only if we give in, and don't try because we feel imposters it's a bad state. I am not saying it's a good state, but still - it's a state that can very productive! Well, another discussion... but it's a very interesting one.
I’d argue that the ‘bad UX’ he talks about here is good. It’s good in the sense that it fits with the theme. Just as <insert tech company here> has a modern, ‘good UX’ website, to convey that their products are cutting-edge, the ‘bad UX’ described here fits perfectly with the magazine’s theme.
Sold! I've found going for second best almost always has a superior cost-value ratio! You can eat sushi in Tokyo at Jiro's... or go to the second best place at a fraction of the cost.
Dino's definitely would not meet your cost-value expectations, they're exceedingly overpriced. They're located on a busy block of popular bars in a hip neighborhood, and they use hipster-ironic self deprecation as part of their marketing schtick, but their pricing is definitely "what the market will bear" and their quality is fairly average. If you want the second best pizza in Seattle, definitely go for the more unassuming Big Mario's.
Can you explain what you mean when you reference “the longest bar in Seattle”? I’ve been their and seen their (fairly short) bar and left a bit confused.
Their pizza may be good, but if their website exhibits all the worst features of GeoCities from way back when, they are certainly never getting any business from me.
You wouldn’t buy a vehicle made yesterday that had all the worst features of the original Ford Model T, would you?
Your analogy would perhaps make sense if there's a documented causal link between a pizzeria's shitty website and the quality of their pizza. Did I miss some ground-breaking research on the matter?
> Their pizza may be good, but if their website exhibits all the worst features of GeoCities from way back when, they are certainly never getting any business from me.
I checked out your website in the hopes of discovering this was intended as some kind of really hard to detect ironic antihumor, but it seems sincere. Buddy, you listen to Lords of Acid, the Geocities of music. Lighten up :)
I think they went a little overboard. If they dialed it back it would be a nice homage, right now it’s a callback to the worst of the worst, which is also fine because clearly that’s what they were going for. I just enjoy subtlety.
I love this kind of web design. So much more authentic and creative than "professional" design. It's a timeless design while the industry's trends for boring cookie cutter websites change constantly and nobody will remember them.
>What I mean with an anti-aesthetics, is that they wanted the design to look good but not too good. They wanted a specific sentiment for the site and this sentiment excluded 'professionality'.
The right word for it is appropriateness I think. Texture created by randomness is appropriate in this case, of the kind you find in actual comic stores that get packed with stuff organically over time. Or think of your room when you were young, it's an anti systemic human touch.
That's weird, all the links are purple yet not in my browsing history...
I guess that shows why websites shouldn't mess with standard UX things, such as having unvisited links blue (or at least something other than the 'visited link purple' colour).
A week or two ago there was a discussion here about how genius this supposedly is, or how you shouldn't waste time to fix what isn't broken, etc.
I will take this moment to repeat that it would take less than a second to make those links blue instead of purple and the design would already be infinitely more usable.
>I will take this moment to repeat that it would take less than a second to make those links blue instead of purple and the design would already be infinitely more usable.
It seems they intentionally took a second to change the default behavior and make links purple. facepalm
Using this weird syntax I didn't know was legal:
<body vlink="#ff0000" text="#000080" link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff">
Your comment just made feel really old. It took me a second to come to realize why you'd think that might be incorrect syntax. I had to read it 3 or 4 times to finally figure out why you thought there'd be a problem (there isn't one... if it's twenty years ago).
It sure would, but what's wrong with purple links? I am an occasional user of Berkshire's website (I read their letters and statements) and find it just fine.
Maybe, purple links can make a new visitor think that they have visited this site before, so potentially it increases trust in the website and the company.
> GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that provides coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles owned by more than 15 million policy holders as of 2017.
>The only difference between the Web of old and the modern Web is that the wild Web sometimes is harder do find due to the instrumentality of the Google search engine, for good and bad.
For a brief period of time, every human with an internet connection had access to a significant portion of the sum total of previously-preserved human knowledge. Web 2.5 has pushed us backwards. After several years now of being unable to easily find relevant results using Google, DDG, etc., I had the crushing realization that, near 30 and for the first time in my life, less truly useful information was available to me, to the average person, than had been before.
This should scare people. Powers that are obfuscating both their rationale and the mechanics of their means are making a play for our collective knowledge base.
Can you provide some examples of this? What types of information are you looking for? Personally I have not found this to be the case, for example I have effortlessly gained tons of information from instructional videos on YouTube that would have been much harder to obtain otherwise.
Are you saying that informational resources are being forcefully taken down? Or that their rankings are artificially lowered in search engines?
Not a direct answer to the question, but something I don't see discussed often enough: "It seems that Google is forgetting the old web" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135
search for some exotic aircrafts on google (e.g. "Polikarpov I-3", "Polikarpov Il-400") - all you will find is wikipedia, scale-model ads and the odd pinterest (which isn't usable without an account and often doesn't show what was advertised on the page). I saved some pics when I was building the scale model some years ago and I'm unable to find half of them in a google image search today after scrolling so far that google is putting in non-I-3 polikarpovs for like all pictures... Also I think there was at least one "book" on the type but I'm unable to find any in the first 10 google search pages (who does that today...). For the latter I've had "bookmarked" an altervista-blog full of pictures - it's still ranked high in pictures, but basically invisible in search.
Duckduckgo is worse, it only has wikipedia-fakes...
And after this small experiment I'm reall frightened and staring at my bookshelf for resolve, in parallel searching for the HN article where people recommend "civilization rebuilding" material...
There is a wide range of intentionally "bad" design in vogue, where "bad" may be one or more of:
- Opaque, confusing, vague or misleading
- Garish, over the top or ugly
- Ironically reminiscent of older design trends that were embraced in earnest at the time
In video games, "retro"/pixel art styles are wildly popular, sometimes because story and gameplay are more important to the creators, sometimes because it was seen as a nearly lost art.
In web design, there have been several recent waves of "retro" trends embracing the styles once found on Geocities/Angelfire or even the original Myspace. There have also been several variants of "brutalist" design with oversized and unusually placed design elements, clashing or exceedingly drab colors. Such brutalist design has been embraced even by mainstream sites like Bloomberg, and in a lot of ways the novelty has worn off and it's just part of a resurgence of design diversity across the web after a long period of uniformity.
In other GUI software, intensely oversaturated colors (like those found in iOS since its "flat" redesign) were mocked mercilessly when introduced but seem to have almost become commonplace.
Like anti-humor, anti-aesthetic is sort of an oxymoron (as TFA points out). It turns out a lot of things that seem like they would be unappealing are actually quite appealing to at least a subset of the population. I am quite fond of a lot of "brutalist" design and find intensely oversaturated colors (in balance) pleasing to look at.
- it's toyish, games got an adult tag since ps2/ps3 but to me games are games.
- it's abstract, the run for photorealism can jump over the shark too. I like to play with representations and not absolute recreation of a thing. When playing honestly, I don't even have the time to enjoy the specular reflections or whatever BDR shader you cooked. It's mostly impressive on still images.
- it makes people seek other ways to surprise you instead of relying on the usual ultra capable 3d engines that often do the same thing but different skins.
FWIW, not all pixel art is equal (and that's okay!). For some, pixel art is a means to an end—cheaper/easier to produce, focus on other aspects of game quality or time to release. For others it's very much a labor of love with plenty of time and effort dedicated to quality art.
Quality pixelart is more expensive than 3D assets. You get all angles and bone based animation from a model while you have to draw every animation frame in every angle manually with 2D approach. On top of that a 3D world brings easier customisation and reusability of assets.
Anyone anyone says 'aesthetic', I instantly feel like they don't care about usability or UX. I use reader mode most of the time on the web, for almost every page, and I've never thought that I wanted to see some flashy colors, fancy fonts, or moving/animated elements.
When I read an article, I want to get the content immediately, in a dark theme, with a readable font and size/spacing. Instead, i get 3 popups, 2 banners i can't close, a bright white background, some crap webfont, several MB of ads and social media garbage, etc.
The web has devolved from what it was without the 'flash'.
Good for you. Most people, however, care a ton about the aesthetics of a webpage. And most people don’t even know what reader mode is. Also, not sure how your second paragraph is at all related to the article.
Any citations to your claim that most people care 'a ton'? I think most people would prefer simpler stuff over the flash if they could see the benefits but i have no proof, so i won't claim it's a fact.
The reader mode note was simply to say I prefer the text only style.
The second paragraph is there because this article is talking about a simple web page, and I'm complaining that more sites don't do simple styles.
I'm not sure why you had to be so condescending about my comment, maybe you're a designer?
I like this post a lot. It’s rambly, but you can tell that the author has been mulling it over for a while and it just feels very personal. It feels like I just got a glimpse of the workings of the author’s mind.
This is a good post and it came at a perfect time. I am currently developing my own personal website. The aesthetic of this one is in the ballpark of what I am shooting for. I am also planning on including a section for writing.
I am curious thought, how do people suggest I create new articles and upload them to the webpage? Do I just write the article in html? Or should I create a form that I can submit posts through? Also, how should I store them? Should I store them as an html file or txt file in s3? I'm not too familiar with storage for blog posts. If anyone has some good site recommendations or references, I would appreciate it!
A highly relevant thing for your search is something known as the Jamstack [1].
People typically use "Static Site Generators" to create blogs which relies more on content than on fancy login flows or database connection flows. Those flows are still possible but Jamstack allows for a low bar high ceiling scenario when you are starting to build your own blog.
To compare the endless list of static site generators, what they are and how you write posts, go to StaticGen [2]. My recommendation:
- Pick "Hugo" for a great out-of-the-box experience with fair flexibility.
- Pick "Gatsby" for virtually unlimited flexibility with React-based generator.
Have a look at static site generators. I‘ve used both Hugo and Nextjs and can recommend them.
Also there is nothing wrong with just editing html directly. It is a very good starting point for many projects like personal sites and other small projects.
Having gone through this whole process myself last year, I would definitely recommend a static site generator. My site [1] is built on Jekyll [2], stored in a Github private repository and is hosted by Netlify [3] for free. The only running cost is the domain name.
Personally I didn't really enjoy setting up Jekyll since I'm not all that at home with Ruby so I would recommend looking at alternatives. Once it's set up though, it's very convenient to work with.
The Github repo is cloned locally, I write posts in markdown and then simply push to the repository. Netlify watches the repository for changes and automatically deploys whenever there's changes. It's very convenient. The compilation cost is paid upfront so the page is very fast as well. Last I checked, it scored 98-100 on all metrics in Lighthouse.
For my low-aesthetic zine (https://freezine.xyz), I just have a git repo full of html and css files i edit by hand. it's not that hard. most of the new pages start out like this:
!doctype html
<meta charset='utf-8'/>
<title> the page </title>
<style> h1 { font-weight: bold } </style>
<h1> Hello, world </h1>
<p> here's some body text </p>
I do all the writing in html, it's really not that bad. I'd start simple and only add more complicated steps if you want to. It's not that hard to add a python or node or Makefile or whatever script that takes a folder full of markdown files and creates another folder full of html files.
I should say, you probably have different goals than me, but as a full time engineer I wanted to make this site as easy as possible to work on and not get stuck fiddling around with configuration or other bullshit timewasting stuff that doesn't actually help me get my ideas out. It's extremely refreshing to work this way :)
My favourite example of bad UX that worked is MySpace profile customization.
Customizing your MySpace profile was done by pasting chunks of CSS into one of the fields on the "edit profile" page. It was an accidental "feature" because they didn't understand XSS - but they added filtering and kept it.
This is a TERRIBLE way of offering customization. But it worked, because it encouraged people to share tips. Having a custom profile became a status symbol, and friends would help each other figure out how to do it.
It occupied this weird space where a difficult flow with a desirable reslt encouraged social participation and gave people a huge sense of achievement if they could figure it out.
> They wanted a specific sentiment for the site and this sentiment excluded 'professionality'.
I think sometimes people can be less trusting of the "professionals", and instead prefer something a bit more independent.
In a previous role we'd built some flashy new landing page + initial flow designs, highly polished, to replace some pretty ugly ones. Our customers were perhaps people who'd had bad experiences with some of the big brands.
As everything at the company was very data-driven, we put the new designs live in an A/B test with the existing ones. It didn't take long to get the statistical significance to prove that the old scrappy designs converted way better.
That was an eye-opening for me; Always done A/B testing where I can since then.
You seem to be waxing lyrical about bad UX, but the UX for a webcomic just needs to be "show me the comic". And that satisfies it.
I don't think its bad. Bad is obtuse or confusing navigation, small text, links that don't look like links, and pages that take too long to load.
In fact the only bad ux i can see is the archive, which opens up an image in the same window, forcing you to use the back button, where all other navigation was via the menu.
Markdown is way easier to use for people who don't like technology. And I don't PHP. Perhaps it would've been better but I did not suffer from writing 30 lines of code. However, I guess it would be possible to still combine Markdown with PHP? But even though you are skeptical, I think most people (especially people who are not familiar with technology) prefer writing Markdown...
I do consent. It's actually about having an experience – as a user, which is why we may understand it as a user experience, intentionally a rather strong, opinionated one.
I don't think so, but perhaps you're right. UI is included in UX as one of many considerations. Depending on what consideration should be emphasized we may need strong UI, or we can solve things like I do on my blog (herebeseaswines.net) - I deliberately put "about" and the "archive" at the bottom. :) In my view aesthetics is a more problematic term. But it is very useful, in aesthetics we have arguments on we have arguments on why things are (as someone say they are). In this, we have to have many considerations. For instance, I try to justify the aesthetics of blog here: https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-21-the-aesthetics...
On this page: http://headachecomix.com/about, the image headache1big.jpg is 1584 x 2153 and has a size of 3,594,579 bytes. This takes a long time to download on a slow connection. This is definitely bad UX, but I seriously doubt it was intentional.
There’s deliberately bad aesthetic, which I don’t mind, but this is bad design because it wastes bandwidth. The image could be resized to the display size without losing its visual impact, and it would save users a lot of time.
The archive is intended to be like so by request. The idea would be caching. They count on people to clicking on all the covers. If it's this is the case or not, I don't know. But their target groups is very narrow on the other hand.
This 'argumentation' is not valid though in the case with the picture at 'about'. And that's my fault. I will fix this.
So yes, you're right. One could argue the same is true for the images at the 'about' page. But yeah...
This makes me worried as well. Even though I know this, I always tend to, at the moment, forget the limitations some countries have. China, Russia, Iran, and others.
There such tendencies, or views only (so far), in Europe where I live, that seems to think this is a good thing. Not as extreme perhaps. But like: in relation to values x, y, z the content and values a, b, c are bad and because they are bad they should be removed. And no, not speaking about things like child pornography.
The difference between liberal values in general and others is that liberal stance (interpreted very broadly) allows criticism of the liberal stance, while we know from history that totalitarian states and ideologies such as communism, fascism, and so on solve things with bans and by burning books.
I know what kind of world I want my children to get older in...
I'd rather have them interested in communism at 15 and radical. That they have the possibility to browse the Web for texts on communism than an authoritarian control saying communism (or some other ideology) is wrong and removing such sites. And the Web is best aligned with a liberal stance. I write more about my view here: https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-28-the-web-is-ama.... But I want to add - even though I've been active in the Swedish liberal movement for a while - that market economy when too far also threatens the Web.
https://lingscars.com is one of the epitomes of this sentiment. (The mobile site is very different, best to see the desktop one for the full experience.)
One of my favorite UX anecdotes is how apparently Snapchat is purposely made to be confusing to keep older people from using it. I'm not sure if it's ever been verified but anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that if that was the plan, it has worked.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] threadFrankly, looking at the site that is being discussed I would call it "good UX" for being simple and "getting out of the way" of the original artist's work (which is the point of the site anyway). I do criticize making me download 2-3Mb pictures when they should be thumbnails though - but really outside of that gaff it's a fine site.
TLDR: Going on a "bad UX" rant feels disingenuous/silly when most designers would absolutely consider this good UX for getting out of the way of the original artist's work.
But I guess I tried to make a more general point. Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated. Both in terms of technology and interface. Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional. And professional often means the quite opposite of personal. Headache Comix just want to post stuff. Actually, one comment was that they don't care if things, in the end, would be hard to find given way more content. And that the people reading the magazine expects this. No, even wants it. Like walking in a museum as they should be (in my view), paintings all of the place - not perfectly aligned, not perfect degrees and lots of whitespaces and so on. :) I don't know if this explanation helped to clarify my take here, but... yeah.
I guess this is your point also, kind'a. And thank you btw! But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then? :) Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones. That's the beauty of the Web if you ask me.
> Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated.
You're not alone in this, and good design is achieved when you can't take anything else away from something because the only components that are left are necessary to function.
> Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional.
Ain't that the darn truth =|
> But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then?
As a design-capable engineer I think you're painting with too wide of a brush in this blog post... and even against your own interests/ego. Sorry to get preachy but I love engaging people on these topics for learning.
You state: "and I am not even a designer" - but you clearly are capable of solving a visual problem in a functional way. At some level, you are now a designer. And, frankly, it feels like you're dealing with some impostor syndrome here.
Your post felt like it was weird with "bad UX is good" then positing a very good example of UX that problem solves in an appropriate way for both your client and your audience. You did an outstanding job of creating functional design, which is aesthetically pleasing, given the constraints of the web/the original art/etc. The simplicity of it all means that it is functional to both your client and your audience - I can't stress this enough.
If I were to write a post on your post it'd be entitled, "designer hits mark 100% for client/audience but isn't sure it's good design because we over-complicate UIX in 2020". Or, "Let's all stop being so pretentious because people are conflating simple functional design with bad design..." Sorry if I sound aggressive. It's just a damn good site and I refuse to even remotely label it as "bad" outside of your image optimization issue.
> Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones
You're talking to someone who browses neocities daily because it's interesting so 100% agree!
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All-in-all sorry if I was too harsh but I think you're being too harsh on yourself by writing this. As a 15 year design professional - You nailed it, and I'll be happy to crucify anyone who thinks otherwise. This is the definition of "good design". Period.
Just - whatever you do. Keep doing what you're doing - we need more people with your same design ethos out here building great tech experiences that are respectful and tasteful like your Headache Comix site. <3
PS: Fix those darn images. <3
Imposter syndrome. I feel it all the time as a programmer. But I don't if it's a necessarily bad state. Doesn't it matter how we relate to it? This is my view. Only if we give in, and don't try because we feel imposters it's a bad state. I am not saying it's a good state, but still - it's a state that can very productive! Well, another discussion... but it's a very interesting one.
I struggle with the same thing myself... SOME impostor syndrome is healthy and it sounds like you are handling it in good way =)
The menu is head and shoulders above many hamburger or drop downs on “real” sites.
The design credit tucked in the bottom links to a nice writeup on making this site, but currently has an cert error - https://www.madebyneversink.com/
Sold! I've found going for second best almost always has a superior cost-value ratio! You can eat sushi in Tokyo at Jiro's... or go to the second best place at a fraction of the cost.
https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/283188235055_/16oz-A...
There is no certificate for "www" for whatever reason.
You wouldn’t buy a vehicle made yesterday that had all the worst features of the original Ford Model T, would you?
I checked out your website in the hopes of discovering this was intended as some kind of really hard to detect ironic antihumor, but it seems sincere. Buddy, you listen to Lords of Acid, the Geocities of music. Lighten up :)
It's fast, functional, fun, obviously retro on purpose.
It's quite good actually.
I think they went a little overboard. If they dialed it back it would be a nice homage, right now it’s a callback to the worst of the worst, which is also fine because clearly that’s what they were going for. I just enjoy subtlety.
I’d argue a design that is more prone to failure is bad design. The rest is all subjective, more power to them.
[1] https://www.spacejam.com/
The right word for it is appropriateness I think. Texture created by randomness is appropriate in this case, of the kind you find in actual comic stores that get packed with stuff organically over time. Or think of your room when you were young, it's an anti systemic human touch.
I guess that shows why websites shouldn't mess with standard UX things, such as having unvisited links blue (or at least something other than the 'visited link purple' colour).
I will take this moment to repeat that it would take less than a second to make those links blue instead of purple and the design would already be infinitely more usable.
Sometimes bad ux is bad.
It seems they intentionally took a second to change the default behavior and make links purple. facepalm
Using this weird syntax I didn't know was legal: <body vlink="#ff0000" text="#000080" link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff">
They're deprecated attributes[1], but back in the 90s before CSS became meta, it was the norm.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.1
A huge problem? Maybe not, but not a sign of 'good UX'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEICO
For a brief period of time, every human with an internet connection had access to a significant portion of the sum total of previously-preserved human knowledge. Web 2.5 has pushed us backwards. After several years now of being unable to easily find relevant results using Google, DDG, etc., I had the crushing realization that, near 30 and for the first time in my life, less truly useful information was available to me, to the average person, than had been before.
This should scare people. Powers that are obfuscating both their rationale and the mechanics of their means are making a play for our collective knowledge base.
Are you saying that informational resources are being forcefully taken down? Or that their rankings are artificially lowered in search engines?
Duckduckgo is worse, it only has wikipedia-fakes...
And after this small experiment I'm reall frightened and staring at my bookshelf for resolve, in parallel searching for the HN article where people recommend "civilization rebuilding" material...
- Opaque, confusing, vague or misleading
- Garish, over the top or ugly
- Ironically reminiscent of older design trends that were embraced in earnest at the time
In video games, "retro"/pixel art styles are wildly popular, sometimes because story and gameplay are more important to the creators, sometimes because it was seen as a nearly lost art.
In web design, there have been several recent waves of "retro" trends embracing the styles once found on Geocities/Angelfire or even the original Myspace. There have also been several variants of "brutalist" design with oversized and unusually placed design elements, clashing or exceedingly drab colors. Such brutalist design has been embraced even by mainstream sites like Bloomberg, and in a lot of ways the novelty has worn off and it's just part of a resurgence of design diversity across the web after a long period of uniformity.
In other GUI software, intensely oversaturated colors (like those found in iOS since its "flat" redesign) were mocked mercilessly when introduced but seem to have almost become commonplace.
Like anti-humor, anti-aesthetic is sort of an oxymoron (as TFA points out). It turns out a lot of things that seem like they would be unappealing are actually quite appealing to at least a subset of the population. I am quite fond of a lot of "brutalist" design and find intensely oversaturated colors (in balance) pleasing to look at.
- it's toyish, games got an adult tag since ps2/ps3 but to me games are games.
- it's abstract, the run for photorealism can jump over the shark too. I like to play with representations and not absolute recreation of a thing. When playing honestly, I don't even have the time to enjoy the specular reflections or whatever BDR shader you cooked. It's mostly impressive on still images.
- it makes people seek other ways to surprise you instead of relying on the usual ultra capable 3d engines that often do the same thing but different skins.
- 3d art is technically harder (more layers to master to get to a result). Pixel art operations are indeed trivial and accessible without learning.
- good visual / animated / gaming art is hard no matter 1d, 2d or 3d. It's more an art than a technique.
When I read an article, I want to get the content immediately, in a dark theme, with a readable font and size/spacing. Instead, i get 3 popups, 2 banners i can't close, a bright white background, some crap webfont, several MB of ads and social media garbage, etc.
The web has devolved from what it was without the 'flash'.
The reader mode note was simply to say I prefer the text only style.
The second paragraph is there because this article is talking about a simple web page, and I'm complaining that more sites don't do simple styles.
I'm not sure why you had to be so condescending about my comment, maybe you're a designer?
I am curious thought, how do people suggest I create new articles and upload them to the webpage? Do I just write the article in html? Or should I create a form that I can submit posts through? Also, how should I store them? Should I store them as an html file or txt file in s3? I'm not too familiar with storage for blog posts. If anyone has some good site recommendations or references, I would appreciate it!
People typically use "Static Site Generators" to create blogs which relies more on content than on fancy login flows or database connection flows. Those flows are still possible but Jamstack allows for a low bar high ceiling scenario when you are starting to build your own blog.
To compare the endless list of static site generators, what they are and how you write posts, go to StaticGen [2]. My recommendation: - Pick "Hugo" for a great out-of-the-box experience with fair flexibility. - Pick "Gatsby" for virtually unlimited flexibility with React-based generator.
[1]: https://jamstack.org [2]: https://www.staticgen.com
Also there is nothing wrong with just editing html directly. It is a very good starting point for many projects like personal sites and other small projects.
Personally I didn't really enjoy setting up Jekyll since I'm not all that at home with Ruby so I would recommend looking at alternatives. Once it's set up though, it's very convenient to work with.
The Github repo is cloned locally, I write posts in markdown and then simply push to the repository. Netlify watches the repository for changes and automatically deploys whenever there's changes. It's very convenient. The compilation cost is paid upfront so the page is very fast as well. Last I checked, it scored 98-100 on all metrics in Lighthouse.
[1] https://www.karltarvas.com/blog/
[2] https://jekyllrb.com/
[3] https://www.netlify.com/
I should say, you probably have different goals than me, but as a full time engineer I wanted to make this site as easy as possible to work on and not get stuck fiddling around with configuration or other bullshit timewasting stuff that doesn't actually help me get my ideas out. It's extremely refreshing to work this way :)
Nothing was shared between sites, lots of cutting up pngs for link headers, cryptic navigation, all that stuff I have to avoid doing now.
It was probably the most fun I had working with a designer.
Customizing your MySpace profile was done by pasting chunks of CSS into one of the fields on the "edit profile" page. It was an accidental "feature" because they didn't understand XSS - but they added filtering and kept it.
This is a TERRIBLE way of offering customization. But it worked, because it encouraged people to share tips. Having a custom profile became a status symbol, and friends would help each other figure out how to do it.
It occupied this weird space where a difficult flow with a desirable reslt encouraged social participation and gave people a huge sense of achievement if they could figure it out.
I think sometimes people can be less trusting of the "professionals", and instead prefer something a bit more independent.
In a previous role we'd built some flashy new landing page + initial flow designs, highly polished, to replace some pretty ugly ones. Our customers were perhaps people who'd had bad experiences with some of the big brands.
As everything at the company was very data-driven, we put the new designs live in an A/B test with the existing ones. It didn't take long to get the statistical significance to prove that the old scrappy designs converted way better.
That was an eye-opening for me; Always done A/B testing where I can since then.
“Bad visual design” or “ugly”, perhaps (though I don’t think so), but User Experience is only very loosely correlated with “looking good”.
If the end result is good for the user, it’s not bad UX.
(Similarly, you can be a great graphics/web/UI designer but horrible at UX)
Indeed. A browser's reader-mode is a testament to the fact.
Kudos to them for not falling into the productivity trap of constantly changing UIs.
There’s deliberately bad aesthetic, which I don’t mind, but this is bad design because it wastes bandwidth. The image could be resized to the display size without losing its visual impact, and it would save users a lot of time.
http://headachecomix.com/archive
The archive is intended to be like so by request. The idea would be caching. They count on people to clicking on all the covers. If it's this is the case or not, I don't know. But their target groups is very narrow on the other hand.
This 'argumentation' is not valid though in the case with the picture at 'about'. And that's my fault. I will fix this.
So yes, you're right. One could argue the same is true for the images at the 'about' page. But yeah...
This is a great analogy for the web, hopefully it will remain true without succumbing to authoritarian control.
This makes me worried as well. Even though I know this, I always tend to, at the moment, forget the limitations some countries have. China, Russia, Iran, and others.
There such tendencies, or views only (so far), in Europe where I live, that seems to think this is a good thing. Not as extreme perhaps. But like: in relation to values x, y, z the content and values a, b, c are bad and because they are bad they should be removed. And no, not speaking about things like child pornography.
The difference between liberal values in general and others is that liberal stance (interpreted very broadly) allows criticism of the liberal stance, while we know from history that totalitarian states and ideologies such as communism, fascism, and so on solve things with bans and by burning books.
I know what kind of world I want my children to get older in...
I'd rather have them interested in communism at 15 and radical. That they have the possibility to browse the Web for texts on communism than an authoritarian control saying communism (or some other ideology) is wrong and removing such sites. And the Web is best aligned with a liberal stance. I write more about my view here: https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-28-the-web-is-ama.... But I want to add - even though I've been active in the Swedish liberal movement for a while - that market economy when too far also threatens the Web.