Sketch notes on ‘Designing for Continuity’ →
There’s taking notes at a typography lecture, and then there’s
drawing notes. Really cool looking work, along with some useful design pointers by designer Oliver Reichenstein (iAWriter)
There’s taking notes at a typography lecture, and then there’s
drawing notes. Really cool looking work, along with some useful design pointers by designer Oliver Reichenstein (iAWriter)
Scanning through the rather gorgeous Gdgt redesign this week, I was impressed with its change in typography. The site uses Proxima Nova for its paragraph text, almost uniformly well above 12px, making reading comments and reactions on the site?s many gadgets easier to browse through. A bump in size also opens more opportunities for sizing variety within a single page, ranging from smaller 10px text for secondary sidebar information to large 16px text reserved for primary questions and notices. Overall, the typographic changes should deliver better usability and most likely generate far higher traffic.
Gdgt?s typographic change illustrates an important web design lesson: To improve the impact and readability of a text or information heavy web site, experiment with increasing the body text slightly. Try to move up from the common 10 to 12 pixel range to something larger, like 14 or 16px. It?s a practice many well designed sites are latching onto, especially in light of higher resolution displays and custom web fonts.
After months of planning, Gawker Media’s massive redesign was released to the public a week ago. Founder Nick Denton declared the changes to be “an evolution of the very blog form”, strong words from the influential entrepreneur.
In response I took a closer look, and after a week of heavy use across several of Gawker Media’s sites (Kotaku, Gizmodo and Lifehacker) I’ve concluded the redesign is a disaster: Gawker takes a shockingly old media approach to a very new media subject matter, largely ignoring the browse and scroll-heavy tendencies of web users in a desperate grab for page views and ad buys. If this is the solution, in Denton’s words, to “the bankruptcy of the classic blog column”, I shudder for web journalism’s future.
Below, a more thorough breakdown of my four largest problems with Gawker’s redesign.
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