Design, Typography, and the Like

The Case Against Gill Sans  →

Josh Farmer:

Many people adore the Gill Sans family. It has its own significant following amongst professionals in the know, and, due to its ubiquity there, it is called the Helvetica of England. This quintessential “British typeface” can seem straightforward and frank but still has an inherent warmth due to the humanist touches throughout. The choice of spurless forms (e.g., b, d, p, q) adds only more to the humanist feel.

But I am not a fan of Gill Sans. So much so, in fact, I have disabled it on my computer.

The Case Against Gill Sans

Typekit  →

Many thanks to Typekit for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. As a matter of fact I decided to sign up for a Typekit account about two weeks ago. (They didn’t give me any sort of deal — I paid for it myself with my own money.)

Before I signed up for Typekit I had a few preconceived notions about it. That: (a) installing Typekit would be difficult; (b) using Typekit would slow my site down; and (c) I had no need for custom typefaces for the sake of branding my site.

However, since Typekit offers a free 30-day trial I decided to give it a shot. It was one of those evenings where you feel like hacking away on some code, and I figured it’d be a chance to have fun and educate myself on precisely how Typekit actually works. Well, I learned that all three of my assumptions about Typekit were wrong.

For one, Typekit was incredibly easy to set up. I simply picked out the header and body fonts I wanted to use, added them to my “kit”, put some javascript code into my site’s header and then changed what typefaces are first in my CSS file’s font stack.

Secondly, my “kit” only weighs in at 196K, or about the size of a few screenshots. I’ve noticed no lag or issues with the loading of the site.

And Thirdly, the branding issue: Yes the typefaces I’m using are unique, but more importantly is that I find the site more readable than it was before. I used to use Lucida Grande as my body font. It was too small at 12px and at 13px it starts looking ugly. Now I use Gesta which is very open and has a generous x-height. It looks great on the screen and I think make the site very readable.

Typekit

Previous Entries

On the homepage of a weblog, when you’ve scrolled to the bottom of the recent posts displayed but before you get to the footer, what should you see?

Most commonly you’ll find a link for “previous entries” or “older entries”. A link that takes you to Page 2 of the site. And page 2 is always the same format as the homepage.

There are some unique dynamics to weblog design. You’re designing for three groups of people:

  • Regular readers who check in daily, or near daily
  • Familiar readers who check in occasionally
  • New visitors

Regular readers tend to hang out at the top of the site or in the RSS feed. Since they are tracking with the weblog they are up to date with what’s been written lately. In fact, many regular readers may not even visit the site and read only from their feed reader.

Familiar readers who check in occasionally are likely to only peruse and read what’s on the homepage. They come to the site, look to see what’s new that they haven’t seen since last time, and then move on.

New readers are actually most likely showing up for the first time onto a permalink page because they got to your site via a link or a search result to something specific. From there, if they like what they’ve read, they’re likely to read more articles or click to the home page and see what is happening.

And so, when someone (who is most likely a new visitor) has scrolled to the bottom of the recent posts on the homepage, before they get to the footer what should they see?

Is a link to Page 2 the best option? I don’t know; the advantages and disadvantages vary based on the site.

Advantages of having a link to Page 2:

  • It’s conventional: Lots and lots of sites use it.
  • It’s familiar: Because it’s conventional.
  • It’s simple: There is only one option: If you want more, click here. If not, see you later alligator.
  • You stay in the same context: The format of page 2 is the same as page 1 which means the reader is not changing contexts from reading to lists to reading again.

Disadvantages of having a link to Page 2:

  • On this site I post dozens of links to every one article. If someone is scrolling through page by page it means they are primarily scrolling through lists of links. And while that’s cool, links are not the premier feature of this site. Though they are the most common type of post, they’re not the most valuable.

  • Some of the work I am most proud of may not have been in the past few weeks or even months. Someone browsing page by page may never get to what I am most proud of.

What Others are Doing

I wanted to see how other weblogs handle pagination navigation. I took screenshots of the bottom of the homepage of 31 different weblogs to compare how they’ve implemented pagination navigation, if they’ve implemented it at all.

I chose sites that are run as a traditional blog, meaning the most recent posts are at the top of the page and usually where several posts are shown at once. I also chose sites that are published by people who (most likely) have thought through this sort of thing for their site.

Of the 31 sites, 19 had some sort of “older entries” style pagination navigation and 12 had something else.

Weblogs with pagination navigation: Kottke.org, Jason Santa Maria, TechCrunch, Jeffery Zeldman’s Daily Report, dooce, Seth Godin, Andy Ihnatko, 43 Folders, Cameron Moll, Panic Blog, Liz Danzico, The Hickensian, Simplebits, The Brooks Review, I Love Typography, swissmiss, This is my next…, Waxy.org, and 37signals.

Weblogs with something other than pagination navigation:

Trying Something New

Since the inception of this site I’ve had the common link to Page 2. I am now testing something new here: I replaced the link to Page 2 with links to recent articles, interviews, and reviews instead. I’ve also increased the number of articles and links that appear on the home page to 25 total.

The goal is to offer the best choice for the reader, based on what I, as the publisher of my site, consider to be the most valuable. Is a link to Page 2 the best way for a reader to continue exploring my site, or would they be better served by discovering the articles I’ve written and am most proud of? 1

Honestly, I’m not sure yet. Though I do think that if I only ever wrote articles it may be a different answer.

  1. Some readers have written in to suggest that I offer a link to Page 2 as well as a link to recent articles, reviews, and interviews. I somewhat like this idea, but my biggest hesitancy is that it may present too many options. When a user is presented with too many choices they will likely chose none. In fact, I already am feeling like having 3 links at the bottom of the page is too many. But at least they are 3 links of the same type. ↵
Previous Entries

Nick Schaden on iOS App Design  →

I agree with Nick in that many of my most-used and most-beloved iPhone and iPad apps are the ones which look and feel like they were made by Apple. A good rule of thumb is, when in doubt, use the same UI design found in Apple’s native apps. If you are going to do something custom then have a good reason why and do it better than Apple would do it.

See also this article from Marco Arment on optimal iPhone UI.

Nick Schaden on iOS App Design

Austin Kleon on “Farming”

Last week Austin Kleon posted an article titled, “How to Steal Like an Artist (An 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)”. There are things you read where you learn something new, and there are the things you read which shed a new light on what you already know and believe in. For me Austin’s article is the latter. And it is one of the best things I have read all week.

However, keeping with the Wil Shipley analogy of farming vs. mining, a better title for Austin’s article would be something along the lines of “How to Be a Farmer.” Because Austin primarily discusses getting off your butt, ignoring your doubts and insecurities, and doing the work you love to do.

As I was reading it I was getting all sorts of little lightbulbs and connections going off in my mind. Here are a few of those items:

You see, there are those who look at a building a website (or a software program, or a business, or fill in the blank) as a way to make money. The project is simply a means to an end, and that end goal is bucketloads of money.

And then there are those who look at building something because they want to do what they love. And for them money is a tool. Instead of money being the end goal, money becomes the means to a goal — and that goal is doing things they love and creating something they’re proud of.

Austin Kleon on “Farming”

Designing the Terminal and More in ‘Tron: Legacy’  →

One of the visual effects artists who worked on Tron: Legacy:

I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded “equations” is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you).

Designing the Terminal and More in ‘Tron: Legacy’

Method & Craft  →

A brand-new, beautiful, content-rich website for creative professionals. It was an idea hatched by Phil Coffman, and it’s a site that shares some of the very fabric of the DNA here at shawnblanc.net. Meaning, Method & Craft is all about the who, what, and why of the creative process. Needless to say this site is fresh and fantastic and the world is a better place for it.

Method & Craft