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Subjectifying Stupidity

Sarai: ‘Sup y’all?

Seems like Jem’s recent article on justified text inspired some people to post their own thoughts on the matter.

Too bad they bring epic phail, both in the original post, the post following right after and even the comments.

Now that’s hard to achieve, people.

Becky: Is it ever! I give her an A for effort though, it looks like she really tried.

So, I went to her site to check out the alleged readability of her text; as I suspected, single-spaced left aligned 8 point Verdana, black on white; the ultimate “look at me I’m accessible!” option.

Sarai: Because that’s so lame. Accessibility for the lose, y’all.

Becky: Excuse me while I go change all my sites to 7pt Georgia, cause you ain’t there until you use print units for the web!

Sarai: You better not.

Becky: Aww c’mon!

Sarai:

I’m just going to come right out and say it; if everyone on the internet decided to format their text as 40em wide 10pt black-on-white Verdana with 1.5 line-height and 2em margins I would cry. Because – c’mon people – that’s so fucking boring.

Oh yeah, just because of Jem’s article people are going to go make their fonts all the same. Just give it time people!

Becky: And if everyone thought like you the internet would be a boring, illegible place.

We’re back onto my old bugbear here of aesthetics versus ‘accessibility’ and, as you can probably tell, I’m more in the aesthetics camp. To be perfectly frank, I think a lot of the harping that goes on about what does and doesn’t improve readability is a bit of a shield people hide behind to excuse what are essentially boring design choices.

Because this is the web and not, oh lets say, a poster, you have to put functionality ahead of aesthetics because the internet is about information. We go on the internet to find information and if the internet is full of artsy-fartsy, inaccessible designs then the vast majority of us are screwed.

You can sit there and say that you do it for yourself all you want, but the fact of the matter is you have a website on the internet so you can bring attention to yourself. It’s for the visitors, not just yourself. By providing an unpleasant viewing experience, where the people have trouble accessing content, you’re driving away visitors. You are perfectly entitled to do that, it is your website, but you’re touting these claims of justified text being superior like everyone should do it when they shouldn’t. Justified text is not a good idea for the web.

Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design.
Differences Between Print Design and Web Design

Sarai: Or maybe, just maybe, they think past their designs and to the real heart of the matter: making it easily accessible for their readers to access their content. Which is the entire point. If you want to be Ms. Artist, by all means open up a portfolio.

Yeah, we can all take the safe route; but do we always want to? I mean sure, if what you’re going for is 100% readability 100% of the time then by all means, go ahead, but I don’t necessarily think that this choice is any more justified (a-har!) in the context of personal websites than the designer who is prepared to shave a bit of accessibility off the edge in order to present text in a way that is more aesthetic.

Gasp. Do you really want to cater to your visitors?! Fuck no! Throw accessibility out the window! No one really cares about that! And if they can’t read the text, then duh, they can increase the font in their browsers and adjust their monitors. I mean, if they took the time, that is. And why wouldn’t they?! I have super kewl header that I made with aesthetics in mind becuz I’m a real artist.

I’ll break it down nice and easy for you: A real designer knows about typography. The target market is us, your visitors, not your own personal preference.

Obviously Dee prefers to be “artistic” (and that is very subjective) as opposed to accessible, and even legible. Unfortunately for us.

Becky: The safe route is, in my opinion and the opinion of most, usually the best route. Sure McDonald’s could do something crazy and have high barstools instead of chairs at all their tables. But it’d present a problem for the elderly and small children (not to mention the disabled and ill). Chapters could go ahead and hang their bookcases from the ceiling, I bet it’d look neat, but it’d present a major problem when people go to get books off the shelves. The “safe route” is keeping the chairs, well, chairs and the bookcases on the ground. Why sacrifice safety for aesthetics? Why sacrifice legibility for aesthetics?

I do agree, however, that you need to experiment and break free of the shackles of whatever the hell it is you’re trying to break free of. But to sacrifice usability for design? No, to sacrifice usability for crappy design (remember, my opinion is right!) is beyond stupid. There are some things in life where you just have to take the safe route. You don’t substitute salt for sugar in a baking recipe, nor should you substitute legibility for something you think is purdy [sic].

Hey Sarai, can you read the footer without highlighting it?

Sarai: The footer? Good god no, it’s hard.

Becky: And that picture in the header wtf is that? Some sort of dead furry? With an eye missing!?!? The hell, that’s going to give me nightmares tonight.

Sarai: Becky, that would be the artistic version of a Sasquatch. Get with the program, please.

I mean, if you’re designing on a proper semantic model your choices can all be over-ridden anyway if people have a real problem with them, so why not go for what you personally love? It’s your site, after all; all that 10pt left-aligned Verdana tells me about you is that you unquestioningly believe everything you read on A List Apart.

What the fuck is this supposed to mean?!

Becky: Sasquatch hmm… I bet we could make a lot of money off of that! Gimme mah shotgun, Ma! I’m goin’ huntin’ bare, hyuck.

I believe she means that you can use stylish or user styles to override certain things. However, if you do it for one site, in the case of user styles, then it affects all sites. Stylish is the best option, but it’s Firefox only. She does provide a bookmarklet to justify/unjustify text. I still say it’s up to the site owner to provide a legible viewing experience for the visitor.

Sarai: I’d also like to point out that Alistapart’s credibility is not up for debate, and it is not subjective, sorry to inform you.

Becky: She’s being very presumptuous in assuming that regular people browsing the internet for fun will know how to set the font-size, line-height and font-family to what is best for them. I doubt most people even know what a font-family is!

Sarai: People shouldn’t have to, that’s the thing. You are catering to your visitors, not your personal preference, for fuck’s sake. The point is to fix it beforehand so that people won’t have to go out of their way to read your website.

Becky: It’s like telling people they can resize your 10px text if they want to. No they can’t unless they’re using Firefox! You own the site, you cater to us. If you don’t cater to us then we will go to someone who does, then where will you be? You might as well just leave your site on your hard-drive and comment on your entries yourself, it’s no fun without visitors.

Sarai: And who the hell told her that Century Gothic was oh so aesthetic? It’s a print font, it only looks good when it’s anti-aliased. I personally find it quite ugly, but hey, it’s all subjective.

Sure, on average people find 10pt Verdana easier to read than 7pt Verdana; so what? And the thing is, I don’t necessarily think it’s as simple as all that.

IT IS. It is as simple as that. If an overwhelming majority of people find it easier to read (and this is a fact, look it up), then by all means, CATER TO THEIR NEEDS. Why go against what’s proven!? Why go out of your way to make it harder for others? Because you want it to look pretty according to your own preferences?! Give me a fucking break.

Becky: Because it’s better to take the dangerous route that sacrifices legibility for aesthetics. Duh! She’s obviously going to do what looks good for her and the rest of us be damned. And you know she’s right and we’re wrong, that’s the air I get from her entire post. Did you see how she flipped out on Jordan for seemingly no reason?

Sarai: While reading some of these lines my eyes do have a hard time jumping the spaces. It’s not like I’m making it up. When reading magazines, I don’t have the same problem because although the columns are narrow and the text is justified, they fit as much text as they can, so there aren’t any white spaces. They also use hyphens to break up words that otherwise would mess up the flow. It’s not the same while reading your blog. Oh and their font size is easy to read and legible. It’s also well contrasted.

Factors Contributing to Text Readability (A List)

• Font Face
• Text Size
• Contrast
• Words Per Line
• Line Height
• Margins
• Alignment

Hmm… this all sounds familiar. Actually, I think I read this on A List Apart. Huh. Strange.

Becky: I lose my line all the time because of justified text and yes I’m referring to print. Magazines, books, signs… it doesn’t matter, I find it hard to read and I’m pretty sure the majority is with me.

The ragged edge text provides me with a visual clue as to where I left off. “Oh I left off on the longest line.” It’s just so much easier to read left-aligned text.

Sarai: Dee is so delusional. If Verdana is not so aesthetically pleasing, why is it used so much in graphic projects? It must be doing something right.

Plus, I love how she has Verdana in a list up there and it looks SUPER nice and then you come down to the not-so-smooth all-too-small century gothic (for me, at least).

Becky: I’m sure everyone uses Verdana, not for its pleasing, legible appearance, but for the sole fact that everyone else uses it. People are such sheep, damn them for having the same font face.

Of course, it’s not just in the text is it? You can have an artsy-fartsy website complete with Verdana and left-aligned text and still stand out from the crowd. If you’re concentrating solely on one element, then yes, your website will greatly resemble others and become boring. Whilst I think typography plays an important role in the web, making it the end all be all “my site is going to look like everyone else’s if I use a legible typeface” is just plain retarded (and that’s a fact!).

As for using pt for the web, well let’s see what the W3 has to say about it:

Do not specify the font-size in pt, or other absolute length units for screen stylesheets. They render inconsistently across platforms and can’t be resized by the User Agent (e.g browser). Keep the usage of such units for styling on media with fixed and known physical properties (e.g print).
Care With Font Size

You should size everything with percentages and em’s, not pt. I suppose though that if people want to resize her text they can just switch their browser and be done with it. Nice mindset she has there.

Century Gothic is so ugly.

Sarai: It is ugly and I’m not just saying that to be mean. Should we even discuss the comments? I think we should because that just makes me sad.

First commenter:

Then again, I was once told password-protecting my blog was completely unnecessary, as it was so godawfully contrasted (yay, neon green on black!) that nobody really could read it in the first place.
HAHA SORRY SUCKERS READERS.

I’d like to take the time to personally give props to the genius that passed on this advice.

Yeah. It gets quite depressing. I mean, okay, a lot of these sites look nice but they don’t look… spectacular. They’re functional designs rather than works of art.

Leave the works of art for print designs or even nice graphic designs. You don’t have to make your font be an art as well, good christ. That’s commenter #2, by the way.

Becky: Yeah let’s, just for a second. Why the hell would you put up something “arty” on the web? The web is about sharing information and communicating with other people. It’s pretty hard to share and communicate when people are too distracted by some arty shit that detracts from the important thing: the content.

If I want to see a work of art I’ll go to an art gallery. When I want useful information, presented in a functional way I’ll go to the web.

Sarai: Credibility gone right out the window, Dee:

In the first part of her comment she’s presenting information as ‘facts’ and – let’s face it – it’s Jordan we’re talking about here; the kid who tries so hard to be the biggest, baddest bitch on the block it sometimes seems like she’s forgotten how to be anything else.

You are oh so mature.

Becky: I wonder why she’s so hostile. I vaguely remember the thread I think she’s talking about, it’s nothing really bad. So why get so defensive?

Sarai: Because her little feelings were hurt, and ultimately, she feels the need to lash out and include Jordan’s name in every response. Somehow, that makes it better, you see.

Becky: E-feelings my ass, she’s acting like a baby. Grow the fuck up and maybe I’ll start considering your viewpoint. Actually no I won’t because your viewpoint is presumptuous and almost complete bullshit (and since that is my opinion, and according to you personal opinion is never wrong, then I must be right both factually(sp) and opinionatedly [totally made that up]).

Sarai: This entry should be titled “Well It Works For Me, So Nar”. The point she’s bringing up is moot. She’s choosing aesthetics over accessibility and it’s bullshit. Unfortunately, the fonts she’d use to be “aesthetically pleasing” were made for print designs. Not for the web. And I’m sure many graphic designers would agree. It’s Typography 101.

Becky: I suppose that’s why she uses print. The print unit is not for the web. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF? The two are so very different and they are both read differently. See above for my little rant on that.

Sarai: And they look different when printed as well. For example, on my screen her Century Gothic looks choppy and small, but if I were to print it in Photoshop on a really good dpi resolution, it would look nice, smooth, and readable.

Becky: Oh but Sarai, it looks prettyful to her so nar.

If I find the presentation of text aesthetically pleasing, I’m more likely to try reading it than if it’s simply boringly functional (because I am vain like that).

I’d much rather read boringly functional column of text than try to wade through a forest of 8pt Century Gothic and Lucinda Grande.

Sarai: I agree, and so would most of the internet.

“Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design. There are so many differences between the two media that it is necessary to take different design approaches to utilize the strengths of each medium and minimize its weaknesses.”
Differences Between Print Design and Web Design

I found this quote interesting. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, I’m afraid. Not on the internet anyway, where there are so many factors that come into play (monitor sizes, screen resolutions, brightness/contrast of people’s monitors, browsers, etc). That is why you work with what’s already been proven to be correct.

“Web design is impoverished because too many sites strive for the wrong standards of excellence that made sense in the print world but do not make sufficient advances in interactivity.”

Like aesthetic fonts? What a crazy concept.

Becky: Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference between a really crappy layout and a really good one. But a good layout doesn’t rely on a bunch of fancy images or flash. A good layout provides something nice to look at, but is second to the content, that’s the way it has always been and that’s the way it’s going to stay. We’re all here to get information and we want it in a way we can actually access it, most of us don’t care about whether or not you have a bunch of fancy shit floating around your webpage making you feel artsy. We just care about getting what we want and getting it in the way we want it.

We should probably say something about the reviews, eh? We’ve pretty much got it down to two candidates, we don’t want to tell you who it is yet.

Sarai: We want to pick the one person who we feel we can give more pointers to. Or the person who needs the most improvement.

Man, what a sucky sentence.

Becky: We don’t want to do anyone who is going to ignore our advice and dismiss it as completely bogus.

Sarai: We would really really like it if more people would submit.

Becky: If not, well, you won’t find out what Sarai looks like nude. Sorry!

Sarai: Wait, what?!

Becky: Yeah okay I’m done. G’bye everynone!

References used for this article:

• Five simple steps to better typography.
• “Nor should web developers who aspire to professionalism leave the typographical details of their sites incomplete and unconsidered.” Typography Matters.
• Web Design is 95% Typography.
• “Don’t tell us to adjust the font size. We don’t want to change our browser settings every time we visit a website!” – The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard.
• Web typography guide.
• Justified Text Versus Ragged-Right Text.
• “You might be thinking, ‘I can read it, so whats the problem’. Good for you, you either sit too close to your screen or you have excellent eyesight. Jakob Nielson has ran plenty of studies on Web Usability, and guess what the all time number 1 problem people have is? Legibility.” – What the large font giveth, the small font taketh away.
• Web Typography
• A List Apart.
• The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard
• Web Accessibility: ‘Is justified text, err… justified?’

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