[nine_k]

A closer example would be books.

For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc.

Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.

But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters.

Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.

Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.

[cabalamat]

> They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.

What happens, when, in the words of the article, you "Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility"?

The answer, it appears, is their re-design of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ which I find unusable.

[Retric]

That's shockingly bad.

The expanded view with lines between comments and their parents which scroll independently is literally the worst website UI I have ever seen. And I recall some terrible flash abominations.

[zipwitch]

The pure white screen has a certain aesthetic appeal, but the total lack of content puts it considerably below the original. (I assume this must be an intended effect, given the complete absence of error messages.)

[singingboyo]

The medium redesign is also awful. Its inability to handle my portrait-oriented monitor did trigger a sense of childish amusement (truncating POOR to POO) but it's entirely impossible to read anything using it.

[nine_k]

> Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility

That is, create a work of art (as opposed to utility). Okay, art is nice, too.

But mixing artistry and utility is quite hard. Designing a nice, livable house, or a store, is a craft. Building fancy sand castles is a (pastime) art. But mixing the fancy free-form with being actually usable by thousands takes lots of work, resources, and time, because what you'd have to build is a cathedral. (If you think modern technology makes it simple, look at the history of building the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.)

[rytill]

Actually wouldn't be terrible if the comments appeared in a more orderly fashion. Right now, they spawn randomly and can even overlap which makes it actually unreadable.

[reaperducer]

I can't imagine what they think someone with disabilities is supposed to do with that.

[cannonedhamster]

They don't care about people with disabilities. They don't even care about people without disabilities. It's not usable for people who are not differently abled.

[greenhatman]

That was a pretty hilarious experience.

[smhost]

the day/night button on the bottom right is genius satire

[Retr0spectrum]

The "redesign" is a joke, right?

[greendestiny_re]

Only an artist could come up with this: http://prntscr.com/lgk7x0

[booleandilemma]

Is this brutalist design?

[anthk]

No, brutalist is HN, lobste.rs or the Oreilly CD Bookshelf. Or any Unix CS guide with those square Motif-like buttons.

[polynomial]

That site could induce a seizure in David Parsons.

[mrob]

Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven, the line ends become harder to distinguish, and more words are broken by hyphens. But it's higher status because when all books were hand-written it took more skill to produce.

Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).

[mdpopescu]

Huh. I always thought non-justified text existed because people are lazy; I absolutely consider fully justified text to be easier to read, not harder. Non-justified text is distracting.

[bunderbunder]

I'm sure it varies from person to person. I believe, though, the bulk of the studies have found that, while people generally find justified text to look nicer, reading speed and comprehension tend to suffer for it.

[xapata]

Same for contrast. If you're not actually trying to read, low-contrast is more appealing. Thus, the CEO who has read their marketing blurb a thousand times likes low-contrast, even though it's counter-productive.

[chiefalchemist]

> "I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens)."

Perhaps. But I always presumed the good eyes, good screen, and lack of empathy belonged to the designer. These same site too often seem to have experiences based on an ultra-fast connection, as opposed to a wonky 4G (at best) connection.

You might be right. But I've sat in meetings and/or shared office space with low-UX-IQ designer / frontend types.

[discreteevent]

I think the low contrast thing is simply a symptom of a general trend twoards form over function, which though it may seem cool, in the end turns out to be cheap. Its the equivalent of putting dark plastic tint on your car windows. It happens in a lot of fields. The truth is most people don't know what they are doing (and we all didn't know what we were doing at one point).

[nine_k]

I don't see why is this downvoted. This is quite valid.

Fortunately extensions like Stylus allow to tweak page styles to make them more usable.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven

That should barely be the case with a good layout and hyphenation algorithm (or a competent printer in the old days). What word processing software does is not necessarily the best possible way to produce an even justified layout.

[blancheneige]

> For ~500 years, books look approximately the same

I think you can even go back as far as 1000 years to find those same standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule

[dingaling]

Yet most books have awful spines that prevent the pages lying flat when open. Not because it's useful or logical but because it's cheap and easy for the publisher.

[r00dY]

> Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.

True, but print media formats got even more simplified in web. The reason? Responsiveness constraints.

Many times I've seen great advanced "article-like" designs for desktop from ambitious designers. It turned out that making them easy to manage in CMS, stable in all possible combinations (or implementing good validators) and at the same time logical and good looking on mobile was extremely hard and not worth it.

This led to further simplifications...

... and then Medium looks like Medium.

There's not much place for creativity on mobile. And this is where most of the "fast content" is read.