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by ralusek 1936 days ago
I'm so sick of this ironic brutalist web design. That HTML blue. It's so frequently paired with that gross salmon color.
5 comments

I'm fine with brutalist web design, what I can't stand is low font-weights and small font sizes, like assuming all of your readers are on a 4K screen with the eyes of a 20 year old.

On a more substantive note, this looks really neat. However, as a data scientist of sorts I've found that what people really want is not some sort of interactive 3D visualization, but a well-computed chart showing a sort of natural experiment (e.g. the results of an A/B test) with the right axes. Has anyone used a 3D visualization outside of tech demos? I guess the NYTimes has some neat stuff that's useful.

Even just directly on white, I find that Blue to be far too powerful. On that salmon, it's horrid.

Combined with the fonts and font sizes, it's rather hard to enjoy the site.

I have not thought about the irony of “HTML blue” before, but I am not a fan of its use, nor that inner-nostril shade of pink (please don’t insult salmon by calling the color that). I love Space Mono/Grotesk and I don't understand why they chose Space Mono as the body type, when it has a lower x-height and lower weight. They were already using Space Grotesk to begin with for headings and else where (albeit sparingly/unpredictably)...strange.

All of this has nothing to do with the software, which looks really interesting and may be quite successful in the future. But it's worth noting and there's nothing wrong with pointing these things out. ralusek's post should not be so grey.

I’m certain that I saw similar stuff on Bloomberg well before that. But yeah it’s been a thing for a while.
I personally like seeing it because it’s still not as pervasive as a lot of design trends and feels like there’s still some variety on the web. But I pain for anyone struggling with the accessibility of these designs.