[valtron]

When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself.

Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a Google page. Does anyone know which one? I really want to know what difference the 3px makes!

[DanBC]

Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc?

Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.

[valtron]

No, but I just checked a few of the sites we made and none break from ctrl+ (regarding this: I've never seen a non-tech person, i.e. 99% of traffic for the sites, use shortcuts in the first place); they also look consistent between _modern_ browsers; and how often do people load their own fonts? Is the designer responsible that a site becomes unusable under Wingdings? (Sorry for the strawman.)

That being said, when a designer says things like "move this button 3px to the left" they usually mean things like "move this button so its right edge aligns with the right edge of the content below, which got shifted because we added padding-right." So the original request gets implemented as what he _wants_ rather than what he asked for.

[chimeracoder]

> Is the designer responsible that a site becomes unusable under Wingdings? (Sorry for the strawman.)

Rather than apologize for making a strawman, how about we not make one in the first place? Nobody's talking about dingbat fonts from the 90s - GP is talking about usability today.

> No, but I just checked a few of the sites we made and none break from ctrl+

I'm glad your team has thought ahead, but I can assure you that many have not.

I can't count the number of sites that I've seen that would be completely unusable for people reliant solely on mobile devices (used as primary computing devices in the developing world), for people who rely on screen readers (blind and otherwise disabled people exist too!) - I could go on and on.

The common rebuttal I hear to this is that "the average user doesn't care about this", and the website isn't designed for "edge cases", which always makes me cringe. The wheelchair ramp at your storefront may not be used by your "average" customer, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have one, even if the law didn't require you to[0].

Amusingly, in many cases, the sites that are the best-suited for a range of devices (desktops, tablets, phones) and clients[1] are the ones that look like they stepped out of the late 1990s.

[0] http://www.adawheelchairramps.com/modular_ramps/ada_modular_...

[1] Take a minute and check if your site works in Lynx. If not, there's a very good chance your site is inaccessible to visually impaired people (yes, Lynx and similar browsers are still used by people with disabilities today!).

[Chris_Newton]

Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc?

Why would either of those things be a problem? Attention to detail is attention to detail at any scale.

It’s true that at scales smaller than anyone would normally notice there can be a difference between a clean optical alignment and a “perfect” mathematical one. This is a challenge that folks like font designers and artists working on icons often have to face. If you zoom in dramatically (say 5x or 10x, not 120%), these details would probably look slightly off.

However, at the kind of scale we’re using for examples here, zooming in will only exaggerate careless flaws like having things misaligned by a pixel or using the same border-radius for nested elements where concentricity of the rounded corners was intended. A well designed page will continue to look clean and tidy at larger scales, and it won’t mysteriously break just because someone zoomed or had different font preferences.

[the_hangman]

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the zoom functions on web browsers, but zooming in on many web pages can easily destroy the design. This is especially true when using a lot of media queries in your CSS and when using absolute units to position and size elements in your CSS (e.g. using px's for your base font size instead of em's or %).

[Chris_Newton]

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the zoom functions on web browsers

I’m a professional software and web developer, and I currently build web-based user interfaces for a living.

but zooming in on many web pages can easily destroy the design

Sorry, but that’s simply not true if you have any idea at all what you’re doing. The tools to support designs that follow the original intent but are flexible enough not to break just because someone has different default fonts or zoom levels have been around for many years, they still work as well as they ever did, and they are entirely compatible with the more adaptive/responsive designs we often use today.

(e.g. using px's for your base font size instead of em's or %)

These days, it’s more likely to be the other way around IME.

Too many people still rely on received wisdom from the days when browser zooming didn’t adjust the whole page, as all major browsers now do. The original arguments for avoiding px-based font sizes were about allowing users to configure their preferred size in their browser preferences and have web sites respect it instead of overriding it. Today the default font specified by most sites is larger than it used to be (a good thing, up to a point) and if that doesn’t fit the user’s needs then every modern browser will scale it up when the page is zoomed.

Too many people are also making trendy design decisions under the banner of “mobile first” that result in a poor user experience on desktop/laptop systems (or even, ironically, on tablets). Consequently, we get silly things like specifying 30px thin fonts and main page widths/margins as percentages with no other limits, which probably look awesome on the designer’s chosen development device(s) but unfortunately look terrible and can’t be fixed using the usual browser adjustments on much larger and/or smaller screens.

[gagaga]

>Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.

What does this mean?

[fibbery]

I don't understand how "some designers don't handle edge cases" translates into "we shouldn't have designers".

[timothya]

I couldn't find a page that looks exactly like the screenshot, but the Google Scholar page is pretty similar: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=search

Then again, this article is from Google Ventures, so maybe they are just using internal design resources.