One design bit I would change here is the monospaced fonts. I realize that monospace signals that this is a "coder's" site, but I find it hard to read. I don't even use monospaced fonts when I write code, as I prefer the readability of proportional fonts.

As a quick test, I changed the font to Arial, removed some of the bold and italics, and reduced some of the font sizes. (I like big fonts, but you don't need as large a font size in a proportional font. And there is probably a better font than Arial, it was just the first one that came to mind. )

Much easier on my eyes this way.

One proposal regarding utilitarian design: As this already uses old school blue links, it would be nice to also have visited links in purple. Like in the olden days :) Makes a collection of links much more useful.

Isn't that the kind of thing that that simply requires not to actively break it? I.e. dropping some CSS should restore that behaviour.

(Assuming it still works. I can't remember when was the last time I saw a site not redefining link styles completely.)

I feel like it needs to be stated that not all of us engineers have the same brutalistic taste in design.

It's not about brutalism. It's like that "make it, make it good, make it fast" adage for optimization, for design it should be - "make it, make it good (for the job it's supposed to do), then make it pretty". Alas, I see the trend is to start with "make it pretty" and then often not even continue to "make it" part.

I don't think there's anything wrong, per se, with the styling as-is on the site. It's clean and it works. That said, a few typographic tweaks (increased font size and spacing between items, introduction of a scale and vertical rhythm, etc.) could improve readability a bit without introducing unnecessary clutter or impacting performance. That's especially true with a monospace typeface.

In any case, there shouldn't be a dichotomy between "make it pretty" (however you want to define "pretty" for a project) and "make it good." If a designer is creating that dichotomy, they're doing something drastically wrong. That's true for any project, IMO.

I like the site and the idea of it, so I took ~15-20 minutes and threw together a simple user style for my own use that keeps to the site's overall aesthetic while adjusting for readability a bit.[0] As the screenshot shows, the changes are mostly just typography tweaks with the biggest change being a dark design (though that's mainly just personal preference). I'd still check the site without the changes, but I do think they help a bit.

0. https://gist.github.com/bluestrike2/59ffb7796a8d48575c28ceb1...

"Make it" without "make it pretty" leads to things that are raw and unadorned; French for raw is brut; the design school-of-thought based on rawness (no design is still a design) is called brutalism; you just described it perfectly; thank you and good night.

Hm. Fair enough. I guess I still had in mind the recent "brutalism on web" articles that showed stuff which really had nothing to do with actual brutalism-the-architectural-style.

Anyway, I was only arguing priorities.

Yeah getting it to work and do something seems to be surprisingly low on the priority list for some people!