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!