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Re:Design of This Website (2021) by hypertele-Xii on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @04:24AM (#30929764)
Black, white, magenta, and orange.

That's a lot to you? It's very few to me.

Re:Design of This Website (2021) by chanc3e on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @06:31AM (#30930472)
Yourself and Gwern both need to learn how typography works before you declare yourselves arbiters of digital design.

On the plus side, your site is friendly in reader view.

• Never justify text in digital • Never right align long form in digital • Both need to learn balance between type size and line height

Re:Design of This Website (2021) by creata on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @07:01AM (#30930679)
From the article, it looks like Gwern, at least, thought quite a lot about text justification --- see the "Abandoned" section --- so the "learn how typography works" comment seems a bit unfair.
Re:Design of This Website (2021) by chanc3e on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @08:52AM (#30931411)
Agreed. I should have said ‘understand’.

My point being that applying rules learnt from hundreds of years of literary culture and printing do not 1:1 translate into digital.

Justified copy is as much about saving paper as it is about any formality/legibility. It really has no place in long form digital space where space is infinite.

Type designers like consistent and even rhythm between the ink and page. Rivers of white and large gaps between words give the ick.

Re:Design of This Website (2021) by enriquto on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @05:17AM (#30930068)
you only need two colors: background and foreground
Re:Design of This Website (2021) by hypertele-Xii on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @07:38AM (#30930915)
That would be the absolute extreme of minimalism, yes. But it's a never-ending rabbit hole. I don't really need a website, either. So the absolute extreme minimalist website is one that doesn't exist.

To me, colors are important. I'm a visual artist. The minimal amount of colors to me is an additional two to your two. It's not arbitrary, I didn't just go crazy with colors, I settled on exactly four because I couldn't reduce it to three.

Re:Design of This Website (2021) by iamacyborg on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @08:00AM (#30931079)
> So the absolute extreme minimalist website is one that doesn't exist.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what minimalistic design means.

If you've identified that you need a website, minimalism would be paring that down to the core essentials and ensuring it has everything it needs, but nothing more, to suit its purpose.

Re:Design of This Website (2021) by hypertele-Xii on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @09:38AM (#30931809)
That's exactly what I've done.
Re:Design of This Website (2021) by carrolldunham on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @10:18AM (#30932203)
Why does it need a background image?
Re:Design of This Website (2021) by hypertele-Xii on Thursday April 07, 2022 @03:34AM (#30941729)
Because the artist requires it.

Websites exist to serve content. The author of this page demanded it have a background image.

Here's another page that doesn't:

https://hypertele.fi/b40bfc44ff8a22df

Re:Design of This Website (2021) by antiframe on Thursday April 07, 2022 @10:32PM (#30952715)
That subtle background gradient is lovely. I like how it adds a frame to the text without distracting from it. It evokes the right vibe, I think.

That's a design element that serves the functionality well and doesn't feel superfluous at all. But the image on the colophon page I'm less excited about. It gets in the way and feels unnecessary.