Ask HN: improving your design skills? - <AUTHOR>

I regularly get negative comments about the looks of my sites, and I want to do something about it.
The problem is: most of them look just fine to me.  It's not like code where I can see what looks bad and then work towards something that looks better.  For that matter, it's not even like a drawing where I can tell whether it looks how I want it.  I like the simple/spare/plain look.  However... that doesn't seem to match what a lot of the rest of the world wants, so any advice from hackers who have made progress in that direction? <comment><USER3> I'll give this a shot.

I'm expecting you don't want to spend tons of time on graphics and the likes, but you don't need to in order to drastically improve your sites as they are now.

Your typography definitely needs to be improved. A lot of people say they can't tell when they need to fix their typography, so here's an easy test: paste a chapter of a book you are reading into your template, and see if you can stand to read it there, instead of in the book. The shorter the amount of time you can stand, the worse your typography is.

As for colors, first pick a primary color. This'll usually be some pleasing shade of blue, red, or maybe green. Draw some blobs and lines of different size and thickness, and see how the color holds up. Then pick a complimentary background color. For example, when I use red as a primary color, I don't set it against a white background. The red will appear too jarring. Instead, I use a pale cream or very faint yellow. Your background doesn't have to be white, but it should be very light so that your text still shows up well. The point of having an off-white background, though, is that it changes the eye's perception of your primary color, and makes it look like it 'fits'. Test out your primary color again on your background color, and tweak the two.

I think, actually, your color choice is already good on your personal site, but it is being marred badly by two things.

The first is the navigation. I know that the two leveled effect is on purpose, but what it _looks like_ to the user is that you had one very long navigation bar that wrapped around. The structure of this navigation is poorly conveyed here. The second navigation strip is supposed to be "under" David, so to speak, but you don't convey that at all in your design. Here's an extremely quick and dirty example of what might be better: [http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/2010-02-05-091156_1024x600_s...](http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/2010-02-05-091156_1024x600_scrot.png) Note you still wouldn't want "Padova Chronicles" taking up two lines.

Also, please, please remove the ads from the top of the page. The whole "above the fold" thing is overrated... however, above the fold is where the user develops their impression of your site. When I see those ads right in my face, before I've even gotten to read the first paragraph of text my immediate association is with a cheap Yahoo Sites page.

You might want to ask yourself how much that ad revenue is really worth. My guess is that it's not exactly a significant portion of your income, and you would be better off removing the ads and having a more favorable professional appearance.

Minus the ads, the site looks a lot more favorable already. <http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/no_ads.png> Look at how front loaded the content is! The user can get right to the point, and read about you, rather than some really not that relevant ads!

</comment><comment><USER4> I am hacker who had made a fair amount or progress in learning graphic design.

Here are the things that helped me:

a) read as much as possible on graphic design. The non-designers design book is a great choice. But there are tons of articles across the web on fonts, spacing, coloring, contrast, etc.

b) pick out sites that you like (and that people with design sense like), and practice copying them _exactly_. If there is some button or styling you do not know how to reproduce, find a photo shop tutorial for how to reproduce it. As you do this, you build up a toolbox of great design techniques. Gradually as you get better and learn how to make pretty sites, your old designs will become embarrassingly deficient to your eye.

c) as you make sites try to solicit detailed feedback from people who know how to design.

Here are some thoughts on specifically why I think your pages do not look so hot:

For your home page: <http://www.welton.it/davidw/>

The text in your logo needs to be anti-aliased, the edges look jagged. The alignment and spacing of the menu links are off (the horizontal distance is not consistent). Again the text is not anti-aliased so it looks jagged. The spacing between the headers and the text feels off, the header should be closer to the paragraph it represents, not the paragraph above. The top of your bio pic is not aligned with the top of the paragraph. Finally, as a general point try and avoid pure black (#000) on pure white (#FFF). Using slightly grayer font ( #555) softens the page considerably. Also, don't use the default blue for links, use a better looking color. The Adwords look very tacky.

For Dedasys: <http://www.dedasys.com/>

Again, anti-alias the logo. Try being creative with the font too, maybe download a font set and try making the logo with a more unique font. Alignment of the menu items looks off, centering them does not work. The bullet points should be aligned left. Even better, use a custom designed bullet point rather than the browser default. The colors for the page overall are terrible. To get good colors, I often download a really nature picture, then use the eye dropper to pick out a couple colors. Doesn't always work, but can be quite useful.

Overall, great design is not about being glamorous versus simple spare. Its about getting all the little details right. The balance, color, alignment, etc. And it's about adding that extra little touch in a lot of places - <USER2> custom icon for bullet points, the creative logo.

Getting good just requires a loop of reading/study, practice, and getting feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. One comment though: neither my personal site nor the DedaSys one has 'logos', just text, which Firebug says has the computed style: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif" at 48px. So I guess the issue is more one of "things don't render the same in all browsers - use an image if you want consistency". I don't care too much for my personal site, but the DedaSys one I'd like to look nice.

<comment><USER5> Please remove the ads from your website. Those ads bring you SMALL income now, but they affect your FUTURE income strongly. Removing the ads is delaying gratification - you give up the amount they give you now so that in the future you will earn more (from the larger number of people who will bookmark your site to be read later)

<comment><AUTHOR> They were mostly there for the articles, where they 1) brought in a bit of beer money, and 2) didn't really seem to detract from anything (I can see the point about the home page ones). Anyway, I removed them.

<comment><USER5> My thought is usually this - if a person is interested enough in the type of money that ads bring that he clutters up his personal website, then this person must be pretty broke. And pretty broke people in the IT industry are usually not very smart people, because it's easy to make money in IT.

That's just my thought process, no personal offence intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Highly recommended: Non-Designer's Design Book - [http://www.amazon.com/Non- Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...](http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers- Design-Book-Robin-Williams/dp/0321534042/ref=dp_ob_title_bk)

<comment><USER7> I recommend the Non-Designer's Design Book too.

Also, I recommend Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug.

I'm a terrible designer, but have learned a few simple things from these books and other great designers.

First, here's what's most important:

\- Copy (most important!) \- Size/Shape/Position

Much further down:

\- Font and colors

Second(paraphrased from Krug's book):

1\. Does this site offer something of value that I want? 2\. How hard is it to extract that value?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Normally the biggest thing people screw up is the colors. Use a color generator and then always pick colors from the theme. Two of my fav sites for this are

<http://colorschemedesigner.com/> and <http://kuler.adobe.com/>

The next step after color is Typography. You don't need to get into all the nitty gritty crap about it but choose some good fonts normally something very clean and simple is your best bet. ie Arial, Helvelica, Verdana (used on this site) and Georgia. When you get into other fonts its very easy to use them incorrectly. For example you do not want to use Georgia as body text its to hard to read but it makes great headlines.

After those two changes the third is the hardest, making things feel well designed. Take a look at how other people have done similar things. A great site for this is <http://patterntap.com/>

Just because something is simple/spare/plain does not mean it cannot look good. For example take a look at these minimal sites

<http://www.fedthread.org/fr/today/> <http://mattbango.com/> <http://www.pixelhavenllc.com/> <http://bobulate.com/>

<comment><USER9> You can make something beautiful and well-designed without color at all. Black and white can be beautiful. The same cannot be said of typography.

And Georgia is actually _very_ readable at small font sizes. It was specifically designed for use as a text font on a computer screen. It's a fine choice for body text.

<comment><USER10> In fact, Georgia is a no-brainer kind of choice if your site is text-heavy. It needs to be opened up a bit -- the line-height should be around 1.4em -- but it makes the right word shapes (most "expert" reading happens at higher pattern-recognition levels than letters) without sacrificing clarity at the level of letter shapes and letter-spacing (as, say, a Garamond or Palatino might). Serifs make a huge difference in readability. They just got a bad on- screen reputation from implementations like Times New Roman on Windows (which is more of a weak encryption scheme than a legitimate typographic decision).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Andy Rutledge's blog has lots of good stuff. His five-part introduction to gestalt principles is about the basics of graphic design:

[http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-1-figure- grou...](http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-1-figure-ground- relationship.php)

[http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt- principles-2-similarity....](http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt- principles-2-similarity.php)

<http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt-principles-3.php>

<http://www.andyrutledge.com/common-fate.php>

<http://www.andyrutledge.com/closure.php>

For typography, Robert Bringhurst's _The Elements of Typographic Style_ is a must-read. [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Brin...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Bringhurst/dp/0881791326).

You mentioned the _looks_ of your sites, so the above are about visual and graphic design, but good _interaction_ design will also help making people think your site looks better, is faster, has more features etc.

Be careful whose judgement you trust. People here on HN sometimes seem to have a caricatured view of users as only being attracted to visuals. In reality, visuals can't do much more than support (or ruin) an otherwise well-designed site.

</comment><comment><USER12> I found The Non-Designer's Design Book pretty useful.

<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321534042/>

It provides a list of simple typographic and design rules to follow, and explains why they're important. As written on that Amazon page, they are contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity.

There's no reason why you can't have a simple site that also looks 'good'. There are some fundamental issues with your sites that wouldn't be fixed by merely making them more complicated. The lack of repetition and alignment in your sites particularly jump out at me (once you've read this book, you'll see mistakes everywhere).

Look at the Squeezed Books site. The "Home" link isn't aligned with the links below and above it. The text in the logo in the top left is nearly aligned with the "Log in" link, but is actually centered within the image. Even if people don't consciously spot it, it will likely feel 'off' to them. You've centered the "What is Squeezed Books?" text. Centering looks messy and feels weak. A good rule of thumb is to avoid it entirely until you know when it's appropriate to break the rule. As for repetition, I simply ask, how many different font styles do you count on that page? There are too many.

</comment><comment><USER13> In my experience becoming a good designer takes as much learning as becoming a good coder. Every designer at Sofa has an unhealthy interest in composition, color and typography and studied years before getting good at it.

That said, a few things that I've seen working with coders starting here that at least their recognition/understanding of great design got better by:

\- Hanging out with designers and discussing their work. You will find out you will sometimes understand them as hard as they do you when taking code.

\- Learning about typography; it's a part of design that has more universal true rules then any other aspect of it, and therefore is easier to study.

\- Looking at pretty stuff on a daily base. Fffound is a great place to start. But great application UI's/marketing stuff works too, if you want to keep it close to computers.

\- Start learning photography, and study how compositions of objects in a frame can make an image interesting.

</comment><comment><USER14> A common misconception is that "simple" is easy to do. Instead, it's often as hard if not more difficult. Solid design is a battle won in the detail and with simple designs you have fewer details that each must be perfect.

For example: The left part of DedaSys \- The fonts are sized as to have an ambiguous hierarchy \- The shadows are not consistent and thus break the illusion of layered paper \- (especially important is that the shadow on the yellow bar at the top doesn't match the shadow in the menu block) \- The current location box is larger than the others once again breaking the illusion of layered paper \- The grey line surrounding the whole thing crosses layers

On your personal site \- The text grids are not equal or obviously intentionally unequal \- The navigation headers are almost randomly arranged \- The picture doesn't fit well into the gridlines formed by your text \- Your text doesn't have a visual flow

Each of these criticisms is a tiny fix in and of itself, but they build an emotional reaction in a viewer. It's an unfortunate circumstance that your designs are judged by all viewers on the same level as those done by professionals. No matter how hard you try, nothing looks "good" unless it's close enough to perfect that people can't tell it isn't.

      ---

So, what are you going to do?

Simple designs are a good place to start: you can iterate them much more quickly, and, just like all design, you definitely are going to be iterating.

Graphic design can be thought of as the unification of a message with a design metaphor. Simple designs should have simple messages and simple metaphors. Interestingly, your sites provide a great comparison. DedaSys has a simple message (a shallow hierarchy) but a complex metaphor (stacked, multicolored paper in hard lighting). Your personal site has a simple metaphor (text blocks in white void) but a complex message (highly nested hierarchy with many levels of equal importance makes it difficult to skim).

So pick a simple metaphor and craft a simple message and then keep iterating.

      - single sheet of brilliant plain paper with two columns
      - a sheet of nice, lined paper lain on textured wall paint
      - Two sheets of paper, laid atop one another, with shadows between them

      (these all involve paper because it's easy to visualize, but it's possible
       to get more exotic while still being simple)

      - a pane of glass with big bold letters stuck to it, held over interesting scenes
        which are wildly out of focus in the background

Visualizations of your message and metaphor drive the "simple" details which build your design, but you should always be moving in a positive direction. There are three focuses I like to use:

      1. intent: make it clear that even your accidents were thought out
      2. consistency: if you've made an intentional decision, defer to
         it throughout the design
      3. illusion: let a realistic design metaphor guide your decisions

      ---

So with that theory in mind, there are also a few pretty common design tricks that help you to be effective. All sorts of comments have already covered these, but I'll reiterate

      1. Pick a grid, both horizontal *and vertical* and stick to it
      2. Study other designs, especially classic and powerful ones like
         Coca-cola's logo or a newspaper, and understand what makes them
         attractive. Steal it.
      3. Study the shape and appearance of real things. If you can physically
         build what you want your website to look like, you have a wonderful
         guide for how to design it.
      4. Study a little typography. It's a very old art which has strong traditions.
         Some of them are important and necessary, some of them are simply important
         because of consistency. We're all expert consumers of type design, whether
         we know it or not.

      and finally

      5. Break any and all of these rules when you think you should, but know when
         you're doing it and DO IT INTENTIONALLY. Breaking a rule shyly looks
         terrible. Breaking one with panaché makes something striking and phenomenal.

      ---

Graphic design is a fun thing, but it takes just as much effort and skill as programming. With that in mind, good luck on your journey.

</comment><comment><USER15> I got similar complaints about my designs, (which can be super frustrating..."i gave you a website...now you want it to be gorgeous too...sheesh").

So I started taking note of what I liked and didn't like about site designs. I made a delicious list and tagged the sites i liked with "webdesign- inspiration" if they have something that specifically stood out to me. Design is an art, and every artist learns by imitating. Find a feature you enjoy and try to duplicate it. Firebug is your friend.

But never get too attached. Just because a child spends hours on a macaroni picture doesn't mean everyone will love it. Listen to your users/friends and take their advice with a grain of salt. Re-design, is just part of design.

Find a few design blogs that you can relate to, i like css-tricks, and check them every once in a while. If you like sparten designs, read <http://www.alistapart.com/> . A typography based webpage design takes more skill and patience to make look good than just throwing some blue web 2.0 buttons on your nav bar.

Keep a folder of screen shots of web designs you like and constantly ask yourself what makes you like them, and how can you incorporate those features in your site.

Finally, if you have any limitations (mine is colors) there are plenty of resources to help you out, just search for them. Such as <http://www.colourlovers.com/> Good luck!

<comment><USER15> I forgot to add, the best way to focus on design for me is to use photoshop (or gimp...whatever) create a mockup and get that 'perfect' before you implement your CSS. It is much easier to think about design separately from the method of the design (css, html), that way you can quickly test out several designs on paper, and pick the best one to implement.

<comment><USER16> Net trick: Inkscape svg files can be rendered directly by most modern browsers.

<comment><USER17> Ohh! I didn't know that.

Actually, that would be really awesome if more sites did that. I usually ctrl+ = my browser to reduce eyestrain, and a lot of graphics look ugly that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Learn to wireframe and sketch out your websites ahead of time. It is much easier to try ten different layouts on paper than starting them in css. Some people like to mockup in photoshop, but I prefer paper. It is just faster for me.

Some people already mentioned "Non-Designers Design Book" - Robin Williams

Some other good ones are:

"Design of Everyday Things" - Donald Norman (Conceptual, but gets you in the right mindset)

"Dont Make me Think" - Steve Krug (Usability matters)

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" - Edward Tufte (he has a set of 4 books on information visualization, all of which are good)

One of the key concepts that I've taken from these books is that everything in a page has a visual weight so you must consider how everything in a page balances out together. Never add stuff just for the sake of adding it, because it will distract the user from the information they are trying to gather.

And most of all just build more websites and try to improve each one. Design is still a lot like programming. If you dont like the particular look of your site you can refactor it. I know you don't get the benefit of seeing it, but some of the best designed sites out there have gone through multiple iterations.

</comment><comment><USER19> learn C.R.A.P.

        * Contrast
          Elements that aren't the same should be very different so they stand out, making them "slightly different" confuses the user into seeing a relation that doesn't exist. Strong contrast between page elements allows the user's eye to flow from one to another down the page instead of creating a sea of similarity that's boring and not communicative.
        * Repetition
          Repeat styles down the page for a cohesive feel — if you style related elements the same way in one area, continue that trend for other areas for consistency.
        * Alignment
          Everything on the page needs to be visually connected to something else, nothing should be out of place or distinct from all other design elements.
        * Proximity
          Proximity creates related meaning: elements that are related should be grouped together, whereas separate design elements should have enough space in between to communicate they are different.

...and ask girls for feedback. they're better with color for some reason.

<comment><USER20> Women have a greater chance of being tetrachromats than men do. Basically a tetrachromat can see a fourth range of colors giving them the ability to distinguish 100 million colors compared to the 1 million colors normal people see.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy>

<comment><USER21> Would this matter on electronic media? Typical color LCD/CRT screens have only red, green, and blue pixels - a tetrochromat wouldn't get any signal on the fourth channel. Computer displays increase the number of colors by increasing the number of bits per channel, but with 24-bit color (8 bits per channel), you're already showing 256 different intensities of light, while the human eye can only distinguish 100. You'd either need special displays or an eye that can pick up more gradations of color per channel to increase the color bandwidth.

I think this effect may be because of another phenomenon I heard about in my psych class: females tend to have larger vocabularies for color than men do. Whether that means they can _see_ more colors or _say_ more colors remains to be determined (and my philosophy class said it _can't_ be determined ;-)), but the net result is that you get better color feedback from a woman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I recommend Blueprint CSS grid framework (<http://www.blueprintcss.org/>) . It's really easy to use and _forces_ you to think about layout (which is the root of good web design). You get some basic typography styles for free too.

I've found that it has helped a lot in quickly putting something together that looks good and can be easily improved incrementally as your site evolves.

You might find it (or something similar) useful when it comes to building the fundamental site structure.

Edit: clickable link.

<comment><AUTHOR> I started using that, and it certainly helps, but there's more to it than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looking at the two examples you provided, I think your problem falls into two categories. Typography and colors.

Typography: The information hierarchy is not clear enough. In your second link the top section has near identical sizes and weights which makes it hard to see what is more important. I suggest you read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. It will teach you how to use type effectively and is a very good and interesting book.

You have way too much copy on the page. You need to make it interesting or people won't want to read it. Things like bulleted lists and pull-quotes will break it up a bit and add visual flavor.

Color: The colors you pick doesn't really work. In the first link the gray is way too dark and looks really dreary. In the second example the link, text, and header colors are so close together you can barely see the difference. They also don't really work well together. This is a matter of taste. Nobody can give you taste, its something you will need to develop.

Practice makes perfect really. Take a look at other websites and just observe which colors work well together. There are lots of little tricks you can use to make a minimalist site looks great. For one, don't use pure black for type. It shimmers on the page. Instead use a really dark gray. I personally use HSB(0, 0, 15).

Another thing you can do is to use HSB to pick your colors. Pick a single color you like, and then adjust the H slider to find a matching color. Its not perfect, but it works well enough.

</comment><comment><USER24> A couple of things:

\- Commit to some rules on your site layout/design/font/colour. It's easier to associate links with a certain pattern rather than inconsistent presentation (e.g. you have a link on the bottom that is bold but the rest aren't. Should be clear why that is bold or all should be bold or none at all.)

\- Information and typography are very important elements. Graphics are only there if you really need it but personally, I don't think they are necessary if you are only placing them in there to just have a graphic.

\- The graphics you currently use for your project listing should be the same width (height may differ). Some are longer, some are shorter and it makes it difficult to scan the content.

\- Run the text for each project across the entire page and avoid cramming text from two or more sections on a single horizontal section. It makes the readability of the text difficult since in some cases you only have 3 words across before it continues below.

\- Think about spacing on your layout. The top navigation should be straight across in this current structure, not alternating upper and lower. You are only wasting space without purpose. Shrink the font size, remove the bold or remove the uppercase and keep it all on one line.

\- You need more padding between sections (e.g. your intro statement, current and past projects). It looks really crammed together right now. If you are worried about scroll, there reduce the general font size.

Hope that helps.

</comment><comment><USER25> You don't need to learn "everything you can about graphic design." Your audience is other hackers. They don't care that much about visual goofiness either- you want a clean, minimalist site, then that's what you should have.

The one single thing you should do is make your site more READABLE.

Right now, this page is too big. Limit the width of a column of text to around 500 px. That will do wonders. I suggest fixing your body to 900px, and then splitting it into two columns- a main content column of 556, and a sidebar of 344. (Golden Ratio always looks nice).

Next- typography: Obviously, stick with web-safe fonts. Arial and other sans- serif used to be the way to go on the web, because low-res screens didn't display serifs very well. But now it's 2010, and all the print people know that for regular text, a serif font is more legible.

font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;

Beyond that, you need to make the lines the right distance apart. They need enough room to breathe, and paragraph breaks should have as much space between them as they would if there was another line of text there. Something like:

p { font-size: 12px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 22px; }

or you can use ems or whatever you like, but notice that line height is a little less that twice the size of the font size, and that the margin on the bottom of paragraphs is the same as the line-height.

If you just did those few things, your content would be immensely more readable.

</comment><comment><USER26> I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted stuff here, I've been looking for these kinds of resources for a while now, but never really asked.

Oh, and I thought I would share this: <http://users.cs.dal.ca/~inkpen/CSCI4161/4161_lecture4.pdf> , it looks like a presentation on "Non-Designer's Design Book" that a lot of people have mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER27> First, learn to recognize good design. Some people claim that you can't learn good taste, but I disagree. You just need to pay close attention to _everything_ you see on a daily basis and store it in an accessible part of your brain. Most people don't store design information, they just store whatever was communicated.

Formal training can be of tremendous value here, but in this day and age it's also viable to be completely self taught, especially with some good books.

Once you have an eye for design you can apply the basic principles as described in other comments here. Without the eye then the principles are meaningless. You also won't learn much by looking at your own work. You're too close to it, so objectivity is all but impossible. You need to leave it alone for a month, absorb as much design training as you can, then come back to it with a fresh eye and quickly critique it before miring yourself in the details again.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not there yet at all, pretty much in the same boat as you, so take this with a grain of salt. I have heard that in addition to all of the great technical tips about color/fonts, etc, the goal of an amazing design is to make it look difficult for the user to reproduce. If your design is something that someone would say "I could put that together in Microsoft Word," then it's just too simple. I think I read it in Simplebits or somewhere like that. Very soft gradients and rounded corners can each be incredibly subtle, but combined can give the effect that it's a professional design instead of something someone put together quickly. That's why you shouldn't ever use Times New Roman, because it's the default font for most browsers, and it shows the least amount of effort.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For some clickable examples:

<http://www.hecl.org> \- I think this one has a bit too much text; that much I can figure out on my own.

<http://www.squeezedbooks.com>

<comment><USER29> I think you need to organize the information and a little bit of typography.

\</comment></comment><comment>

hecl is just fine. (looked only at the home page)

But squeezedbooks needs some work IMHO

* Login/Signup seems to be just thrown in there. There is another list of links just below it and ideally it should belong there

* "What is squeezed books" block also seems to be placed wherever there was space. First think about whether you actually need that block. Why can't the info go in about ?The answer to "What is squeezed books" seems more like a tagline than a real answer. You already have the tagline in the header which is remarkably similar

* Too many horizontal lines in the header. It would look better if you your menu list has a background color and looks like a horizontal strip.

* Mixing of intent. "Recent summaries" and "latest comments" are list of stuff. But you also have "Write a summary" styled the same way. That is a call to action. Ideally it should look and act like a button.

* Long text: The last comment is very long without paragraph breaks. It looks like user generated content, so you can't do much about it but limit the amount of text displayed and add a "Read more". This will make the comment section look more consistent.

* The latest comments is a a list of li. That is probably OK but you should definitely lose the bullets.

* Play around with font-size, line-height and different fonts. If you want absolute readability, see what the readability bookmarklet is doing. Don't copy blindly because the font-size set by it is pretty large for a normal website. But looking at your site, you could probably do with increasing font sizes.

My 2 cents. Not a designer but is trying very hard to learn design.

</comment><comment><USER30> 4 years of design school left me with 2 words: Simple contrasts.

Design, particularly typography, is all about the relationships between elements. Contrast defines those relationships. For type, contrast is usually created by size, position, color, weight (sometimes called typographic color, just to confuse things), face, and variant (eg: oblique). Use as few of those to achieve contrast as possible. Thus, simple contrasts.

The Elements of Typographic Style will efficiently rock your world: <http://amzn.com/0881792063>

</comment><comment><USER31> Ryan Singer of 37signals gave a great talk at Windy City Rails last year about this very topic.

<http://windycityrails.org/videos#4>

</comment><comment><USER32> One of the best methods to improve your skills is use the Google Analytics method of evaluating before and after changes to your site. You should look into this type of evaluation, and you can be surprised to find that this will improve your customer response to your goals.

The idea is that you put up two pages simultaneously. You track the success of your goals based on incremental changes. The changes that result in more success are the ones you gravitate towards. Using this approach should help you understand what customers want or expect in order to reach the goal. (The goal is any achievable metric such as signing up for a free account or purchasing a product.)

Another method is to ask your customers and also observe your customers. Customers may think they want something, but when you observe them, you may learn otherwise. I have done this and learned quite a bit about the behavior of users.

You will also want to research trends and statistics if possible. People have researched design, and there are commonly accepted practices that can be used to enhance the performance of your site. However, you must be careful to stay up to date because these trends change as people 'fade out' commonly over used attention-getting solutions.

<comment><USER33> Patrick(patio11) released an opensource rails plugin to do the A/B testing. I haven't used it but he can probably chime in or you can look at his blog about his results.

<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo>

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Learn by example, just like you read someone else's code to learn a lang or framework, find sites that you like e.g. from <http://www.designmeltdown.com/>

Open a few up in the background, fire up photoshop and start getting inspired by the layouts and themes around you. Once you've done this a bit you'll find you suddenly have a much larger vocabulary of design elements to pull from.

</comment><comment><USER35> Before&After Magazine is my design How-To favorite.

<http://www.bamagazine.com/>

I am not a design professional, so not all of their stuff is useful to me. But their typography and layout advice is excellent.

Some of the content of their back issues has been reworked into a couple of books. One of those might be a good starting point.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is an excellent question - one I've been trying to answer for myself for quite sometime.

You certainly don't need to go graphics heavy, but having an eye for arrangement, matching color palettes, typography, flow, etc... are all crucial to an elegant design. I've found you don't ever need to go graphics crazy if you can master all of those fundamentals with what HTML+CSS provides you.

Graphics and graphic design should just "add" to it. A lot of designers I work with use graphic design as a crutch for their inability to understand true elegant web design (hence why I will never subcontract a designer that "does primarily print work and web design on the side").

In all honesty, a programmer is more capable of devising and creating an elegant and magnetic site design for one primary reason: a programmer grasps the underlying technology and capabailities (hell, it's programmers that made Photoshop possible!). Just adding in a classical eye for aesthetics will make your ability to arrange and select out of what you already know much more efficacious.

</comment><comment><USER37> There are a few fundamentals I see lacking in your sites that would be a night/day improvement:

1\. Grids

2\. Typography

3\. Thorough understanding of CSS

Both of your example sites are accessible but good minimalism generally emphasizes #1 and #2. Think Apple. You can find plenty of books on those two topics because they are so fundamental to good design.

<comment><USER38> I agree, especially with the first two. I'd recommend searching for those terms on Smashing Magazine (<http://www.smashingmagazine.com/>). I'd also highly recommend <http://webtypography.net/>. It's a more accessible, if incomplete, version of Bringhurst's book. (Bringhurst's book is great, but it's a bit much for total beginners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a constant issue for me. I get excited by good design - it scratches a purity/elegance/zen itch in me. Can recreate it? No chance. I've even had one of my sites defined by one HN user as "...like a domain parking page".[1]

To loosely paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart: I can't define good design but I know it when I see it. [2]

The reality is I need to engage professional designers earlier in the process but, being self-delusional, I'll always give it a bash anyway.

1\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902408> 2\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it>

</comment><comment><USER40> Are the clients happy? More importantly, are the clients reaching their goals with your designs? Design is a lot more than a pretty face. It's also about usability, driving sales, , telling a story, engaging visitors, etc. If your design results in increasing my sales then I don't care if people think it's ugly.

If current clients are happy but potential clients are complaining about the looks of sites in you portfolio, then maybe you should be tweaking your own sales pitch. Include not just images of your work, but also stats which show how your design helped conversions among others.

As a designer, it's your job to educate the client as to what's really important. Maybe all the client knows is to look for a pretty face.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a hacker (although I'm uneasy about calling myself one), not a designer, and if I'm doing a web site professionally, I generally work with someone who does the graphics/design. This is for my own sites, where there is no client who says yes/no.

<comment><USER41> It doesn't like you want to spend a lot of time trying to become a premiere designer, but you are sick of hearing about how your sites look like they were designed by a programmer. Why don't you trade services with a kick ass designer and finally give your sites the makeover they deserve?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, but here's why I'd like to improve my own skills: I like being able to put something together to test out a new idea or site, and if I have to get someone to help out every time, it's a bit limiting. If any of them ever were really successful, or I wanted to invest in them, I'd certainly get a pro to fix them up nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Have you read Jakob Nielson's work? - <http://www.useit.com/>

Designing Web Usability would be a good start - <http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/>

And Homepage Usability is good for screenshots with examples - <http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/>

I would take what he says with a pinch of salt at times, as he can be very metric based. Sometimes it helps when to know to bend the rules. I remember for years he was very strict about hyperlink colours insisting that they should always be blue for unvisited and purple for visited.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just some random pieces of info:

* Sketch.

* Begin your designs in greyscale. Introduce colour at a later stage once you've worked out your design whilst only being aware of tone.

* Like many have said, good typography is essential. "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst is pretty much the bible here. Some find it too dry, some find it fascinating -- either way, it's definitely worth a read.

* "Don't Make Me Think" is a brilliant book. Each page is almost worth the price of the book itself.

* With usability in mind, definitely read "Web Form Design" by Luke Wroblewski.

* When you notice a piece of design that you really appreciate, take note of it and think about why that is so.

</comment><comment><USER44> You may be interested in reading about the Golden Ratio[1] and more specifically the ways people apply it to web design[2]. Helped me a fair bit, especially when I'm at that point where I'm starting a new design and need a jumping off point.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio>

2\. <http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesignbasics/a/aa071607.htm> [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/the-golden-ratio- in-...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/the-golden-ratio-in-web- design/)

Google for more.

</comment><comment><USER45> There are two types of graphic designers- creators and copiers.

Creators create original work and ideas, and can synthesize a wide range of influence, tools, and trends to get exactly what they need.

You will never be a creator.

But there's no reason why anyone can't be a copier. There are enough resources to easily help with every aspect of graphic design. Find something you like and try to incorporate a similar effect into your design.

Start with taking a few moments to keep tabs on Smashing Magazine (<http://www.smashingmagazine.com/>).

<comment><USER46> I don't see a reason why he can't be a creator. Design it's more a knowledge of relationships, and the more you explore the more you _can_ create.

Assuming you're talking about graphics design (creativity) [r1]: the more you explore design patterns, _it's more about knowing the tools_ , once you know them you can create with them. Programmers are designers, just they're not used to do graphics.

EDIT:r1: Graphics design only, not including accessibility, etc.

<comment><USER45> It's an interesting tangent- how much crossover is there in the inherent skills of a developer and designer?

I use those terms from a pretty elitist graphic-design view. Of course anyone with a knowledge of tools can 'create' something. But the good graphic designers I know are so much more than their tool set- they are just different breeds of people. After immersing yourself in that world it changes your perspective.

<comment><USER21> It's an open question just how many of the skills of both developers and designer are "inherent".

I've certainly noticed that the designers at my company operate on a different design plane than I do. However, that could be because they're _designers_ \- this is what they devote their professional life to, just like how I devote mine to programming. Immersing yourself in anything changes your perspective.

<comment><USER45> I would venture that the "inherent" skills (i.e. skills that can't simply be learned) are those that separate the truly good _anything_ , whether it is a designer, developer, or basketball player. Maybe the term there is "talent"?

Agreed- devoting yourself to anything will adjust your perspective. But I'm not sure that alone can explain super dork programmers or really off-the-wall designers? There's something more fundamental there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Much was said about the different aspects of design, but what I want to point you to is the ultimate goal of design. It's not for you to "like it", it's for your visitors to get the most out of your website, and seen from that perspective, design is all about added value.

To do it right, imagine how adding each bit of "cosmetics" improves the ability of your visitors to reach the state of mind you want them (to get into the buying mode, decide to subscribe to your blog, whatever)

Only after that you'll start understanding what kind of design you need, not just putting on some random fancy-pansy stuff.

</comment><comment><USER48> I recommend picking up CSS Mastery: <http://www.cssmastery.com/>

In my case, I never took the 10-12 hours required to learn how to employ CSS properly. It seemed like a very boring low-return investment of my time.

My designs were lack-luster -- and I claimed I preferred an austere approach -- because I didn't know a headache-free way of implementing certain looks. This book helped. My designs are much better now, even though I have not changed my aesthetics.

</comment><comment><USER49> Here's a quantifiable source of information on what the rest of the world wants: <http://www.tumblr.com/themes/popular>

</comment><comment><USER50> I recommend Mark Boulton's book, Designing for the Web: <http://www.fivesimplesteps.co.uk/>

</comment><comment><USER51> I highly recommend the book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" from Sitepoint. Get the basics right first.

</comment><comment><USER52> Pick up a copy of the Non-designer's Design and Type Book by Robin Williams (not the comedian).

</comment><comment><USER53> It's all CRAP

Contrast Repetition Alignment Position

</comment><comment><USER54> I second the Rutledge recommendation below.</comment>


XML for databases: a dead idea - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2013/01/14/xml-for-databases-a-dead-idea/ <comment><USER2> I had a project where I used an xml column[1] in MSSQL2008, since we had variable schema data and didn't want to store it vertically (one row per value), and definitely didn't want to alter schema on the fly. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing what I did, I don't see anything wrong with it and it solved that specific problem rather eloquently. We got the data out just fine with XQuery.

Believe it or not it was extremely fast...but only after playing with the xml format for awhile and making sure the indexes all fit nicely. You can, almost surprisingly, index specific XML fields inside of xml data-type columns[2].

I can almost hear you all cringing after reading that :)

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms190936(v=sql.90).a...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms190936\(v=sql.90\).aspx) [2] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms191497(v=sql.90).a...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms191497\(v=sql.90\).aspx)

<comment><USER3> We had an entire system based on SQL Server's "FOR XML" output clause and XML data islands in IE. It was an unmitigated fucking disaster zone that took 5 years to get rid of.

That put us off the above pretty sharpish.

<comment><USER4> FOR XML and XML data type (e.g. XML column) are pretty much unrelated.

<comment><USER3> Yep but they share one feature: shitty idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For better or worse it's only dead in the same sense that the "relational model" is dead - as a research topic. It's certainly alive in the real world where it's more properly used as an interchange format. E.g. The IRS's MeF[1]. It's also finding interesting adoption in other industries[2].

1- [http://www.irs.gov/uac/Modernized-e-File-(MeF)-Program- Infor...](http://www.irs.gov/uac/Modernized-e-File-\(MeF\)-Program- Information)

2- [http://www.service- architecture.com/xml/articles/oil_and_gas...](http://www.service- architecture.com/xml/articles/oil_and_gas_xml.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Good. XML for data-storage was always a bad idea and I (and others <http://www.dbdebunk.com/>) have been ranting about it since the beginning. XML is verbose, hard to parse, and enforces a ridged hierarchy, even if your data model didn't need it.

Presumably XML is good for "interchange" but I've never found that to be the case. JSON seems to do just fine. :)

<comment><USER7> Actually XML is more "reach" format than JSON. XML nodes have attributes and values, when in JSON - values only. And lot of databases are "document- oriented": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document-oriented_database> and what is matters in comparison is parsing performance and size. JSON just more compact, but not better in all aspects. I think XML is an excellent format, especially when size matters less than "dimensions" of presented information. I think it's perfect format for RSS and for REST API and for web-pages.

<comment><USER8> XML seen in the wild rarely has good separation of attributes and values. It _can_ be useful to distinguish data and metadata, but it's more expressivity than perhaps most applications need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> XML wasn't a good fit for databases or configuration files, but it was basically inevitable that it would wind up used in those capacities. Playing around with new technology and misusing it in fun ways like that is an important part of the growth of a new technology--that's how we learn what the strengths and weaknesses of a technology are.

<comment><USER10> How did the trend develop, especially for things like configuration data?

Some warped sense of ease from using Java and .NET libraries to read / write XML?

<comment><USER11> XML is still a good solution for human-readable data. JSON, for instance, doesn't allow comments because of some dogmatic idea of the author. The author of JSON even goes as far as suggesting that you use a non-JSON parser to strip out comments before parsing. In other words, not using JSON for configuration files that need comments.[1]

XML is also very ubiquitous in library support, having been around for over 15 years.

I think the most negative reaction to XML is the extreme overuse for things like component configuration, where there's no defaults, and every property and class name must be specified. Also, the misguided tag closing (<tag>content</> would have sufficed) adds to the verbosity.

1: [https://plus.google.com/118095276221607585885/posts/RK8qyGVa...](https://plus.google.com/118095276221607585885/posts/RK8qyGVaGSr)

<comment><USER12> God knows something to ease the closing tag verbosity would make XML at least twice as useable. I wonder if there's anything in the grammar that would conflict with </> as a closing tag? I'm almost tempted to muck with libxml and add it for personal use.

<comment><USER9> A personal dialect of XML? Wouldn't you be better off making your own grammar from scratch?

<comment><USER12> If I installed it at the system level, then anything that linked against libxml/libxml2 would have the enhancement. Which is also the biggest reason I'm not going to do it...I'd invariably end up distributing XML with the sugarfied close tag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I am missing from this article is what replaces XML for databases.

An XML database is just a document store, and that idea has not died. You can s/XML/JSON/g and you'll see that the ideas and research is still very relevant today.

XML databases are decidedly 'NoSQL'. MongoDB is a good example of a straight port of the document store idea to JSON.

MongoDB would be a lot richer if it were to support XQuery in some form, rather than their awkward json querying system.

I think there is a discrepancy between the academic world which likes the orderly nature of XML and the pragmatic programmers world who like the terseness of JSON.

<comment><USER7> Couchbase also stores documents in JSON (and uses JavaScript for "views"). And it's one of the best in performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used an XML DB in a project back in the early 2000s. The database was populated by running an in-database XQuery that pulled data across the webs in XML. When people visited a web site, XML was queried back out, then XSLT translated it to (drum roll) XHTML. I even experimented with XForms to capture data from visitors, which had the benefit of directly using the DB schema to validate data. All in all, it was pretty nifty when you got all the pieces working together properly. Sort-of XRX without the R.

As to reasons for their "death": DTDs and XSDs were a serious PITA. XML data types didn't map closely to standard relational DB types; this wasted space (which was costly at the time), and made it difficult to interact with a relational DB when that was necessary. The XQuery query planner was braindead. That was really the nail in the coffin.

All in all, they're just document stores, and those are more popular than ever now with the whole NoSQL thing. As the author mentions, XML seems to have won out as a document format... I wonder what sort of DB we could put all those documents into. One that could support storing those documents without a bunch of translating to other formats, and had some method of running queries over them (preferably in a standardized way), and output the data in a similar format. Too bad XML databases are dead, one of those would have worked pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I will say I don't like it for online storage of any kind, but it's pretty hard to beat XML as an offline interchange or archival format.

Case in point: we can dump an entire client's data from our system into a single gzipped XML blob straight from the ORM. This can also be restored straight back into the ORM as well with very little code.

This means we can switch database engines, do snapshots, backups, manage on site deployments and all sorts of nice things very easily.

</comment><comment><USER15> Remember all the XML programming languages? I recall Water <http://waterlanguage.org/>, for example, getting some buzz in the Boston area during the buzzy time Daniel Lemire refers to...

<comment><USER3> Ugh I remember that. What an utter vomit-bag of a creation that was.

You can see how popular it was considering their web site was (c) 2001 - 2003...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice observation:

"I initially wanted to write an actual research article to examine why XML for databases failed [but the article would] be unpublishable because too many people will want to argue against the failure itself. This is probably a great defect of modern science: we are obsessed with success and we work to forget failure."

</comment><comment><USER17> Down for me, but Google has it cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2013/01/14/xml- for-databases-a-dead-idea/)

<comment><USER18> The CoralCDN also has a cached version:

[http://lemire.me.nyud.net/blog/archives/2013/01/14/xml- for-d...](http://lemire.me.nyud.net/blog/archives/2013/01/14/xml-for- databases-a-dead-idea/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Storing data in XML for long-term interoperability is an acceptable use of > XML.

What?

<comment><USER20> Not sure it would be my first choice either, but that's not a crazy statement. In a couple of decades, I'm confident there will still be well-maintained XML libraries for every popular platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They just evolved into document databases like Mongo and CouchDB. Same thing is happening in the transport world. XML started the shift, JSON is continuing it.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's bad for data storage, but it's great for passing hierarchical parameters to stored procedures. It's also great for retrieval of hierarchical data.

Storing the XML in a column, that's just dumb. If I did that I would only ever treat it as a binary blob, same as any file. When you start using the db's XML query support to query that column, that's when you get into trouble and need to rethink your design.

</comment><comment><USER23> If we exclude stuff like OLAP and spatial databases, there are only 3 types of database: relational, pointer and logical.

Relational means something that accepts Codd's constraints, more-or-less. Pointer is something that doesn't, and which therefore easily allows hierarchies.

Logical is like relational, expanded to allow recursive queries, prolog-style, which is a high level way to have hierarchies and Codd's constraints, but you pay for in terms of query performance.

The thing is, pointer databases have been reinvented again and again: First as the mainframe cobol databases of the 70s, then as the filesystem, then as the windows registry, then as OODBMSs, then as XML databases, and now as NoSQL.

The other thing is, Postgres is designed to cater for all 3, relational, pointer and logical.

</comment><comment><USER24> XML is fine if used where it fits.

Use the best tool for the job and all that.

<comment><USER25> > Use the best tool for the job and all that.

I don't know of anyone advocating that they something other than the best tools for the job should ever be used. The question is whether a particular tool is good for a particular job or not.</comment></comment>


Duuble: a new microblogging/self-tracking tool (testers needed) - <AUTHOR> http://duuble.com

<comment><USER2> Do you have any samples, so that I could see what to expect? I would like to see some examples of how this is better or different than say tumblr/posterous/twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> in some ways we are similar to those guys, but we are different as we allow users to differentiate their posts between private and public. All posts are recorded in a diary, but public entries can be seen by anyone and they are displayed on a blog-like page. We believe that there is value to such private entries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why are stronger passwords not allowed? Stronger, meaning not only letters and numbers, but also punctuations? like &é"'(§è!çà)-+

</comment><comment><USER4> Did you realize that the term "blugging" has apparently mostly been used to mean "low quality blogging"?

</comment><comment><USER5> That scrolling hot air balloon made me smile, well done. Animation is a bit choppy on my machine though.

<comment><AUTHOR> opps, we tried to make it as smooth as possible! which browser are you using?

<comment><USER5> It's on a freshly installed Chrome on Windows 7.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm, we'll work on that then!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shouldn't the hot air balloon go up?</comment>


What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/28/what-ux-designers-can-learn-from-1990s-japanese-video-games/ <comment><USER2> Couple of nit-pics:

> you come across a small, glowing light — something that'll entice any gamer > in search of loot

That small glowing light is not a UI element to highlight the tutorial – instead, it's what a 'save point' always looks like in that game. It just so happens that the first time you interact with a save point, you get a tutorial (the same as the first time you interact with several other game mechanics, which don't look like glowing lights.)

So that goes against the author's thesis a little bit - arguably they are misinterpreting the SNES UI in the context of their modern experience.

>Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I've played where poking around mundane rooms pays off.

Poking around mundane rooms in order to get rewards is almost a trope in SNES RPGs - Final Fantasy in particular was full of "secrets" you could find.

In fact, this reminds me of a criticism of game UI (Ernest Adams, maybe?) which is that its not obvious that you have to shoot crates in order to get health, or try to interact with not obviously interactive elements of the game world for hidden rewards. Experienced players quickly find these things by shooting everything and trying to interact with everything, because they are familiar with the trope from other games, but it makes the game less accessible to newcomers - arguably bad UX.

<comment><USER3> In a game, finding out how mechanics work and what you can do is exploration. Figuring out that you can combine a certain action with a certain object to get a new result is exciting and interesting. When you got the whole game figured out, know how everything works and what to expect — isn't that the point where you abandon it?

<comment><USER2> I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

Consider the game of 'Go' \- there's a very small amount of rules, and once you know those, you know all the rules, but there is still a lot of higher- level strategy to learn. It seems bad to not know all the rules, but good to have more strategy to discover...

It would obviously be disappointing to then be playing an opponent, and discover they are about to beat you with a rule that's new to you; or to have played the game for a long time and then realise there was a move you never knew you could make. Watch someone learn about capturing _en passant_ in chess for the first time from their opponent, during a game they are invested in...

At the same time, learning a new 'strategy' is quite enjoyable and delightful - maybe even if you learn it as an opponent beats you with it – as long as it is something you _could have reasonably discovered yourself, even if you didn 't._ (?)

A disappointed sensation like "oh, I never knew you could do that" is bad; but "oh wow, I never realised you could do _that_ " is good.

What's the difference between these 'rules' you should know, and 'strategies' to discover? Is there a real difference? You are ultimately just choosing an action from a constrained set of candidate actions in both cases; in one case not knowing the full action set is bad, and another it's good.

Clearly, you can think of a game at multiple different valid levels of abstraction - 'you can push these controller buttons'; 'you can move up, down, left or right'; 'you can sneak up behind the enemy'; 'stealth is the best strategy' etc. Clearly, at some levels, not knowing all the actions is frustrating; whereas at other levels, discovering new higher-level actions is delightful.

So, which is shooting the crate to find a medkit?

It's not completely clear, but I can see how people would think it is a hidden rule, something they could not have been expected to realise themselves, but which was obvious to players of other games - a missing word, rather than a delightful high-level behaviour that falls out of the interaction language the game has taught them.

<comment><USER4> I think there's a difference between single player games, and competitive multiplayer here.

(Even further: in single player games, people often even intentionally handicap themselves. Either directly for the challenge, or because they are role-playing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How about another one?

Simple design that teaches people how to use it through doing stuff rather than forced tutorials. Old school Mario games were great here, the level design basically taught you how to play the game without as much as a message box in sight.

Unfortunately, a lot of modern apps seem to be some overly confusing mess that try to rectify UX design issues by use of tutorials and pop ups and arrows and what not, rather than simplifying things so people can figure them out on their own.

<comment><USER6> new school mario is even better. I bet you saw this [http://www.dorkly.com/post/73379/this-guy-makes-a-good- case-...](http://www.dorkly.com/post/73379/this-guy-makes-a-good-case-for-the- impressive-level-design-of-super-mario-3d-world)

in case you haven't enjoy the ride.

<comment><USER5> Yep, saw that video. It's a good overview of how the level design in Super Mario 3D World works, and well worth watching for anyone interested in designing good games.

I mostly only mentioned old school because of my disappointment with Mario Galaxy 2 and the 'tutorial disc', which was one of the most pointless additions ever:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM)

Still, least it made for a funny parody:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I absolutely loathe 'modern' UX design, not only because it seems to get _too_ out of the way most of the time, to the point where I am struggling to find out how to _locate_ the damn interface to begin using it in the first place. I am the go-to tech guy in most friend/family circles as many of you are, and the 'hidden' modern UI interfaces become a compounded problem when I am trying to help people over the phone. Back in the day, when helping my family first use Chrome, I'd say "click the gear icon, in the top right" \- and they would find it with near 100% accuracy. Now it doesn't matter what I say... "hamburger icon" (give me a break), "three stacked bars", "triple bars" \- the settings menu is no longer iconic, and modern UX has become a verbal wasteland when trying to explain anything over the phone. "Hover over the little down triangle thing to the right, then the menu pops up" ... "swipe near the edge of your screen, not too far to the right though, just tap the very edge and the menu comes up" ... these kind of explanations should not need to exist if the UX was good. At least the old games you could walk your buddy through the selections over the phone.

<comment><USER8> I first saw the term hamburger menu several months back and I thought, "huh?" as I had no idea what it meant. I had to go search the net to find out that they meant those three stacked bars. Why not just call it that? It doesn't really look like a hamburger.

<comment><USER9> I had to do the same when I first heard it, a sure sign that the metaphor fails, and most of the search results were pieces explaining what a terrible idea it is. Just searched again, yep, nearly all the first page is why you should never implement it, along with BK and a stack exchange "what's the lined menu icon called".

Better question, why not just stick with a GUI element that can be described succinctly? A gear perhaps.

<comment><USER10> If the top Google results all tell you that you shouldn't do it, then why do so many people do it?

In fact I'm writing this on Firefox, which has one of those things in the browser UI...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know the article was talking about broad design cues, but there was one specific menu design from that era that I thought was fairly good, the ring menu system Secret of Mana.

This clip from Secret of Evermore (same developers, different series) shows the ring menu system:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0)

Also, slightly off-topic but I'm not sure the article it mentions about Minesweeper being designed to teach people how to use GUIs is accurate, though it could have been an unintended consequence. IIRC Minesweeper was written by a Microsoft intern, I'll try to find the Reddit thread where the author discussed the story behind its development.

<comment><USER12> I rather liked the ring menu system; one could go through the various menus quite quickly, (and with pleasant, contextually matched sound effects!) It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to.

I like to imagine a world where _Secret of Evermore_ did well, financially. It doesn't help that it followed in the footsteps of _Chrono Trigger_ earlier in the year, _Final Fantasy 6_ the year before that, and then one more year for its spiritual predecessor, _Secret of Mana_. The bar was so high! Part of its lack of success, though, was a pretty broken combat system (unbalanced), and a poorly implemented "search here" command, which rendered the player needing to swing their weapon spastically when trying to find hidden items. A cool feature with poor UX really hurt that game.

Still, _SoE_ had some really great art, and a decent story. What a great first entry into his professional career for Jeremy Soule (composer), as a teenager just out of high school. Who needs college when there's opportunities available like that? ;)

<comment><USER11> > "It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it > could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it > well, and those are the methods of input most catered to."

Design decisions for software should take the interface into consideration. That said, I do think ring menu systems can work on PC and mobile. Some mobile apps have a context menu triggered by a long press, I could see a ring-type menu working there. As for PC, I'm not aware of that many examples, but the pop up palette in Krita is one example that could be easily adapted to be closer to a SoM/SoE-style ring menu.

[http://youtu.be/jAJmPwe6IoU](http://youtu.be/jAJmPwe6IoU)

<comment><USER4> Lots of menus on PC can be navigated with the arrow keys, and the highlighted items wraps around when you hit the top of bottom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is crazy timing. I'm playing Chrono Trigger right now and the thing that struck me as fantastic UX this playthrough is that Crono shakes his head when you're trying to go somewhere you can't. I found it particularly useful when walking on the beams in the Arris Dome. It maps pretty well to the design pattern of shaking prompts when entering invalid input such as an incorrect password.

</comment><comment><USER14> As an example of startlingly good UX in Japanese RPGs, I point to the modern persona games, which somehow manage the thankless feat of providing copious amounts of information, but always in a very useful way, as well as helping clear away the mundanities of the game (remembering enemy weakspots and such)

<comment><USER4> We can also learn from boardgames. The technology is mostly cardboard, though.

For example Eclipse manages to make the huge amount of bookkeeping in the game bearable with some very clever 'UI' on the player mats.

([https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse))

Though for the really good designs you don't even notice the UI and bookkeeping any more.

For example: auctions are a tempting design choice when making a game, since they automatically balance the price of good and bad options available. But, they take comparatively long to resolve---so distract from the core of the game (unless it's specifically an auction game)

Instead some games introduce new options with a heavy mark-up and lower their price every turn. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Contrary to what the article says I think kids/people did read the instruction manuals back then. Some old games didn't have certain super moves mentioned in the game at all. That probably allowed UX design to be terrible in places.

</comment><comment><USER16> All your base are belong to us</comment>


Paul Graham: The World's 7 Most Powerful Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleperlroth/2011/11/02/paul-graham-the-worlds-7-most-powerful-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> I was hoping for something a bit more surprising in the list, but it's a defensible choice. It's very close to just a list of the _richest_ tech entrepreneurs ordered by net worth, though, with a few swaps and one non- super-rich addition (Gordon Moore).

For reference, these are the top 7 richest tech entrepreneurs by net worth (as per the Forbes 400): 1. Bill Gates, 2. Larry Ellison, 3. Jeff Bezos, 4. Mark Zuckerberg, 5. Sergey Brin, 6. Larry Page, 7. Michael Dell

And this is the "most powerful entrepreneurs" list: 1. Bill Gates, 2. Larry Page, 3. Sergey Brin, 4. Larry Ellison, 5. Mark Zuckerberg, 6. Jeff Bezos, 7. Gordon Moore</comment>


White House Proposes Slashing Tax Rates for Individuals and Businesses - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/us/politics/trump-tax-cut-plan.html <comment><USER2> This is a purely political story, though it might look like an important policy or news story. It isn't.

Every administration proposes a tax plan. But, of course, tax policy is set by Congress. The President is (usually) the ostensible leader of the party, and this President's party controls both houses of Congress, but by both rule and statute they'll need a filibuster-proof majority to pass most of these policies --- and, because the "popular" parts of this proposal will balloon the deficit, they probably won't get unanimous support from their own party.

This is all academic anyways. It seems somewhat traditional for the administration to propose a fairytale tax plan, and traditional for that proposal not to have much impact on policy.

<comment><USER3> > by both rule and statute they'll need a filibuster-proof majority to pass > most of these policies

Couldn't the republicans use reconciliation (in which only a simple majority vote is needed) to push tax reform?

<comment><USER2> No. By statute, you can't use reconciliation to pass a bill that raises the deficit 10 years out. It's not even a Senate rule they can "go nuclear" on: it's a law.

<comment><USER4> Is there a political cost or statutory block to doing a Bush-tax-cuts-style 10 year expiring plan? Regardless of the merits, most of those cuts are still law, and the GOP was able to extract concessions for the parts that were allowed to expire.

Once in place, tax cuts are hard to reverse even through inaction.

<comment><USER2> The Bush tax cuts expired in 10 years because the deficit projections allowed it to last that long. Projections for this proposal --- which again I think we should treat as fictitious, like every administration's first tax plan --- give it 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not an American but this is interesting....

> The estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, which Mr. Trump has railed > against for years, would be repealed under his plan.

The AMT is one of the largest issues for people calling their stock options on non liquid companies.

> Mr. Mnuchin offered few specifics about the blueprint, other than confirming > that its centerpiece will be a 15 percent business tax rate

This is also very interesting, and I think, its the core of Trump's tax plan. Instead of giving corporations a tax holiday to bring back offshore money, just lower the tax rate to create a permanent tax holiday.

If the numbers are to be believed ( 250 Billion for Apple alone) then this could add alot of money to the US economy over the next few years. Look for a wave of US company to US company acquisitions to spring up if this comes to fruition.

Event driven hedge funds are going to have a bonanza with this!

It might even be enough to make the economy jump going into the next election cycle.

<comment><USER6> >The AMT is one of the largest issues for people calling their stock options on non liquid companies.

This cannot be stated loudly enough.

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER6> If a company (startup or otherwise) is private, then stock options holders can't liquidate their shares. However, they are still required to pay taxes on the capital gains when they exercise, which can be huge if the company has grown exponentially.

Not only do you have to take the risk of the stock/company crashing and burning but you have to pay in advance the taxes on the "gains" which you can't actually cash out. It's a trap, only thing you can do is stay at your company until liquidity occurs for shareholders.

<comment><USER8> I don't think I fully comprehend - do stock options holders need to pay tax even if they have not added actual money to their bank account?

Why would someone have to pay in advance taxes on a gain that has not actually happened? If I don't have the money in my bank account yet, how can I pay this huge amount of gains tax even?

<comment><USER9> > Do stock options holders need to pay tax even if they have not added actual > money to their bank account?

Yes. The options are converted into shares, which is considered a taxable event by the IRS. Ordinarily this isn't a problem because you can sell some fraction of the stock that you gained to pay for the taxes. But if the company is not public, you have no easy way to sell the shares.

> If I don't have the money in my bank account yet, how can I pay this huge > amount of gains tax even?

That's exactly the problem. Many employees at unicorn startups are stuck in "golden handcuffs." If they leave, they oftentimes can't exercise their options due to the taxes, in which case they lose them. This forces them to stay in the hopes that one day the company will go public and they can exercise their options.

<comment><USER10> Just to make this clear (correct me if I'm wrong)... If you buy stock at market value, and it increases in value over time, you only pay tax when you sell it. But if you exercise a stock option (in which you purchase stock for a [typically] lower price than current value), the difference in value is considered the same as if you received any other non-monetary income (i.e, that difference in value is treated the same as a stock grant), in which you would have to pay tax in the current year. Did that about sum it up?

<comment><USER9> That's my understanding of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Repealing the estate tax? The tax instituted by our founding fathers, specifically as a safeguard against the creation of an aristocratic class? A tax that ONLY affects people with more than 5 million at time of death?

For shame.

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States#History)

According to the IRS, a temporary stamp tax in 1797 applied a tax of varying size depending on the size of the bequest, ranging from 25 cents for a bequest between $50–$100, to 1 dollar for each $500. The tax was repealed in 1802. In the 19th century, the Revenue Act of 1862 and the War Revenue Act of 1898 also imposed rates, but were each repealed shortly thereafter. The modern estate tax was enacted in 1916.

<comment><USER11> The founding fathers enabled the tax. It was re-instated and repealed into and through the gilded age. It was finally re-enacted at the beginning of the 20th century, and has remained in place since.

<comment><USER12> > The founding fathers enabled the tax.

They repealed the tax 5 years later. Also, it was $1 per $500 (0.2%).

> It was re-instated

as part of the Tax act of 1862 to help fund the Civil War and repealed after the war was paid for.

That history does not scream "must prevent creation of dynastic wealth!" to me.

<comment><USER11> straw man, it was the stated reason they originally implemented the tax, and has been the reason people have defended it since.

<comment><USER13> That's not a straw man. You said:

> The tax instituted by our founding fathers, specifically as a safeguard > against the creation of an aristocratic class?

fr0sty essentially said that your original statement should be amended to something like: "The tax instituted by our founding fathers, specifically (so they said) as a safeguard against the creation of an aristocratic class, and then repealed five years later to show that they weren't very serious about preventing aristocracy (or no longer believed in the tax as a cure for it).

And a 0.2% tax rate is directly relevant to the actual effectiveness of the tax at preventing the aristocracy (as in, not very effective at all).

You also said:

> A tax that ONLY affects people with more than 5 million at time of death?

But that's the current state of affairs _now_. When originally implemented, it applied to estates as small as $50. Placing that in the very next sentence to the founding fathers has the potential to be misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They always mention how the inheritance tax hurts family farms...

<comment><USER15> The current exemption is more than $5 million. People saying that are full of shit.

Sure, someone inheriting a $6 million plot of land will owe taxes on $600,000 of income. I wonder if they could secure a loan somehow?

<comment><USER16> > The current exemption is more than $5 million. People saying that are full > of shit.

Have you looked at land, livestock, infrastructure, and equipment costs they tax? People saying that are not "full of shit" and an unexpected death can ruin not only the farming family but the folks they hire.

<comment><USER15> An enterprise valued at more than $5 million, with lots of employees, is not a "family farm", at least not in the traditional sense.

I totally agree that a tax on inheritances above $5 million will tend to impact family owned businesses worth $5 million though.

<comment><USER16> Actually, in North Dakota it is a family farm since we specifically outlaw corporate farms. $5 million when the combine (or some tractors if renting the combines) is a $1 million plus some storage bins and the per acre cost of farmland is not a big farm. So, in the traditional sense, farming is really easy to tax infrastructure activity. That is why that tax is so hated. Farms are damn expensive.

<comment><USER17> Is it something specific to farming?

How is that different from, for example, $5,000,000 to buy a lot, build a gym, and stock it with equipment?

<comment><USER16> Don't know, never really talked to a gym owner before, but my suspicion is that it probably is a huge problem for anyone who builds up assets (that a tax person values highly) to do the job but not a lot of actual cash to pay the taxes. I think land or infrastructure intensive activities are probably all in the same boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't tell if the 15% applies to LLCs. Anyone know? Is it worth becoming an s corp otherwise?

Would you still have the self employment tax?

<comment><USER18> The proposal seems to state that pass-through entities will be subject to the 15% tax rate as well. From what I've read so far that would seem to mean that all business income from one's LLC would be taxed at 15%, and there wouldn't be any personal income tax to pay on top of that.

<comment><USER2> That seems improbable, because LLC owners usually recognize _all_ of their income as pass-through distributions; this would be akin to a capped 15% tax on all wealthy people.

The reason you can propose drastically cutting the corporate tax is that it's a tax on money that is again taxed as income when it reaches households. The whole point of an LLC is not to do that.

LLCs that retain lots of income in the corporation indefinitely can elect corporate taxation, to which the proposed reduced rate would presumably apply. But when the LLC distributes that money back to its members, it is again taxed as income. In any case, that may be the basis for this proposal applying to LLCs.

<comment><USER18> 100% agreed, which is why I was pretty surprised to read that in the article but we'll see if that's actually the intended understanding of this proposal.

For reference, here is the excerpt: "Beyond cutting the tax rate to 15 percent for large corporations, which now pay a rate of 35 percent, Mr. Trump also wants that rate for a broad range of firms known as pass-through entities — including hedge funds, real estate concerns like Mr. Trump's and large partnerships — that currently pay taxes at individual rates, which top off at 39.6 percent."

Their specific mention of pass-through entities might mean that literally but it might have just been a more succinct way to group LLCs, LPs, and PLLPs.

<comment><USER19> I don't know where the NY Times gets that. It's not mentioned in the actual text of Trump's plan:

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/full-text-of-trump- administ...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/full-text-of-trump- administration-tax-reform-principles-2017-04-26)

<comment><USER2> That's the précis the White House gave to journalists. The WSJ covered this in more detail. Either way: don't hold your breath for an (absurd!) 15% cap on people who make money through LLCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Raising the standard deduction is nice.

Ideally I'd like to see it drastically raised, like no tax on each person's first $30k. I'm surprised the democrats have never tried to push a policy like this, its the type of policy that would get support from many republican voters.

<comment><USER15> Deductions apply to highest bracket income. The "first" $30,000 sort of implies lowest bracket income (because if you stopped working after earning that much, it'd reflect your entire earnings).

<comment><USER20> The standard deduction is effectively a 0% tax bracket.

<comment><USER15> It's income with a 0% tax rate but the impact on effective rates is different than a 0% bracket; it lowers effective rates more for people that have income in higher brackets.

A 0% bracket has the same impact regardless of income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't mind paying less in taxes.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DEFICIT???

The deficit hasn't mattered to anyone before now, esp not in the last 8 years. Can't get any worse than it has been already for years now.

<comment><USER22> It matters to the GOP when they're not holding the Presidency, apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just because the tax rate is lowered doesn't mean companies will repatriate their money here. I think we need a law that penalizes companies for offshoring their money. If you want to be an American company, headquartered in America, then it should cost companies like Apple to offshore that money. Carrots and sticks should be used to bring that money back, but a lower corporate tax rate is a start, but not the solution.

<comment><USER15> They don't offshore money, they do profitable business in other countries and then don't want to pay taxes to move the proceeds to the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How are we going to pay for the great wall of Mexico again? No, I don't believe Mexico will pay for it...with cash I mean.

</comment><comment><USER25> If I'm reading this right, I could make a partnership (LLC or S-corp) and use it for normal activities, investment, consulting, etc., and I'd pay 15% _total_. This is nuts. Heck, Uber and Lyft drivers could set up as passthroughs and save a bunch. This is nuts.

For the record: I think slashing the corporate rate is a good idea, but only if long-term capital gains are taxed high enough that the overall rate is reasonable.

<comment><USER26> No, that's not how taxes work in the US. Business taxes are before, and in addition to your income tax.

Single member LLCs get special treatment - you only pay personal income taxes and self employment taxes, but not business income taxes.

But let's talk about business income tax. Let's say you have a company that you own but do not work for (so I can skip payroll taxes). The company does $2,000,000 in sales at a cost of $1,700,000. The company has a profit of $300,000, which it currently pays corporate taxes of $120,000 on. After corporate taxes, you take home $180,000 in personal income. Then you pay personal income taxes of about $62,000 if you live in CA. You end up with $118,000 out of the original $300,000 profit.

This double taxation is a reason many people support ditching seperate corporate taxes altogether or at least lowering it substantially.

<comment><USER25> > No, that's not how taxes work in the US. Business taxes are before, and in > addition to your income tax.

Businesses are either taxed as corporations (so they pay their own taxes and owners treat them as capital assets) or as partnerships (so their taxes are rolled into their owners' taxes but owners can distribute assets tax free).

Trump is talking about _changing_ the tax code, and partnerships don't currently have a tax rate, since they don't pay the corporate tax. It sounds to me like his proposal is to lower the rate paid by their owners.

> Single member LLCs get special treatment - you only pay personal income > taxes and self employment taxes, but not business income taxes.

Multi-member partnerships, too. AFAIK the only thing that's special about single-member partnerships is that they don't file separately. This has no major effect on taxes paid.

<comment><USER26> What the White House memo actually said was "15% business tax rate". I don't see anything in what the White House actually said about replacing personal taxes with business taxes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When was Super Mario Bros. released? No one knows - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/167392/sad_but_true_we_cant_prove_when_.php

<comment><USER2> To save you some time:

Japan: September 13, 1985

US: October 18, 1985 (NES launch) or November 17, 1985

</comment><comment><USER3> I would think a simple store receipt would be able to settle this. Maybe one will turn up.

<comment><USER4> Would the release have been discussed in the monthly issue of Nintendo Power? Or maybe the magazine didn't exist in 1985?

<comment><USER5> The first issue of Nintendo Power was in 1988 and on the cover was Super Mario 2.

[http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/08/download-the-first- issue-o...](http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/08/download-the-first-issue-of- nintendo-power-1988-in-pdf/)

<comment><USER6> Oh wow. I remember that issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> according to this wired article [http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1018nintendo- nes-...](http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1018nintendo-nes- launches/) Super Mario Bros., although it had just been released in Japan, was not yet ready for America ( on October 18, 1985)

</comment><comment><USER8> personally, seeing as how it was already released in japan on september 13, it is not all that interesting to know when exactly it was released in other markets. in the grand scheme of things, there is only one "release date".</comment>


Ask HN: From a semantic perspective, how do you feel about bootstrap? - <AUTHOR>

This isn't about whether to use bootstrap or not. Both sides of the argument have their place. But I just wanted to know what developers and designers feel about the way in which bootstrap has to be integrated. The multiple classes, the use of classes like row, col- that break away from the rules of keeping thing semantic etc. How could this be improved? Can it be improved? Is it a shortcoming of CSS standard or a fault of the bootstrap project? Your thoughts. <comment><USER2> With LESS and mixins, you can apply bootstrap features/grid to semantic classes. [https://www.ostraining.com/blog/coding/bootstrap-right- way/](https://www.ostraining.com/blog/coding/bootstrap-right-way/)

Personally, for the types of projects I work on, its more productive to just use the bootstrap classes. It's not "right", but it's more productive for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's quicker to use the classes, but semantically, you can use the LESS/SASS mixins they provide to remove the classes from the markup entirely.

[https://coderwall.com/p/wixovg](https://coderwall.com/p/wixovg)

</comment><comment><USER4> How do I feel? Horribly.

Not even just the semantic perspective, but from the mess it is afterwards. Mixins is a good way, but I prefer the different semantics that OOCSS can add to CSS. Pragmatic semantics.</comment>