Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.
I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.
Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.
Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.
Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.
There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.
So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
> Justified text is bad on the web.
Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.
Beause in print you would typically use your publishing software to adjust various things, like where hypenated word breaks should happen. This is much trickier in digital media, and usually just isn't done, resulting in ugly word spacing.
I believe this will be fixed by this year - you have smart hyphenation going to come natively in CSS. It was always possible using the JS hyphenator lib.
> Justified text is bad on the web. ...so right ragged text is always more readable.
I disagree. I like justified text on the web as well as in print. To me, jagged right hand side of the text column is more disturbing than uneven spaces between words. So, you cannot universally declare that justified text is an accessibility issue.
Accessibility issue doesn’t imply universality. Ideally, this should be a user preference setting.
I'd like to see some sources on this. I've seen good and bad examples of justified text, and it's also highly dependent on the font as well.
> There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
And pegs the CPU and drains the battery.
Those animations wont "peg" any relevant CPU, and they clearly had a purpose that was not about wasting cycles or battery.
They still end up doing that, regardless of the intention. It would be better if they only animated once, or just when you hover over them instead of constantly.
On mobile there's far too much white space between sections, there are almost entire screens of nothing.
Disagree on the animations. They are both beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point.
Your other criticism I agree with.
I agree that they are beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point. I really, really love them. I'd love to have them on my wall.
That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.
Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:
1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.
2) You're too small of a segment to care about.
But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.
I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.
Probably got a lot of neurospicy folks here on Hackernews, so there's less of a stigma associated with it, and more people familiar with the kind of sensory issues you deal with.
I feel you. I can't have autocomplete on when I'm coding, partly because having video game stuff happening in my field of view while I'm trying to focus throws me off. I'd rather just remember the name.
There has to be a middle ground though. For instance, I am definitely the opposite; I would feel as the site would be less usable to me if it just ran once and I had to reload the page or spam click replay if I wanted to see the animation again. I'd imagine people who are slow readers or with dyslexia would feel the same, and would make similar aurguement that you are making that them auto playing the animation assuming everyone had same reading speed when the animation is in focus are not taking thier cohort in consideration due to the small size of the group. I am sure that there are some colorblindness condition that would find the colors of the site difficult to distinguish as well. I would be be more emphatic to your view point if this was a school/employment/healthcare/goverment document, but it isnt realistic to say a primarily artistic/design project has to cater to everyone's specific accessibility concerns.
I believe the middle ground is implementing `prefers-reduced-motion` alternatives for the looping animations.
Then it would still loop for you, but not negatively impact people who are using reduced motion settings in their browser/OS.
I’m not autistic and I agree that nonstop animations are distracting and detrimental.
I hope you didn’t think I meant to imply that this is only bad for autistic people. I know that many other people have the same issues. But when I mention these problems to people that don’t have difficulty, sometimes they assume it’s just me and a tiny minority.
I just didn’t want people to interpret your comment as only autistic people being bothered by this.
Looked up the author's main site:
https://alcohollick.com/
> Dan Hollick.
> Design, technically.
Blogs about using Figma to create things (like this).