[Docs] Better body font choice

[ionelmc]

The are some issues that make the docs very hard to read:

• Not high color contrast
• The lack of contrast is exacerbated by thin sans-serif font choice for body. Thin sans-serifs should be only used for fancy headings. Now I still can't see shit even if I zoom in, cause the font is god damn thin.
• Lack of typography choices - there's sans-serifs everywhere, everywhere ! It's like I'm looking at bowl of oats. Use a serif font for body text. Georgia is acceptable, Palatino Linotype is exceptional (if you can afford it).

[ionelmc]

The oatmeal:

[ionelmc]

And fixed:

[zpao]

I'll respectfully disagree on the serif here. I often do prefer it for body typefaces, but not here. We won't change that at this point. We'll consider it if we redesign.

As for colors, our contrast ratio on the normal body text is actually 8.69:1. That's well above the WCAG AAA level.

The font weights are a bit light (in fact it is the "light" variant), we could probably do to drop the font-weight: 300 bit. 400 is normal.

[ionelmc]

Well ofcourse, it's not so easy, you can't just change the body to Palatino. You need to fix the menus, navigation too.

Then again, you do use the same font everywhere, something is definitely wrong. You could explain your design choices instead of respectfully disagreeing ignoring feedback - there might be other ways to improve readability.

[zpao]

disagreeing ≠ disrespecting ≠ ignoring (I can edit too)

[ionelmc]

You don't need to reply to the ticket if you don't have the time to explain why it's like that. No one expects you to take action. But if you do, you should argument your disagreement, otherwise it's just disrespectful to disregard my feedback. You wouldn't do that at your workplace would you ... just saying. I wouldn't have called you out if didn't have that fake "respectfully disagree" sugarcoating in your response - is all.

[zpao]

My job is to handle issues. I could have just closed this issue entirely without any sort of response. That's rude. Instead I told you what we would and would not do here given the multitude of constraints we're working under. I really did appreciate the feedback, I did not disregard it. We're going to make a change based on it.

Design is such a personal & difficult thing to do such that everybody agrees it looks right. There's rarely an objective right and wrong. For example, I don't like the text shadows on your website. I find your screenshot harder to read than bumping the font-weight on Proxima Nova. Does that make me wrong? Is Apple wrong for changing the system font from Lucida to Helvetica? Google is probably using the wrong shade of blue.

Honestly, most of our design decisions came from a mockup a designer made in his spare time 18 months ago and we've outgrown some of them. We haven't spent much time really deviating at a big picture level. That's why some of the things are the way they are. When we have time, we'll redesign. That's been a pretty low priority. If there are actionable incremental improvements we can make in the meantime, great.

If you have constructive criticism, keep it coming.

[ionelmc]

Thanks for elaborating. I don't necessarily want it to be exactly like in the screenshot. How about darker color for body (p { color: #000; }) ? The fonts don't have 300 weight (unless there's another font name) and at 400 it looks quite different. Pure black would keep roughly the same looks but with improved contrast.

[sophiebits]

Currently I see:

With the font-weight: 300 removed, I see:

Maybe we can make the text darker, though probably we don't want to go all the way to #000. Right now it's #484848 and looks noticeably non-black (presumably intentionally). #333 is definitely higher-contrast but looks almost black to my eyes. (You'll note that almost no one uses black text – for example, Google's search results are #545454 on white.)

[ionelmc]

Well yes but they don't use thin fonts, and they have white background. I can solve this with user styles, but I really wanted to have it fixed for other people too.

[sophiebits]

My second screenshot shows non-thin fonts; do you disagree?

[ionelmc]

No, that's quite good. Can you change to that?

Thanks,
-- Ionel M.

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 3:52 AM, Ben Alpert notifications@github.com
wrote:

My second screenshot shows non-thin fonts; do you disagree?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1926 (comment).