Yeah, this was a bug I accidentally seem to have introduced a bit ago. I apologize. The correct ratio I wanted to use was the one that Tufte CSS uses, which is 21px size to 30px height, which is a much more reasonable ratio. (This will be fixed in the next few days)
Looks like LW 2.0 is using a 20px font size, and 25px line height, which is in range of what is recommended.
Is “what was recommended” similar to “mistakes were made”? It blames it on someone else, while leaving the “someone else” unnamed.
Existing recommendations about text size (and particularly, about not fitting too much text on a line) do not consider that Lesswrong has a different usage pattern than most sites. There are references dating back to 1971, but I can’t figure out if any scientific studies were actually conducted at the time to determine this, and at any rate, printed text is not the web.
Also, beware of using some recommendation just because it’s easy to measure.
This is basically breaking the site in order to fit “recommendations”. LW 2.0 is bad, and everyone involved should feel bad. It is fundamentally designed around a bad idea.
That seems rather extreme. What specific bad idea do you mean?
(Context here suggests that it’s something like “the idea that typographical choices for LW2 should match those for the web as a whole”, but even if LW2′s design makes that assumption and even if it’s a bad assumption it doesn’t seem fundamental enough to justify your last paragraph.)
So LW2 (as a whole, it seems) is bad and everyone involved should feel bad … because the people who designed it think that web typography is a mature science whose recommendations can be taken at face value?
Maybe I’m being dim, but that seems really strange to me. It isn’t clear to me what even makes you confident that they think that; I’m not sure what it means to say that something is designed around that idea (it can be designed via a process that assumes that idea, I guess, but that really isn’t the same); and getting from there to “LW2 is bad and everyone involved should feel bad” seems like an enormous leap.
I wonder whether I’m missing some vital context here.
The recommendation by “someone else” is anything but anonymous, adamzerner’s comment quotes and links directly from Matthew Butterick, author of the online book that provides said guidance (and also explicitly makes the point about print vs. online).
While I fully agree with you about strong distaste for the visual design of LW2 (at least using default display settings in the current beta) you have failed to make a valid argument here.
Looks like LW 2.0 is using a 20px font size, and 25px line height, which is in range of what is recommended.
NN Group supports what you’re saying, although the text on LW 2.0 looks plenty dark to me.
Agreed.
Correction: the body text has font size 19px, line height 32px (ratio of ~168%). This is definitely too widely spaced.
Yeah, this was a bug I accidentally seem to have introduced a bit ago. I apologize. The correct ratio I wanted to use was the one that Tufte CSS uses, which is 21px size to 30px height, which is a much more reasonable ratio. (This will be fixed in the next few days)
This is fixed now.
It might depend on screen size.
It does not.
At https://www.lesserwrong.com/sequences, when I open up Chrome’s dev tools on my 13 inch Macbook Pro with a macOS Sierra OS, the computed value of font-size for the paragraph of main text is 20px, and the computed value of line-height is 25px. But on https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/AmaWMMWPzuQ62Ernf/against-individual-iq-worries I’m getting the same values you mentioned. So I assume it at least depends on what type of post is being displayed.
Is “what was recommended” similar to “mistakes were made”? It blames it on someone else, while leaving the “someone else” unnamed.
Existing recommendations about text size (and particularly, about not fitting too much text on a line) do not consider that Lesswrong has a different usage pattern than most sites. There are references dating back to 1971, but I can’t figure out if any scientific studies were actually conducted at the time to determine this, and at any rate, printed text is not the web.
Also, beware of using some recommendation just because it’s easy to measure.
This is basically breaking the site in order to fit “recommendations”. LW 2.0 is bad, and everyone involved should feel bad. It is fundamentally designed around a bad idea.
That seems rather extreme. What specific bad idea do you mean?
(Context here suggests that it’s something like “the idea that typographical choices for LW2 should match those for the web as a whole”, but even if LW2′s design makes that assumption and even if it’s a bad assumption it doesn’t seem fundamental enough to justify your last paragraph.)
The idea that the study of typographical choices for the web is a mature science whose (nontrivial) recommendations can all be taken at face value.
So LW2 (as a whole, it seems) is bad and everyone involved should feel bad … because the people who designed it think that web typography is a mature science whose recommendations can be taken at face value?
Maybe I’m being dim, but that seems really strange to me. It isn’t clear to me what even makes you confident that they think that; I’m not sure what it means to say that something is designed around that idea (it can be designed via a process that assumes that idea, I guess, but that really isn’t the same); and getting from there to “LW2 is bad and everyone involved should feel bad” seems like an enormous leap.
I wonder whether I’m missing some vital context here.
The recommendation by “someone else” is anything but anonymous, adamzerner’s comment quotes and links directly from Matthew Butterick, author of the online book that provides said guidance (and also explicitly makes the point about print vs. online).
While I fully agree with you about strong distaste for the visual design of LW2 (at least using default display settings in the current beta) you have failed to make a valid argument here.