Our mind is not a camera. Seeing is not a passive act. We see what we expect to see, or, as Anaïs Nin put it so beautifully: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

The idea that our perception is as much a result of what we are able to know as of what we expect to find is not new. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is based on this insight:

“Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but […] let us once try whether we do not get further […] by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.”

In the meantime, cognitive psychology has followed Kant’s “Copernican Revolution-in-reverse”. Our perception is defined by what cognitive psychologists call a “perceptual set”.

“Perceptual set is a tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others. […] perceptual set works in two ways:
1. The perceiver has certain expectations and focuses attention on particular aspects of the sensory data […]
2. The perceiver knows how to classify, understand and name selected data and what inferences to draw from it […].”
— Perceptual Set, by Saul McLeod

The way expectation can influence our cognitive set can be illustrated quite easily:

Depending on how you read the diagram, you will read the characters in the middle as “13” or “B”.

“The physical stimulus ‘13’ is the same in each case but is perceived differently because of the influence of the context in which it appears. We EXPECT to see a letter in the context of other letters of the alphabet, whereas we EXPECT to see numbers in the context of other numbers.”
— ibid.

The influence of past experience on perception can be demonstrated in the following puzzling experience:

In this case past experience of hearing or reading these common phrases can influence your perception, and make you ignore the errors that seem obvious once you have spotted them. Professional writers will probably notice, but many still have a hard time. If you failed the above test, and now see what you previously didn’t, you will immediately nod in agreement to the following thought:

“…we don’t see that we don’t see.”
— The Tree of Knowledge, Maturana & Varela

Our perceptual set can change short-term, for instance when we are hungry our sensitivity to the smell of food is strengthened. The way experience affects long-term perceptual sets can be studied by analyzing the different perceptive sets of professionals that are strongly influenced by what they know.

• Cooks and sommeliers are able to more clearly discern what they taste because through constant exposure they have improved senses, and also the vocabulary to express and discuss their impressions.
• When doctors look at X-rays, they see more because they know anatomy and what to look for in the mix of light and shadow. Over the years they have learned to more clearly discern slight differences in shape and shade that to us are indiscernible.
• When an architect enters a building, they see through the walls, and they understand the building as a four-dimensional space-time continuum.
• When fashion designers look at your outfit, they don’t simply see stylish clothes, they see cut, seam, material. They imagine how your clothes feel.
• When I open a web site or an app, I see information architecture, interaction design, typography… and I imagine the conversations between business, design, and technology that lead there.

Just like in the second experiment above, professionals see things that, while they are physically there, not everybody will perceive, unless they are pointed out.

Learning to see

Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse — once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can‘t expect to sell what you can’t explain.

This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.

“See with one eye, feel with the other.”
― Paul Klee

Claiming that you can’t see well if you are not a designer might sound condescending, or at least old-fashioned, but this is not a post about designer superiority. Designers are as superior in design as doctors in medicine, or hair dressers in cutting hair. Of course there are good and bad designers, doctors, and hairdressers, and most of us fall somewhere in between.

In reality, “designer” and “not designer” are not split into two separate groups. You can develop an eye for design without ever going to school or even having designed yourself, and you can pick up some serious knowledge about design from design books. There is no doubt that if your perceptual set is comparable to a web designer’s point of view, for example an architect or industrial designer, it will be easier for you to see design in the same way a web designer would.

However, as much as seeing mistakes is always easier than doing things right, you will always see more with practical experience than from passive observation. There is no better training than imitation. When you learn to draw you do not primarily learn to move your hand, first you need to learn to perceive light and shadow as they really are, not what you think they are.

“My approach to the artistic process is to trust my eyes, not my mind.”
— Kenn Backhaus

What applies to Backhaus doesn’t apply to Picasso:

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
— Picasso

Genius or mortal, you need to learn to discern what you see and what you think you see before you can paint either reality. The best way to learn to see is copying the masters. That applies to art as well as to any form of design.

By observing great examples of design with your own eyes, attempting to duplicate them with your own hand, you will feel, see, and eventually understand the invisible lines behind a great product at a deeper and deeper level. Some of these lines are more obvious, while others may be so delicate that the very designer that drew them might not consciously realize exactly why and how they happened.

I sometimes hear that once we know how things are made, we can’t create or enjoy them spontaneously anymore. As far as this concerns enjoyment, I completely disagree. For me the more I learn about the many ways of human expression — music, architecture, even sports, the more I enjoy observing the masters at work. How could one not enjoy observing functional beauty and the care for detail?

In the development of design skills, theory can get in the way of practice, but only until the theory becomes practice. With practice your intuition evolves, and the better you understand what you do, the deeper your intuition. Only once you do not consciously think about the theory anymore are you achieving mastery.

Design vs taste

Design as functional beauty is an expert’s view on products. However, for non-designers “well designed” tends to mean nothing more than “I like it” or “it looks good to me”. This likability comes from the visual appearance of the object, and is a personal expression of taste — a feeling, not an analysis. Feelings such as “I like it” (or “I have a headache”) are not debatable.

“Good design is when I like it”
— Everybody

There’s nothing wrong with non-designers talking of “design” in terms only of likability and aesthetics. Indeed, it would be so much easier for everybody if good designs always looked nice and bad designs looked bad! Yet there are many ugly designs that work well. Look at Google, Reddit, Craigslist, or even iOS with a free aesthetic eye and you won’t find much that is formally sublime. But these interfaces work, so they are well designed.

This is because despite the more common use of the word, the technical term “design” is not primarily about appearance, fashion, superficial beauty, or personal taste.

“[Design] is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs

We can draw two axes: the layperson’s version from “ugly” to “pretty”, and the designer’s version from “broken” to “works well”. This is not the only way to look at design, but it makes a lot of sense when we talk about user interface design:

There is plenty of good design that is ugly, and of course there’s good design that both works well and looks pretty. But a design that doesn’t work can never be substantially good — ugly and broken is just worthless crap, and pretty and broken is phony or kitsch:

“Was einer möchte und nicht kann, wird Kitsch”
→ Desire lacking ability turns to Kitsch
— Jan Tschichold (my translation)

“No design” in the literal sense is never a good quality of a product. “No design” is the diametral opposite of “beautiful design”. Taken literally “no design” is, simply put, nothing but shit.

Still, some people use “no design” to mean “not pretty but functional”, which can still be “good design” for a design expert. I’d advise designers to avoid the confusing expression “no design” when you mean “functional design”.

The above chart also shows why I dislike the expression “minimal design”. If you take the expression “minimal design” literally and just do what is absolutely necessary, you end up in the Bold quadrant.

But you want to be in the Beautiful quadrant. How do you get there? Usually you move from the center to the upper left into Bold. Because first of all you need to make it work. Once you are there, you need to move to the right. How do you get from Bold to Beautiful?

You don’t get there with cosmetics, you get there by taking care of the details, by polishing and refining what you have. This is ultimately a matter of trained taste, or what German speakers call Fingerspitzengefühl (literally, “finger-tip-feeling”).

I don’t know of a more beautiful illustration of Fingerspitzengefühl than this iconic portrait of the typographer Jan Tschichold.

Personal taste vs sophistication

As we covered above, the everyday notion of “design” doesn’t say much about design as functional beauty. Personally (dis-)liking a color, form, or image is not a matter of design, it is a question of personal taste. And as we all know, when it comes to personal taste there is not much to talk about there. But in addition to personal taste there is something that we can call “trained taste” or “sophistication”. Let me recapitulate:

• Whether I like pink or not, sugar in my coffee, red or white wine, these things are a matter of personal taste. These are personal preferences, and both designers and non-designers have them. This is the taste we shouldn’t bother discussing.
• Whether I set a text’s line height to 100% or 150% is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of knowing the principles of typography.
• However, whether I set a text’s line height at 150% or 145% is a matter of Fingerspitzengefühl; wisdom in craft, or sophistication.

Obviously, beginners in design don’t have the same “finger-tip feeling” as Mr. Tschichold. Also, while your intuition grows with training and experience, your need for conscious control over the design process gets smaller and smaller the better you get at it. It’s like dancing or playing an instrument — the more advanced you are, the less you need to consciously think about it. The less you think about what you do, the more virtuosity you will be able to achieve.

Typography is a great example of this. A well-set book following the principles of typography is easier to read than a sloppy book that doesn’t. The experience of reading becomes measurably easier and thus definitely more pleasurable with good typography. The untrained eye won’t notice the quality of typography, good or bad, as long as we are not comparing extremes.

“If you really hate someone, teach them to recognize bad kerning”
— XKCD

However, we will all enjoy reading a well-set text more, regardless of our typographic expertise. And the more typographic understanding you have, the more you’ll enjoy following the blueprint of a master’s trained taste. The same applies to well architected houses, finely engineered cars, and, to some degree, even to graphic design.

Form and so on

Now, despite our two axes above, there are many links between visual and functional beauty. From Dieter Rams’ “Ten principles for good design”:

“Good design is aesthetic — The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.”

Visual and functional beauty are not completely independent. Why is that?

A designer who is able to find the functional essence of a product will also likely find it in the visual aspects — they are usually interconnected, sometimes almost inevitably so.

Don’t count on an inevitable visual beauty when it comes to products with a heavy engineering aspect, like computers, web sites, or industrial complexes. There the conditions can be harsh, with the materials and standards we have to work with being bereft of much aesthetic refinement. In this kind of environment even a product with merely bold functionality can be perceived as visually pleasing, after you’ve used and understood the necessity of its bold shape.

Functional design is not completely self-evident on the object, it shows itself in use and effects the aesthetic perception. This is even more pronounced with software, where the outside hardly gives any hint how well (or even if) it actually works. However, this doesn’t mean that software needs to be hard to use. On the contrary. Whether we talk about hardware or software, usability is key, because:

“Good design makes a product useful — A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.”
— ibid.

Since professional designers focus on functional beauty and hard-to-spot detail, they can call things beautiful that may seem blunt, cold, or overly simple to a non-designer. This might explain why designers and non-designers sometimes come to like different things.

The more knowledge you have about a product’s inner workings, that is, if you can see the construction, the hidden mechanism, and glimpse the process leading to its current state, the easier it becomes to see its design. On the other hand, if the design process becomes too obvious, if the designer leaves too many traces on the product that shout “DESIGN!” without fulfilling its promise, it moves to the lower right quadrant of “kitsch”. Dieter Rams:

“Good design is unobtrusive — Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.”
— ibid.

Whether the inner workings show or not is far from a clear, unique distinction between good and bad design. If you shell the core interface though, you are probably moving again into the lower right corner.

“Good design is honest — It does not make a product appear more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.”
— ibid.

In general, more advanced design is also less visible unless you’re looking for it. The customer doesn’t need to be bothered with the sketching and production of the object in order to use it. What the customer wants to understand is how the product is supposed to be used. There, the designer should aim to be as transparent as possible. (Although there are a few exceptions, as we will see later.)

“Good design makes a product understandable — It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.”
— ibid.

This is why as a rule of thumb advanced design stays largely invisible to the untrained eye. However, while professionals are able to more clearly perceive and understand the logic of the design behind a product, anyone can assess the quality of design through use.

• You don’t need to see and understand the engineering of a car to know if it’s well designed or not. If it runs well, it’s probably well designed.
• You don’t need to see how and why your TV works as it does. If you can’t figure out how to use it, it’s crap.
• You don’t need to know the different layers of web design to find out if a web site works or not. All you need to know if it’s good design is if it works for you.

How well something works is the only obvious criteria of good design. To decide whether an everyday object works for us or not, we don’t need to be experts. We know it when we use it.

Again, this is a rule of thumb. That not everybody can sit down at a piano and play away like Glenn Gould is not the piano’s fault. Your skills need to match the tool you are using to assess its quality — you can’t test-drive a car if you haven’t learned to drive. But everyday objects should only require everyday skills. This is what makes web design so hard.

Obviously, good interface design — and all product design is to some degree interface design — needs to somehow indicate its purpose and use. This is often more a matter of dealing with standards and expectations than of innovation. This makes the first of Dieter Rams’ rules one the hardest:

“Good design is innovative — The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.”
— ibid.

If designers get too adventurous with usability, the result is generally a mishmash of quirky and hidden functions. When I say that good design is invisible, obviously I don’t mean obfuscating the use of a product by hiding the interface. Just like Dieter Rams doesn’t mean that good designers should be lazy when saying that good design is “as little design as possible”. Things that are hard to use by their intended audience are obviously bad design (I’m looking at you, adventurous “designer” faucets).

To make a product’s use obvious without distracting from the regular use is one of the the hardest parts of the design job. The solution is almost never in implicit or explicit instructions (I’m looking at you, iPad magazine apps), but of reducing learned interaction patterns into simpler, yet still common patterns.

The art of reduction is not just “cutting things”. The cutting is merely the reduction part. The art of reduction is cutting away what is not essential, and adding detail to what is.

“Good design is thorough down to the last detail — Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.”
— ibid.

Beauty in design is not found by adding prettiness to a bold, functional design, it’s adding detail to the essence, so the functional logic becomes more humane, refined, and clear. As Edward Tufte said: “To clarify, add detail.”

User Interfaces

Seeing the design of all but the simplest user interfaces is about as hard as seeing the blueprints of a building only by looking at it from the outside. Why? Isn’t the interface just what I see on a screen? Hell no!

The confusion between the common and the expert definitions of “design” goes hand in hand with the general fuzziness we face when dealing with the term “interface”. In everyday language an “interface” is not “the way you accomplish tasks with a product”, but just the functional aspects of a product’s surface — the buttons and controls. When it comes to screen design, people often use the term “interface” to just describe the visible graphic elements on the screen. But the expert’s definition of “interface” is not primarily what you see on the screen.

“The way that you accomplish tasks with a product — what you do and how it responds — that’s the interface”
— Jef Raskin

And again, using “interface” in the sense of only what you see on the screen or the surface of a product is not bad or wrong, it’s just the non-expert use. As interface designers we need to be careful. Our definition of “interface” is, again, not just what you see, but for better or worse how it works.

As I mentioned before, computer user interfaces can look incredibly ugly, yet still be very well designed because most of what we regard as interface is, alas, not visible. And you will not be surprised when, again, I say that a literal “no interface” is definitely not a good one.

The expressions “less interface”, “hidden interface”, “no UI” etc. are not literal. They are fuzzy rhetorical formulations that mix up the common and the technical definitions. What does this rhetoric aim at?

It targets only the bloated, overblown surface, ignoring the depth of an interface. What do these expressions try to say? They are trying to say the same thing as those who say “less is more”. However, if this translates to “hide how a product works”, or anything else that makes the product harder to use, the interface will become worse. On the other hand, less visual clutter does lead to a more efficient interface. Again, in Dieter Rams’ words:

“Good design is as little design as possible — Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.”
— ibid.

Less visual clutter leads to a more efficient interface. Technically speaking is not quite clear what “less interface” means when you take that expression out of context.

1. If by “less interface” you mean “harder to work with”, less interface will lead to a worse interface.
2. If by “less interface” you mean reducing visual and functional elements to the essence, you will improve the interface.
3. If by “less interface” you mean “hiding how a product works”, less interface will always lead to a weaker interface.

Discussing “more interface” or “less interface” out of context is prone to misunderstanding. While we have no right to tell people how to speak, as designers we have to communicate clearly. Here again, if in context it is clear what “less interface” means, maybe we should not be too pedantic about it either, and remember that

“The slightest mistake looks incredibly stupid, when others make it.”
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Conclusion

It is not the hand that makes the designer, it’s the eye. Learning to design is learning to see. Naturally, what designers learn to see as they improve their skills is usually related to design. Doctors don’t see web sites in the same way as web designers, just as web designers don’t see radiographs as doctors do. Our experience sharpens our eyes to certain perceptions and shapes what we expect to see, just as what we expect to see shapes our experience. Our reality is perspectival. Although we don’t perceive and sense things that a more experienced practitioner can, we can learn, and it’s very exciting and rewarding to do so.

The difference between good and great design tends to happen in a sphere that only experienced designers can perceive clearly. Still, most people can feel the difference between good and bad design. As I mentioned above, very few people perceive the delicacies of great typography, and even fewer can set type, but most of us will feel that a well typeset book reads better. This seems like a paradox. But think about it: the aim of design is to facilitate use, and take care of details that are tedious for the inexperienced person. What looks paradoxical from outside is perfectly logical from an inside perspective.

A lot of confusion arises from the fact that there are many ways to use the term “design”. The common definition (a matter of taste) is incommensurable with the professional definition of design as a matter of functional beauty and care for detail. While everybody can sense the design quality of a product through use, no one has authority on matters of taste. Still, and to hammer it in, by learning to design you evolve an eye for design, as well as a more refined taste to discern subtle design details.

Now, if you are a designer and proud of your skills, keep in mind: There are not distinct groups of “designers” and “non-designers” — it’s a continuum. And there is no such thing as the worst or greatest designer, since design requires a lot of different talents that can’t be directly compared. Some have deeper imagination, are better with the purely functional aspects, have more talent in polishing details, have better technical skills, and some will shine with an unbreakable will to ship. It is a long way from novice to pro, but what we all have in common is the trained ability to see what others don’t, to create what others can’t see but only feel.

The same confusion that leads to pedantic fights over what design really is arises when we mix the common definition of “interface” in the sense of “computer graphics” with the more abstract and technical definition that involves how something works, including the physical interaction and the user’s perception. It is possible to say a lot of cool shit about design or interface design by making a mess while meaning the right thing. So before we get into teaching and preaching mode we need to consider the context and try to understand what is meant.

It’s easy to score marketing points by saying “No UI” is better than “a lot of UI”, even though strictly speaking this relies on imprecise language. If by “no UI” you indeed mean that hiding the UI is a great idea, then let’s hope that you are designing child locks. Unless your purpose is to make your UI inaccessible, hiding interfaces is always a bad idea.

As with design in general, user interface design has to be assessed in terms of functionality and care for detail.

A UI that works is not a priori self-evident to everybody. Tools need to work for those who use them. That being said, everyday objects like faucets, hammers, and iPad magazines need to be considerably more self-evident than violins, airplane cockpits, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines.

After getting lost in the labyrinth of design and aesthetics, I think that I have found a way out that doesn’t oversimplify or fuel egos, but invites everyone to see more. I am pretty sure that there are shorter, easier ways, but I can’t see them… yet. Maybe it needs a non-designer’s perspective from outside to say it all in fewer words.

“When everyone has the same Mac and the same internet, the difference between hackneyed graphic design and extraordinary graphic design is just one thing—the ability to see.
Seeing, despite the name, isn’t merely visual.”
— “Learning how to see”, by Seth Godin

If you scrolled down to find the article’s essence in a last nutshell paragraph: Designers are not superior creatures that can ignore listening to other, supposedly inferior beings. In contrary! Without critical feedback and the modesty to accept all opinions on our work as a perfectly valid, different view no matter who, how and what, we lose our freaky key ability, which is not just to see more, but to see more with one eye, and feel with the other.

So, yes, I am looking forward to hearing what you think.

The main request we’ve heard for iA Writer for Mac from customers is the ability to change font size. This would be a simple feature to add, but we just didn’t give in. Why?

Why so arrogant?

While some critiques suggested Writer’s typography was due to our aesthetic arrogance, this is not true. The reasons why Writer had only one typeface and font size were:

1. One of the main distractions of other text editors is fumbling with fonts. Despite varying preferences and a legacy of over-small type from 20 years ago, finding the right typeface and text size is not a matter of taste.
2. Smaller font sizes are good for reading and editing, but seeing the text up close helps you focus when you’re crafting your prose sentence by sentence.
3. The font size we chose was not ideal. It was a compromise — a size that would deliver good results on most Mac Screens. We were always aware that on some older screens the font would seem rather big, while on newer screens it would seem a little too small for the best writing experience.

We knew there was room for improvement. We have spent a lot of time thinking about a solution that keeps Writer’s simplicity and still allows different font sizes. First we tried to find a technical approach to check resolution and pixel density, changing font sizes for different screens. But that solution required us to add separate reading and editing modes, and seemed a little too control freak-ish, even for us.

The solution: a responsive design

Inspired by our deep experience designing for the web, we’ve given Writer for Mac a responsive design, changing the font size based on window width. This maintains the text’s typographic proportions, zooming in and out without reflowing the text. I don’t know why it took us so long to find this obvious solution. However, given that no one else has done it, the simplicity of this solution is perhaps not as obvious as it seems in hindsight. With all the custom features built into Writer for Mac, like Focus Mode and Auto Markdown, technically it was not as easy as you’d expect. But we’ve taken the time to address these details, so that this new feature feels obvious and natural.

While we experimented with liquid resizing, we decided to go with a three-step adaptive layout. This is why:

How we write with Writer for Mac

We’ve been testing prototypes for months now, and this seemingly simple change has completely changed the way we write. Here is how we use the three font sizes:

1. Big size for difficult writing: Seeing your sentence from close slows down your pace. This is particularly helpful if you have a tough subject to write about, that requires you to take one step at a time. Especially when paired with Focus Mode, this helps you write that difficult scientific paper, poem or philosophical text.
2. Medium size for Writing and editing: This works well for quick, easy writing and editing.
3. Small size for reading: Some writers like to use a small font size to write because it allows them to see the surrounding text. However for many people a small size reveals too much text. Seeing too much text can lead to fast typing, careless thinking, and the temptation to stop writing and start editing. Some texts (and some writers) will benefit from this, but we find the small size works best for moving text around, “big picture” edits and reading what you’ve written.

Another way to use the different font sizes is to order open documents by importance. Resize the window to the small size before putting it into the background, and make the text bigger for the window that you are actively working on. Use a medium size for secondary texts.

Two more things…

While we think responsive design is the stand-out feature in this version, there are other exciting additions and improvements. Writer for Mac now has selection-sensitive word count, a more powerful find and replace and an HTML preview panel. The really good news is that, it’s a free update. If you don’t have it yet get your copy now, while it is on sale at half price.

Classic folder systems don’t perform too well. One reason is that organizing folders is engaging in the tiring discipline of information architecture. Information architecture is hard brain work. Just like a chess problem, it seems obvious once done, but takes considerable mental energy to figure out a clear and simple information architecture. And mainly, you just don’t want to do it all the time. Tying folders to an app and reducing them to one level could solve a lot of these problems.

Folders-in-folders don’t work

The folder system paradigm is a geeky concept. Geeks built it because geeks need it. Geeks organize files all day long. Geeks don’t know and don’t really care how much their systems suck for other people. Geeks do not realize that for most people organizing documents within an operating system next to System files and applications feels like a complicated and maybe even dangerous business. Remember that autoexec.bat file?

Folders tend to grow deeper and deeper. As soon as we have more than a handful of notions, or (beware!) more than one hierarchical level of notions, it gets hard for most brains to build a mental model of that information architecture. While it is common to have several hierarchy levels in applications and file systems, they actually don’t work very well. We are just not smart enough to deal with notional pyramids. Trying to picture notional systems with several levels is like thinking three moves ahead in chess. Everybody believes that they can, but only a few skilled people really can do it. If you doubt this, prove me wrong by telling me what is in each file menu in your browser…

Folders-in-folders are hard to deal with. Just as physical folders-in-folders are prone to creating a mess, digital folders-in-folders represent a steep mental hurdle for most of us. Most people don’t want to bother with folder structures. They get confused when they’re forced to deal with settings in a text editing application. People expect things to just work.

Even geeks can’t handle folders in folders

I am a geek myself, and even a specialist in organizing complex clusters of information, but my own file systems always sucked. Picture this: I have a degree in philosophy and have worked for almost 15 years as an information architect. I enjoy playing chess, reading Kant, and thinking about the correct order and hierarchy of words all day long…

…and yet I hate, always hated, and always will hate thinking about organizing files. I just want them out of sight. I used to blame that on my laziness. But maybe it’s not just that. Thinking about how to deal with files prevents me from working. And this annoys me.

Some might argue that the reason why I hated naming and organizing folders on my computer was not in spite but because I am an information architect. As an amateur you might still believe in the perfect order of your words, the perfect philosophical system, the perfect file system.

The more experience you have dealing with notional systems, the more you know that there is no perfect information architecture, but only better or worse compromises. And making compromises is tiring.

The beauty of search and sort

It is possible to fill books with how horrible iTunes is, but finding a song among 1’000’00 in there works incredibly well. Without folders. How come?

The iTunes music library was Apple’s first step into a new file system paradigm. And besides all the mistakes they made with iTunes later on, they solved the basic problem: How to organize thousands of files without folder system. The solution was search and sort.

To find one song among a million, all you do is type in either the band, the album or the song, and sort the list accordingly. It takes no more than a couple of seconds to find what you are looking for.

If you prefer to find your music throug the iTunes folders than through search and sort, then, of course, you are the file system king and you don’t need a better way to organize your files on a computer.

Seeing how well the file system worked, Apple decided to integrate the search and sort paradigm step by step into the core interaction of the finder. Search became the new finder.

Default folders help

I was relieved when Apple introduced default content folders in the left side Finder panel:

The default content folders are: Documents – Downloads – Movies – Music – Pictures. The choice of those categories, as obvious as it may seem now, are also based on a series of compromises (Do we need a texts folder? A “Work” or “Private” folder? Are Photoshop “documents” not often “Pictures”?), but they are all pretty good compromises and adding a folder is easy. I don’t know about you, but before Apple introduced the default folders my document filing system was not nearly as obvious.

Curious to see how well they worked, I dropped my intricate file structure and tried to just use the defaults (with the additions of “Sites” and “Dropbox”). Putting everything into “Documents” freaked me out — it took some bungee jumper’s deep breathing. I’m not even sure if I can find my files quicker now, because I’ve been using Spotlight for this so my workflow didn’t change. However, what matters is I don’t need to think before putting a file away anymore.

Not having any more deep folder structures is generally a big relief. But it still makes me nervous. Enter Document Library.

The Document Library

With the introduction of Mountain Lion, Apple is about to make a major change to its file system. Your files will be tied to the app they were created in. Each application comes with its own little file browser, the Document Library:

The Document Library has its pros and cons, and, like so many tech people, I was quite skeptical at first. Not about anything specific, just skeptical in a general, dickish way. Geeks think in our own little boxes. If one comes up with a new pattern for a common interaction, others will naturally be generally skeptical. That’s usually a healthy attitude for usability issues. But that’s not the real reason why geeks are skeptical. It’s because we are smart asses. We are the people that put salt and pepper on the pizza before trying it, because we just know best.

My self-justification was I was convinced that the Document Library is going to be like those annoying templates we never use in Word or Creative Suite. Template choosers feel like old Flash splash screens: nothing but an annoying hurdle for noobs.

But not in this case. What makes the Document Library better than a template chooser is iCloud, with its one level folder structure. The problem is that the concept is not obvious enough. Yet. We know Apple — they will substantially invest in explaining how to use it with ads. They’ve been doing this for years now, and it’s one of the reasons why Apple products are perceived as easy to use.

I am not sure I’d like the Document Library and iCloud’s new file system paradigm if I hadn’t been forced to understand it. I had to as part of developing iA Writer. Getting our heads around how iCloud is supposed to be used, the following three arguments killed my skepticism:

1. I don’t need to type file extensions into Spotlight any more. In general, documents belong to an app. While there are often several apps that can use the same document, we usually have a preferred app for each document type.
2. I don’t need to drag documents into the app. I can navigate from app to app, and handle the documents right there.
3. I don’t need to put files away. The OS does it all for me, and my documents are always at hand in the app that they belong to.

These are all simplifications in the file handling that might go unnoticed to the amateur, but they are substantial simplifications—as long as the user accepts the new paradigm.

That paradigm change alone would not suffice to make file handling easier, because there is still a major problem: getting files from one device to all your devices. Enter iCloud.

iCloud

iCloud makes sure that my documents are always on all the devices I use. In real time.

Having all documents accessible without sending them via e-mail gets rid of a stressful question: where is the latest version and what is it called? This, in combination with the OS X Versions feature, is a giant leap forward in cross-device file management.

iCloud is mind-blowing. Or more accurately: iCloud would be mind-blowing if it worked 100% of the time. Which it doesn’t. It’s more like 99.9% of the time. This is not good enough for a core part of a new file system component. With over 400,000 customers, this keeps me awake at night. 0.1% of 400,000 is 400.

Now, if you scale that to the total number of Apple users, you’ll see why Apple does not yet fully support iCloud on all its own software. I fervently hope that Apple squashes these bugs.

In Apple’s defense, this is a brand new, highly complex technology, and it is continually getting better. We’ve found the latest “one level folders” change to be a major improvement.

On the surface it’s only a file system with folders, and technically they’re not even real folders (but that’s besides the point). But in practice, it is real-time syncing of files and folders across all your devices, and technically this is a big deal. Here’s an example to illustrate why this is tough:

Imagine that you have a document open on both your iPhone and your Mac. Now change the name of the document and put it in a folder. Let’s up the ante and rename the folder. How is the Mac going to know that the open document now has different name, and is in another place which also has a different name? Yet somehow it works (most of the time).

1-level Folders in iCloud

As a developer of iCloud-powered apps we had to quickly work out why on iCloud we are only allowed one level of folders. Why the restriction? If you’ve made it this far it’s quite clear. They wanted to avoid the folder in folder conundrum and guide the user to use a simple structure.

Folders are not a feature that beginners muddle through but pro users require. No one can deal with deep folder structures. Our brain is simply not built for them.

On the other hand, a reduced one level structure is very easy to handle. Here is what I came up with for my own folder structure in the iCloud Document Library:

1. Notes
2. First Drafts
3. Edits
4. Archive
5. Trash

For me these are:

1. Quick thoughts, funny things, random sentences
2. More detailed sketches of thoughts
3. Texts that I am currently working on
4. Published texts
5. Things I’m not ready to fully erase yet

Having a long list of files per app works well enough, if you have good search and sort functions. So, pragmatically, you don’t really need folders. But…

Having a basic structure that mirrors our mental model, such as (for me) the editorial stages documents go through, is still a big help. With a basic file structure, the files always seem in the right place. And that is the real benefit of folders in an operating system.

Conclusion

Realizing that deep folder systems only create chaos, I went with Apple’s default folder structure, and located files via Spotlight using document extensions.

The Document Library removes the need to narrow your search using extensions, and the need to think about where to put your files.

The ubiquity of iCloud and the Versions feature removes the need to manually version files using different file names.

The iCloud Document Library folders, restricted to one level, guide us to use a simple hierarchical system that mirrors our mental model. This makes them easy to understand, gives us peace of mind that the files are in the right place, and relieves us from our OCD compulsion to over-organize.

We need folders. More for our peace of mind than for pragmatic reasons. We like to know that things are in the right place. Few people can think three chess moves ahead, and maybe even fewer people can picture notional hierarchies that are deeper than one level. In spite of the outraged geeks that will hate Apple for being this authoritarian, it makes a lot of sense to restrict the folder depth to one level for geeks and casual users alike. We need folders, and we need folders in the cloud, but we don’t need folders in folders.

All this will be for naught if Apple doesn’t succeed in explaining why the new file system works like it works. But if Apple is good at one thing it’s marketing.

PS: Why not just use Dropbox?

For those who prefer Dropbox and cite it as an example of how to Do Things Right™—Dropbox is great. At iA, we use it as our internal file system. An amazing service, but…

1. Dropbox does not allow you to access the same document from different devices. This makes syncing a lot easier.
2. Dropbox is a couple of versions ahead of iCloud
3. The Dropbox API has its own (sometimes quite bad) hiccups

Remember that if you have problems with iCloud (or Dropbox for that matter) it doesn’t mean that everyone is having the same problems. We are pretty sure that Apple is going to find and fix the remaining problems. Why? Because they have to. Without iCloud the whole new file system paradigm goes down the drain. The clock is ticking.

PS2: Folders on iA Writer for iPad and iPhone

At first it seemed iCloud wouldn’t have folders at all. So we built iA Writer’s file system around the initial no folders concept. Then Apple introduced folders, but only one level deep. When this happened, we put all of our energy into implementing that strategic change into our iOS apps as soon as possible. Why?

1. The Document Library in Mountain Lion allows you to create folders. These folders need to be mirrored on iOS, or the folder structure is destroyed every time you access iCloud using your iOS device.
2. Folder syncing between OSX and iOS needs a lot of debugging. If you don’t have folders on your iOS app the files in folders will not be visible.

In other words: The Document Library on OSX is almost useless, if your mobile iCloud apps don’t support folders.

If you are interested in trying the latest versions of iA Writer, they are currently on a 50% discount.

Get iA Writer for Mac for $4.99 and iA Writer for iPhone and iPad for $0.99.

Update: I hope that you realize that…

Mac OSX Lion still has the normal file browser. What happens with iCloud is a direction Apple OSX is heading into. But it’s not forced upon you:

“Use Mountain Lion and its built-in apps like TextEdit and Preview for a few hours and it is very clear that this is how Apple wants users to deal with documents and app content. It’s a radical change from the nearly 30-year-old file-system-centric approach to data management on the Mac. The old way: go to the Finder, find the file you want, and open it. The new way: go to the app and open the document from within the app. Conceptually it works just like iOS — your files aren’t in the file system, but rather “in” the app you used to create them. This is the future, but Apple isn’t forcing it upon us. The feature is prominent, yes, because Apple wants us to use it. But it is far from mandatory. Don’t want to use iCloud document storage? Then just keep on managing your files exactly as before. Apple’s not dragging us to the future; they’re enticing us to walk there on our own.” Daring Fireball

Some people mentioned that professionals need folders for client projects working in a team. I hope you don’t organize your team repository only on your own machine. Mountain Lion is not going to replace GitHub or whatever you use to organize your client projects (we use GitHub and Dropbox). iCloud is for personal use, it’s not a team work file system.

Mac: New parser and window framework

As you probably know, the Mac version comes with a powerful text parser and window framework that allows us to use the unique combination of:

• Auto Markdown with auto-indent
• Dynamic title bar
• Focus Mode
• And our famous blue cursor

To implement the dynamic title bar, we had to use a custom window framework that came with some downsides for third party apps, multi-monitor setups, and older machines. For this version we’ve overhauled our text parser, and built a completely new window framework. It is flying fast, and should work seamlessly with third party apps and multiple monitors.

Mac: Document panel

iA Writer for Mac is the first writing app that fully supports Mountain Lion, including folders in iCloud. To make this possible, we put all our energy into making iA Writer 100% ready for Mountain Lion.

Making those iCloud folders work both on OS X and iOS was a major achievement: you can now write and organize all your texts with one application.

The only downside is that you will have to wait another couple of days for Mountain Lion to launch. (Note: On Lion and Snow Leopard you can only view iCloud folders and their contents, not create them.)

iOS: Folders everywhere!

iA Writer for iOS is a universal app, meaning you get both the iPad and the iPhone apps in one. Since Mountain Lion allows you to work with folders, we wanted to support iCloud folders on iOS too.

We implemented Apple’s standard behavior for creating folders on touch devices: simply drag a document and drop it on a second document, and they will automatically be put in a new folder.

iOS: Responsive typography

As of our latest update, iA Writer for iOS comes with responsive typography. No matter whether you use an iPhone 3GS or a new iPad with a Retina display, the typeface will always look stunning.

What’s next?

We hope you like these changes. Our next update will concentrate on more visual changes. If you haven’t got our apps yet, now is a great time to buy them — both iA Writer for Mac ($4.99) and iOS ($0.99) are currently discounted, for a limited time!

It is extremely difficult to catch up with a bad tweet. One mistake, and you’re that guy that disses women in tech, hates his clients or tortures chihuahuas, and then a campaign starts against you — an evil sinner that needs to be brought to justice by the social media avengers. An error on Twitter can easily turn into twitterror.

Bad luck? Pay more attention? Humans make mistakes. Some mistakes happen in good faith. No one knows everything, and no one is so considerate they can avoid ever hurting anyone.

That errors get spotted and corrected quickly is one reason why I like Twitter. That errors get frozen in screenshots on other people’s websites like Han Solo in Carbonite… I’m not a big fan of that. My factual and ethical mistakes are spotted and corrected within seconds. And that’s great! If there only was a way to acknowledge my errors without deleting tweets and making a mess in the conversation that followed my errors!

Twitter is fast, and that speed is part of its charm. But the faster the pace the easier it is to make mistakes. Of course, a single error will rarely cost your career, marriage or professional reputation, but even small errors can be quite painful to deal with. If English is your second or third language, the chances that you misspell or miscommunicate are high. And even if you are a very careful native speaker, you won’t escape the URL-error devil:

The above is a completely harmless case, but there are plenty of other examples. Just deleting the tweet doesn’t solve the problem either. Deleted information can be perpetuated in quoted retweets or look-at-this-stupid-asshole screenshots.

A missing tweet also doesn’t explain why it’s missing. Excuses might be posted after the mistake happened — but they might also never be seen. The only format that clearly states a mistake is a fat strike through. It is a strong answer to any interpretations and accusations that follow. It clearly says: “Don’t read this. This is all wrong. I take it back. I’m sorry.” Deleted tweets don’t say that — they smell like a cover-up and often make you look suspicious. And apologetic follow-up tweets don’t have the power to neutralize that screenshot of you screwing up.

The most obvious way to deal with erroneous tweets would be to add a feature to redact them, but editing tweets would:

• be technically unfeasible
• work against the core concept of a status streaming service
• make it difficult to hold people accountable
• bloat the interface

So instead of making a metaphysicaltechnical mess by allowing to edit tweets I proposed a comparatively simple solution. Add a new status to tweets called “Error.” This is how the Error status could look:

This is how it could work (there might be other, simpler ways, but hey, I don’t get paid for this):

The idea is simple. If you make a mistake, instead of deleting the tweet you choose “Mark as Error” and write a follow-up tweet that corrects your mistake. A strike through means: “This is just wrong, ignore it and look for a follow-up of this if you’re interested.” Unlike the deleted tweet that leaves a black hole ripe for interpretation, the strike through hints at a follow-up down the stream that corrects the mistake. A stupid idea? Fuck yYou might be right, but you have to agree that information that is struck through has a funny magic that might spice things up.

With a little bit of imagination you can also see how people could use this in creative ways, which would no doubt invigorate some debates.

What are the chances?

I made the suggestion on Twitter to Twitter twice. The first time some favored it. The second time Josh Brewer liked it. Creative Director Doug Bowman is still not a big fan expressed some concerns over added complexity:

The most influential designer at Twitter didn’t like it expressed concern and the scariest designer on Twitter didn’t like it either:

So I decided to write this post to illustrate to the most influential designer at Twitter how easy and likable it could be if done right. And to kick the scariest designer on Twitter in the balls.

But hey, wait, I’m a non-native speaker with terrible spelling and a quick “bad tweet” finger that regrets his spelling mistakes, sloppy fact checking, and Cuba Libre-powered tweets all too often and too late. So this is all very biased. Still… How awesome would it be if in a couple of months that screenshot looked like this:

I’m curious to hear what you think…

The following critique is not only the first public critique of a product that competes with some of our clients, it is the first quick review that we publish. We write a lot of those when we look at the site of a new client or when we assess competitive Web sites for our clients. If you work in the industry, it will give you a insight on how we look at things.

Our reviews are short, cold and to the point. We do not intend in any way to bash the design. NZZ is one of the most prestigious journalistic products in Switzerland, and everything they do is high class. Even though NZZ is not our client we all read and love that newspaper.

Concept

Business Model

NZZ has announced that they will introduce a pay wall. Looking at the Website it is not immediately clear what the concept of that paywall is (the official statement is that it will be a metered paywall), but there are a lot of sales points embedded into the design.

The discussion about paywalls is a subject of its own, but if indeed the paywall comes up, the communication about how it works needs to be streamlined and the sales points should be reduced (if possible funneled to one central sales point). There is a lot to say about the new single brand with a unified newsroom but this is a quick review…

Information Architecture

If you have ever worked on a news project, you will be pleased to see how simple the new information architecture of the new NZZ site is. As a design agency, you usually do not have too much influence on the structure. The editors fight it out among themselves and you can just try to avoid the worst.

You might criticize Meiré and Meiré for some things that seem to point to a lack of conteporary technical potential of Web design, but the Information Architecture is spot on.

The meta navigation on the top of the page is split into two strings. There are eight content categories:

• Aktuell (News)
• Meinung (Opinion)
• Finanzen (Finance)
• Wissen (Knowledge)
• Lebensart (Lifestyle)
• Video (Video)
• Dossiers
• Marktplätze (Buy and Sell)

The News category is divided into nine sections:

• International
• Schweiz (Switzerland)
• Wirtschaft (Economy)
• Zürich
• Feuilleton (Arts)
• Digital
• Sport
• Panorama

The news sections are straight forward and correspond to the mental model of the print reader. The eight main categories have one or two debatable notions (why is “Lifestyle” there?), but overall this is a job well done.

Lovely details like the context-related search field beneath articles made us smile.

Marketing

While the aggressive integration of social media buttons with a floating panel is a debatable move, NZZ now seems to have a strong and real presence in social media, they are relaxed and casual and seem to respond really quickly. NZZ is regarded as a serious, dry publication, but the slightly more casual Twitter policy is appropriate for the medium.

The ad campaign: NZZ’s front page was printed in binary code. This shows that they are serious about what they do. That the Zwinglian “Old Lady” agreed on such a bold move cannot be applauded enough. The only minor stain: the ad agency (“JvM”) had to leave its trace in the header, which weakens the bad ass impact a tiny little bit.

NZZ head binary

• 01001110 01011010 01011010 translates as “NZZ”
• 01001010 01010110 01001101 translates as “JvM”

NZZ article binary (sample)

• 01000010 01100101 01110010 01101001 01100011 01101000 01110100 01100101 00100000 11111100 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110101 01100101 01110011 00100000 01001101 01100001 01110011 01110011 01100001 01101011 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01010011 01111001 01110010 01101001 01100101 01101110 00001101 00001010 00001101 00001010 01010101 01101110 01101111 00101101 01000010 01100101 01101111 01100010 01100001 01100011 01101000 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110110 01101111 01101101 00100000 01010011 01100011 01101000 01100001 01110101 01110000 01101100 01100001 01110100 01111010 00100000 01100110 01100101 01110010 01101110 01100111 01100101 01101000 01100001 01101100 01110100 01100101 01101110 …translates as “Berichte über neues Massaker in Syrien” and “Uno-Beobachter vom Schauplatz ferngehalten”

Design

It is a bold move to get print and digital from the same hands. Print and Web seem similar yet they are completely different disciplines. Web design needs different engineering skills from print design. One can see both the benefit and the downside of a print designer taking matters in his own hands. And while it is not entirely fair to nail the deficiencies of the design to the fact that a print designer did it, it is also the risk you take when you work in another field.

The Good

On the positive side it is worth mentioning that the NZZ gives enough space to the masthead and doesn’t slavishly follow the above-the-fold/below-the-fold ideology. There is enough white space to make the page breathe. The Typography is systematic and on most monitors it is readable. There is advertisement but it doesn’t kill the page. The work of the picture editors is exemplary.

The negative aspects are longer but that’s also because it is always easier to point out negative aspects. Overall the new NZZ.ch is solid work. Okay, enough now with the excuses…

The Bad

The use of the real brand (NZZ instead of the obsolete NZZ Online) is the right move. That being said, all in all, the site doesn’t feel quite like NZZ just yet.

Interaction Design

On a PC, in general the interaction design is well crafted. Some downsizes though: The many flyouts in the header for promoting the various subscriptions break the decent appearance. Where the visual branding does a good job, the interaction branding leaves an experience somewhat of a mine field.

Some elements feel especially raw, like the “Lesertrend” box. Hovering to reveal additional information is not only unexpected, but slow in performance and partly breaking the design.

Advanced functions like bookmarking (“Merken”) don’t work properly (yet). If you try click on a star (which appears on mouse over), you won’t get any reaction, but the tool tip will change. On a second click nothing happens at all.

Information Design

The black bar navigation bar is a foreign body in the otherwise very reduced design; it splits the masthead from the body and creates trapped white space between the bar and the content section with the grey background.

The fade on the top is what Swiss designers call “schwurbel” or “gurk.” Warning: “gurk” doesn’t mean the same thing in English! Don’t even…

The grey background feels a little too dark, which makes the page look a little grim. The whitish background on some of the right column boxes break with the minimal approach of the main column that only uses horizontal lines.

The vertical rhythm needs optimization. Compared to the beta site is already substantially better (less holes), but overall it still feels somewhat random after two or three scrolls.

The article pages are readable but the overlong side bar kills the layout on pages with short articles.

Typography

In order to create a tighter integration with the print edition an obvious measure would have been to adapt the print typography. There might have been some concerns about performance, but technology is advanced enough to use a digitized version of the typeface used in print.

The current typographic definition has too many elements that resemble other competing newspapers that have been designed years ago under different technical conditions. This is a shame if you look at the treasure chest of ideas and elements that NZZ’s print design offers.

Side note: With new screens conquering the market the 15px body text will soon be too small.

Identity

The aggressive integration of Social Media Buttons on a high end journalistic product feels cheap and pays more into the social networks than into the brand. Alternatively, the curated integration of the best social Media comments into the article would add value and credibility to the brand.

Technology

If you are visiting nzz.ch today, you will likely encounter some issues, as usual in recently launched websites. However, there are a couple of problems that are obvious:

1. The first time the page renders, some elements are out of place (such as, for example, the tabbed articles being rendered on top of the main menu). Some seconds later, the page seems to re-render and all the elements go into the right place;
2. The social buttons seem to stutter as we scroll, being extremely distracting.

Despite these problems, there is something that is important to mention: the page loads blazing fast. No matter how good your IA and surface design is, a slow page sends those efforts to the toilet. NZZ got it right.

We noticed that although NZZ advertises that this website adapts to the device you’re visiting with, their adapting mechanism is not active yet. At the time of writing, both a smartphone and the iPad load the desktop version of the website, although they clearly have a mobile version. Despite this malfunction, the strategy NZZ adopted is clear: the mobile version is served separately, rather than having one responsive version.

Accessibility

The team behind nzz.ch took accessibility seriously. Looking into the code, one of the first elements is a (visually) hidden list of links. This list can be read by screen readers and allows visually impaired people to jump directly to a specific area before reading anything else. If this was not the case, a visually impaired person would have to skip 28 (!) links until he reached the actual content. This and other details make for a nice experience for a target group that is, more times than it should be, an afterthought.

Conclusion

The new information architecture with its reduced and clear structure is without any doubt one of the highlights of this redesign. The paywall is not activated yet and we don’t know enough details to make a substantial statement about the overall concept.

Using the mother brand in a more spacious masthead, breaking with the above-the-fold ideology are welcome design moves, but the redesign falls flat on the unused typographic potential that the print edition offers. The design has failed to translate the world class typography of the print product into digital. While even one year ago this would have been an understandable omission, today it is not anymore. The information design needs a lot of work to find the right density and clarity.

The CMS has some major relaunch problems that are apparent but that we cannot judge from outside. Hopefully these hiccups will disappear in the next few days. The frontend code is well executed, and the minor flaws it has can be fixed easily.

In the heat of the relaunch I wrote a quick blog post on responsive typography, focussing solely on the aspect of our latest experiment: responsive typefaces. Without knowing the history of iA, you’d miss some key aspects to the responsive typography and design in our relaunched site. Instead of mashing up all our articles on the matter, I decided to start from scratch and explain responsive typography step by step. This is step one.

To avoid designing different layouts for every possible screen size, many web designers have adopted the concept of Responsive Web Design. In a nutshell this is the idea that your layout automatically adapts to the screen definition. There are different ways to define it. I like to put it this way:

1. Adaptive layouts: adjusting the layout in steps to a limited number of sizes
2. Liquid layouts: adjusting the layout continuously to every possible width

While both have advantages and disadvantages, we believe that adaptive with as few as possible break points is the way to go, because readability is more important than having a layout that is always as wide as the viewport. This is a debatable opinion on a complex matter in itself, but optimal readability requires a certain amount of control over the measure (column width) of the text, and in this regard a liquid layout creates more problems than it solves. More about that another time.

Note: Responsive design already incorporates a lot of macro typographic issues (type size, line height, columns width). So responsive design already incorporates responsive typography in many ways. What we focused on in our first post on the responsive typography on our own site, mainly referred to our use of graded fonts. I’d like to talk about grading in the next post and dive right into the basics of responsive macro typography on the screen now.

Choosing a typeface

The right tone

Sooner or later, you need to decide what kind of typeface you want to use. The choice of your font is mainly a matter of tone, but, as every typeface has its own qualities and demands (or forbids) certain treatments, the choice of type has a lot of visual and technological consequences. With web fonts you now have a big choice of typefaces, so finding the one that fits has become yet another challenge.

We designed our own typeface for this website to experiment with graded fonts. We chose a serif because it fits our tone, and mirrors the refinement of our content (or at least that’s what we think). For iA Writer we chose a monospaced typeface. Because the primary purpose of our program is helping you getting a first draft out, we specifically chose Nitti — a typeface that feels strong and careful at the same time. The decision to use a monospaced typeface also came about because the first iPad’s Operating System didn’t auto-kern proportional typefaces. Instead of using a proportional typeface that would be rendered poorly, we decided to go for a monospaced typeface right away.

Serif or sans serif?

Usually the choice falls between serif and sans serif. This is in itself a complex matter, but there is a simple rule of thumb that might help you: The serifed typeface is a priest, the sans is a hacker. One is not better than the other, but, for various reasons, a serifed typeface has a more authoritarian touch, whereas a sans serif feels more democratic. Remember, this is five thousand years of typographic history wrapped in two sloppy lines, so don’t take it too seriously.

A lot of people still think that for screen typography the question “serif or sans serif” answers itself. Actually, it’s not that easy. Against common beliefs, both serif and sans serif can perform equally well, if you choose a body text size above 12 pixels. Below 12 pixels serifed typefaces don’t render sharply enough, but (and this brings us to the second point) on contemporary monitors 12 pixels is definitely too small anyway.

What size?

The size of your body text doesn’t depend on your personal preference. It depends on reading distance. Since in general computers are further away than books, the metric size of a desktop typeface needs to be bigger than the sizes used for printed matter.

The illustration below shows that the further away your body text, the bigger it needs to be. The two black and the two red A’s have the same metric size. But since the right pair is held further away, the perceived size is smaller. The red A in the right image has the same perceived size as the black A in the left image:

The further away you hold the text, the smaller it becomes visually. You need to make the text size bigger the further away the text is read, to compensate for a larger reading distance. How big is, again, a science in itself. If you are inexperienced, a useful trick is to hold a well-printed book at a comfortable reading distance while looking at your website to compare.

Graphic designers without Web design experience are surprised how huge good body text on the web is in comparison to printed matter. Mind you, it’s only big if you compare it side to side, not if you compare it in perspective.

If, after increasing the size of your body text to match, the new size irritates you in the beginning, don’t worry that’s normal. However, once you’ve gotten used to it, you will not want to go back to the “standard” small sizes.

We’ve been promoting these “perspectively proportional” font sizes since 2006. Initially, our claim that Georgia 16px was a good benchmark for body text sizes provoked a lot of anger and even some laughter, but now it’s more or less a common standard. With higher resolutions, that standard is becoming slowly obsolete. But more on that later.

Line height and contrast

While body text size can be evaluated with that perspective trick, line height needs some adjustment. With more reading distance and (what we call) pixel smear, it’s wise to give screen text a little bit more line height than printed text. 140% is a good benchmark, but of course, it depends on the typeface you use.

Today it’s a given that you make sure that the contrast is not too weak (e.g. grey text on a light grey background) or too garish (e.g. pink on yellow). Since screen typefaces were designed to be displayed black on white, using dark backgrounds is also somewhat difficult, but these can work if done right. With contemporary high contrast screens it’s also preferable to choose either a dark grey for text or a light grey for the background, instead of a hard black on white. But that is, again, not the most important question.

iPhone vs iPad

A lot of what we learned about responsive typography came from finding the perfect typography for our writing app. When we designed iA Writer for iPad we invested weeks to find the right typographic definition. At the time, the high resolution screen of the iPad was a completely new challenge, and it took quite some time until we understood how it works. When Apple introduced Retina displays for iPhones and later for iPad, everything changed again. We could write a whole book to explain how we got to the iconic look of the iA Writer typeface, but there is still so much to say about more general matters so I’ll cut to the chase.

If you compare our current version of Writer for iPhone with the version for iPads, you will notice that the type size is not the same.

Why different type sizes for iPhone and iPad? If you read the above explanation attentively, you might have already guessed.

1. While the distance is not always the same, in general you hold the iPad a little bit further away. Whether you use your iPad on the breakfast table, on your knee sitting on your sofa or right in front of your face lying in bed gives a variety of reading distances. This was an entirely new challenge, because the reading distance on desktop and laptop computers doesn’t vary that much. In order to make it work in all instances we chose the furthest reading distance defining the type size. This might result in a slightly bigger than usual type size when you read it in bed, but it’s not uncomfortable, and generally you don’t use a writing application lying on your stomach in bed.
2. You have less screen estate on an iPhone so you are forced to make adjustments.

Luckily, the iPhone is held closer to the face so being forced to use a smaller type size works out perfectly. From an average reading distance, both iPhone and iPad have a similar perceived type size.

Since the iPhone is held closer, the line height could also be tighter, which again is a necessity because of the smaller screen:

Not everything always works in your favor when you design for the screen. Interaction design is engineering: it’s not about finding the perfect design, it’s finding the best compromise. In our case we had to reduce the line height, and also the gutter and the spacing between characters:

The adjustments were so delicate that if you don’t know it, you won’t notice how small the gutter is. Why didn’t we just get rid of the gutter? The gutter is not an aesthetic matter, it lets the text breathe and helps the eye to jump from line to line. If you think that this all sounds esoteric: no, so far we’ve just covered the basics.

What about desktop computers?

Some people complain about the big font size in Writer for Mac. Just like we had to go for the biggest minimal size choosing the font size for iPad (which is held at different reading distances), we went for the biggest minimal font size on Mac as well. At the time our benchmark was a 24 inch high resolution iMac, where the perceived size is more or less the same as on all other devices.

Since the variety of Mac computers that run iA Writer is finite, we could determine the different possible resolutions. We looked at every possible configuration to make sure that the type size was the best compromise for most machines.

You might ask “Why not just allow the user to choose the type size?” Well, adjusting type size is not a matter of taste, but a matter of reading distance. Since most websites and applications have an overly small type size, new customers would initially choose a type size that they are used to, that is: too small a size, and never experience the full pleasure of our writing app. The main reason is not that we want to force a certain look upon all users: what we want is that iA Writer works without settings without fumbling, that the only thing you can do with it is write. This has been the open secret of its success and changing that would be messing with its core. (What we need to improve are the accessibility integration for people with bad eye sight).

Okay then, why not adjusting to the device’s resolution automatically? Wouldn’t that be true responsive typography? That’s right, and we are working on something similar. Now, in adjusting to the resolution, you also have to choose the right optical weight to make sure that the typeface really works as intended with every size and resolution. With the type size and the resolution optics of the font change as well. That’s why iA Writer for Mac, iPad 1/2 and iPad3 all have different grades as well. To explain the full logic behind grading digital fonts and explain the thoughts behind our new Website, I need a little bit more time and space. So, stay tuned for Part II!

Response so far

In spite of having no social media buttons, this article got lots of of retweets, very few critique points, mainly around the question of liquid vs adaptive layouts, a topic that I’d like to address at a later point. I was surprised when Joshua Porter asked:

“@iA You had me until the line ‘interaction design is engineering’. How does that work?” @bokardo

Just in case other people wondered… The full citation is: “Not everything always works in your favor when you design for the screen. Interaction design is engineering: it’s not about finding the perfect design, it’s finding the best compromise.” Usually I say “Web design is engineering: it’s not about finding perfection, it’s finding the best compromise.” With the term “Web design” the sentence becomes a bit clearer because of the somewhat more obvious technical implication. I used “interaction design” because in the examples I used an app.

What it means is that while graphic design requires and allows you a great degree of graphic control, Web design requires you to think about compromises between visual design and technology from the very beginning. To get the optimal results you need to explore a lot of different solutions, each with its own pros and cons and try find the best compromise among all the suboptimal choices.

At this point, graphic designers often chime in and try to make the point that they, as well, deal with a lot of technology and so on. And sure, you do do. All creation of artifacts, all design requires technological knowledge. But just as there is a difference between engineering car engines and Websites, there is a difference between designing Websites and Magazines. And the difference is the degree of engineering involved.

In conclusion that means that in the process of designing Websites and apps, a lot of what we do is thinking about compromises and trying to find solutions that do not have too many downsides. This is what turns a lot of graphic designers off, because they are used to having control. More about that in the excellent presentation by Khoi Vinh on the difference between screen and graphic design (2007).

(In case you didn’t, please read the original article and initial reactions before you continue.)

Insights from The Guardian

Martin Belam, former IA at the Guardian, usually likes what we do but disagreed this time:

“Share buttons aren’t there because people don’t know how to share without them. They are there as a visual cue to share.”

Note: Our conclusion was to integrate tweets and Facebook posts more tightly into articles, not just to eliminate all traces.

Martin’s article had highly interesting information to share: The Guardian just tested different positions of social media buttons, and found that their location matters greatly:

“I don’t have serious research across the board [...] we’ve actually just done a fascinating set of A/B tests around sharing buttons. This has culminated in the appearance of a ‘floating’ set of buttons to the left of an article. What intrigued me most of all when we did the test was not that ‘position A’ generated more share interactions than ‘position B’, or that ‘position C’ sounded the death-knell for sharing whilst ‘position D’ caused people to share more freely. What intrigued me was the effectiveness of the positions was different for each service, even though they were always all presented as a block together.”

This is fascinating in many ways but doesn’t prove much against the main argument. The Guardian didn’t test our suggestion to replace the buttons with tighter social media integration, they tested the position of the buttons.

Research by Nieman Journalism Lab

The most extensive research so far (although on Twitter buttons only) comes from the Nieman Journalism Lab. They used a Ruby script by Luigi Montanez to look at a series of news sites. The following graph comes from the same source, although we extended the scale to 100% to give you a better impression of the actual percentage:

And this is how they interpreted the data:

“Tech sites seem to be less reliant on the Tweet Button, as a percentage — as one might expect from sites with a social media-savvy audience. Presumably readers of The Verge are comfortable copying and pasting a URL into Twitter on their own, or tweeting to Verge content by seeing someone else’s reference to it in their feed.”

Here is how I see it: Apparently, the more you understand technology the less you use the buttons. Why? Because technologically used minds use technology more efficiently than others? Because they know that those buttons don’t provide the best tweet experience? Because they come from social networks, go back and tweet right there? I don’t know, but I’m very curious to learn why.

“Sites with a clear ideological profile — Daily Kos on the left (38.8 percent) and Red State on the right (32.1 percent), for instance — are among the heaviest beneficiaries of the Tweet Button.”

I’d say: The more ideological, the more likely you blindly push buttons. It’s good to have soldiers supporting your cause. I prefer to learn from conversations. The following graph comes from the same source, although we extended the scale to 100% to give you a better impression of the actual percentage:

I am not surprised that the buttons are used. Of course, people do use these buttons. But wouldn’t they tweet without buttons? And isn’t 20% rather a low number, not a high number? Isn’t 80% manual tweets surprisingly high? Is it really 20%? What happens on small sites? Does size play a role? The relatively low button use (15%) on the New York Times is noteworthy. Could they improve tweets by being more active on Twitter instead? What’s the matter with Fox News (5%)? Do they know about that? Are they doing something differently? Or is it the user base? The most important question is: how high is the percentage of total readers (not tweeters) that use those buttons and how much additional traffic do they generate?

In any case, what we suggested is not cutting social media off, but integrating it more selectively and consciously. To further careful social media interaction and conscious debate. This is how we think social media works. What did surprise me was Joshua Benton’s conclusion:

“…even this quick look would seem to support the idea that killing off Tweet Buttons would, for most news organizations, remove somewhere around 20 percent of their Twitter link mentions.”

He then relativizes this conclusion up and down (“maybe more, maybe less”), but let’s be clear:

1. You can’t conclude that people that use the tweet button wouldn’t tweet it otherwise.
2. Part of the original argument, nicely put by SmashingMag, was: “We removed FB buttons and traffic from Facebook increased. Reason: instead of ‘liking’ articles, readers share it on their timeline.” Meaning: They like less but discuss more, which results in more traffic. Quality instead of quantity.
3. Again: Not elimination of Social Networks, conscious integration is what we suggest.
4. To say for sure whether these buttons are beneficial at all you need to A/B test. To falsify the assumption that curation of tweets works better than tweet buttons you need to A/B/C test:
   • A: An article with buttons
   • B: The same article without buttons
   • C: The same article with curated integration of tweets

Insights from the Financial Times Lab

I was really pleased when I read “Decreasing the distance between producers and consumers of news” from Matthew Caruana Galizia, working at the FT Lab, who said:

“…what we’d really like (my team and I, not necessarily the FT) is for the editorial team to engage more actively on social media. The first step would be, as the article points out, to discourage passive ‘Liking’ and encourage the more active kind of posting that people would do otherwise. The second step would be to show journalists where these discussions are happening (using our tool) and lead them to participate.”

So what is it?

It becomes clear that there won’t be a one size fits all, either-or answer to this. What have we learned?

• A lot of (technically savvy?) people despise these buttons and do indeed consider them to be sleazy. If early adopters in tech are indicators of tech trends, then these buttons will disappear sooner or later.
• Apparently, they work quite well for activist political sites and removing them might not be the smartest thing for similar sites.
• From what we can see, there are definitely smarter ways to integrate social media for quality tech sites like the Verge, and quality newspapers like the New York Times. And this was what — as a newspaper designer and tech blogger — I was mostly interested in to begin with.
• Don’t be fooled: If you have 30 visitors per month, those buttons won’t make you a star. And for a quality brand with a higher brand value than Facebook and Twitter (yes, they still exist), these buttons actually profit more from you than the other way around.

Whatever side you are on, this has been, and will continue to be, a highly interesting debate. It is not a black and white case, and it is far from over. Let’s get to the bottom of this.

First reactions and additional insights

In the mean time, most reactions now come in long form. Which is preferable, as it is a complex debate. Here are a few reactions and some additional information:

“Visitors to the Huffington Post in January 2008 would have been given the option to share an article via Digg, Reddit and Delicious. Now they are given up to 20 ways to share an article just via Facebook alone.” Journalism.co.uk

“…is there any point compromising the entire design of your site with buttons that are going to drive such small volume of traffic. Are people just installing these buttons because they see them on every site in the world?” simplyzesty.com

“@iA We noticed in usability testing that even novice users were uncomfortable with branded share buttons: ‘I don’t want to be followed.’” @bartvandebiezen

“Love a good questioning of the status-quo” @on_ah

“I redesigned Useit for a project, and his share buttons weigh 30x more than the rest of the page combined.” @ctbeiser

“@iA Killed off those social media buttons, replacing them with a link to your article in the source code.” @davidbauer

“@iA And then all web browsers add the social media buttons to their default toolbars: Mountain Lion” @bartvandebiezen

“A few months ago I toyed around with the idea of removing share buttons from my company’s email newsletters, just to see what would happen. … After a few email newsletters had gone out I checked out the numbers and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw—the blog posts were getting more shares than they had ever gotten before! I realized that the social share buttons in the newsletter weren’t doing me that much good.” — Search Engine Journal

“One argument in favor of sharing buttons is the psychological phenomenon of “social proof,” where a person entering a new environment tends to conform to the behavior demonstrated by others. [...] “just look at all these other people who already have!” [...] We also know that many people share content because it makes them look smart and well-informed. Part of that is being among the first to have shared it, and thus not sharing something that’s already well-circulated. In this way, a sharing button could limit the potential spread of your best content.” Poynter

“so far I’ve noticed that, on any given day, about 2% of my visitors share a link. Each shared link generates a little over 2 extra visits, and that adds accounts for about 3% of my site’s traffic.” The Digital Reader

There has been some discussion on G+ on how G+ activity affect your SEO. While it’s a shrewd trick to get people to use G+ by influencing Google Search results depending on your G+ action, the 100,000 Dollar question, is, again:

“Where do you rather get a +1? On G+ or on your page? Would you not get even more +1s if you provide a more engaging hook into +1 than a silly button, meaning: Doing what I suggested, and feature some of the social Media interaction at the end of the post.” Me on G+

No need to remind me of Twitter

The user doesn’t come out of nowhere. We don’t land on your page and then head happily to those social networks to promote you, just because you have a button on your site. We find content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc., not the other way around.

• Whoever uses social networks to find content, usually begins the web journey there and goes back naturally. We don’t need to be reminded of what network we use on the way. We know. We came from there.
• For those who don’t use social networks the social media buttons are completely useless.
• If readers are too lazy to copy and paste the URL, and write a few words about your content, then it is not because you lack these magical buttons.

Some people probably do use those buttons. Maybe even a lot of people. And maybe you do and think I’m dead wrong about this. Maybe I am. And maybe someone needs to do some serious research to know for sure. I won’t deny all that. What I know for sure is that most people who know how to use social media also know how to share URLs:

“We removed FB buttons and traffic from Facebook increased. Reason: instead of ‘liking’ articles, readers share it on their timeline.” —@smashingmag

If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

What’s the harm?

What does it mean that every Mashable article has thousands of retweets and likes? It’s not like the number of tweets shows how interesting an article is. It more likely shows the strength of their social media profile.

Don’t worry. These buttons will vanish. The previous wave of buttons for Delicious and Digg and Co. vanished, Facebook and Twitter and G+ might vanish or they might survive, but the buttons will vanish for sure. Or do you seriously think that in ten years we will still have those buttons on every page? No, right? Why, because you already know as a user that they’re not that great. So why not get rid of them now? Because “they’re not doing any harm”? Are you sure?

• Did you know about the spying?
• Are you okay with slower loading times and bumpy scrolling?
• If you’re unknown, social media buttons make you look like a dog waiting for the crumbs from the table. You might have magnificent writing skills and a lot to say, but you will still only get a few retweets and likes. Yes, it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. If you’re known, you will get attention, even for the mediocre. If you’re not known, no matter how good you are, initially you won’t. That button that says “2 retweets” will be read as: “This is not so great, but please read it anyway? Please?”
• If you’re known and your text is not that great the sleaze buttons can look greedy and unfair (yes, people are jealous). “1280 retweets and you want more?—Meh, I think you got enough attention for this piece of junk.” When I started writing this article I was looking forward to cite a courageous piece by 37signals explaining why “it’s the content, not the icons”—only to find that they now have added a Like and a Retweet button.
• In a medium full of advertisement and self-promotion, every unnecessary pixel of noise and “click-me!”-begging should be avoided if it can be. The less noise, the less begging, the less secondary advertisement means the easier it is to focus, and the more likely it is that people will actually read your content.

Social media buttons are not a social media strategy, even though they’re often sold that way. Excellent content, serious networking and constant human engagement is the way to build your profile. Adding those sleazy buttons won’t achieve anything. Social media is not easy — there is no simple trick. Usually, what most people do is not the winning strategy but the safe strategy, and safe rarely wins.

Got a better idea?

Is there a better way to “integrate Social Media”? Well, why don’t you just post the best reactions on the bottom of the article? Like this:

“@iA would you please stop telling people that they need to do put effort to get good results, instead of relying on cheap magic tricks?” @fariska

“@iA Also to point out one actual harm the buttons do: slower page load times. Especially, but not only, Facebook buttons.” @ojt [Completely forgot about that, updated the post right after the tweet.]

“@ia And then there’s the persistent cookie trail they leave—pertinent for EU-based website creators and owners. Going, going, (soon) gone” @Wordius

“Designer Hilton Lipschitz told us he had much the same experience. Buttons were slowing his site by over a second, which made him concerned some potential visitors would leave, and many were rarely used: ‘One article got 22,000 page views, but there were no Google+ or Facebook Likes and no Tweet shares.’ He said people are probably used to seeing these buttons but blank them out like adverts, and added that his traffic – which mostly arrives from Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News, has not been negatively affected.” From .NetMag

“Just saying: There are also technical reasons to decry buttons, as @zurb did: ‘Small, Painful Buttons: Why Social Media Buttons Might be Killing Your Mobile Site’.” @gregone

“I don’t embed any sharing buttons for one big reason: they look cheap and desperate. They would devalue my voice and reduce my credibility.” Marco Arment

“… those insipid per-post social media buttons” Daring Fireball

“How much of web design is done because that person did it over there?” Shawn Blanc

“Well said” @Zeldman

“Well, I don’t have serious research across the board, but I do have access to the Guardian’s analytics, and we’ve actually just done a fascinating set of A/B tests around sharing buttons. This has culminated in the appearance of a “floating” set of buttons to the left of an article.” Martin Belam EX IA at TheGuardian

“In conclusion, what we’d really like (my team and I, not necessarily the FT) is for the editorial team to engage more actively on social media. The first step would be, as the article points out, to discourage passive ‘Liking’ and encourage the more active kind of posting that people would do otherwise. The second step would be to show journalists where these discussions are happening (using our tool) and lead them to participate.” Matthew Caruana Galizia UXD at the Financial Times Labs

Critical reactions and first data analyzing the performance of buttons here.

Between just a MacBook Air, a Nokia Lumia 900, a Samsung Galaxy, and an iPad3 alone we have four screen sizes and resolutions. Until recently, we only had a couple of system fonts to choose from, there was not much choice. For serifed typefaces there was mainly one (Georgia) and for sans-serifed typefaces there were two or three (mainly Arial and Verdana). These typefaces were designed in the early 1990s for what we now consider low resolution screens. They have worked well so far. Unfortunately, they don’t work on high density screens. Why?

Goodbye Georgia?

Georgia works perfectly as body text up until 16 pixels. As soon as you go over that size, it starts to look odd. This is not a design deficiency of the typeface. It was simply not designed to work for big body text sizes and dense screens.

Which is why we designed a custom typeface that adapts to different resolutions. We call it iABC (a lot of shapes were inspired by a little side project of the same name). Currently you can only see it on mobile devices and OSX. Until iABC is properly hinted, PC users will see Georgia.

In retrospect, making a custom typeface was pure madness, and the microtypographic result is far from great. Professional type designers at TypoBerlin were frowning over the many bumps and spacing mistakes.

Our new typeface is also quite boring, conceptually. But it was not our goal to convince with a best type designers that we can create the best typeface. What we wanted is to test our concept of responsive typography. And since there are hardly any screen fonts that offer this feature, we had to create it ourselves. The idea of using graded fonts for different conditions is not new. Newspapers have been using graded fonts for different paper qualities for a long time.

Our custom typeface also gave us the liberty to embed all graphic elements of the site into the typeface. Except for actual pictures, the whole website is constructed with type.

Which fonts work where and why?

Now it gets complicated. Since there are so many different screen sizes, pixel resolutions and rendering processes, it helps remembering the following rules of thumb:

1. PC: System fonts look ok in most cases. Custom fonts turn into a nightmare if they’re not hinted.
2. OSX: System fonts look good on low resolution screens (e.g. the old PowerBook G4 12 inch), they look too bold on high resolution screens (MacBook Air) and they look okay on Retina displays (next MacBook Pro). Lighter fonts look excellent on high resolution screens, but they are too light for Retina displays.
3. iOS: System fonts look too bold on high resolution screens (iPhone 1-3, iPad 1-2) and they look okay on Retina Displays (iPad 3). For perfect HTML performance on Retina displays, you need a bolder font on portrait mode and a regular weight in landscape mode. For perfect performance on high resolution screens, you need a lighter typeface.

Now this list will confuse you more than it will clear things up. To put it in simpler terms: For optimal performance beyond low resolution, and outside the PC world (where system fonts still perform adequately), you need three font grades:

• Lighter (for high resolution screens)
• Regular (for Retina landscape HTML mode)
• Bolder (for Retina portrait HTML mode)

Show me!

You can see it right here; that is, actually, you can’t. You can’t see responsive typography on one and the same device. And you can’t even see it comparing the devices if it’s done right. The idea of responsive typefaces is that the typeface always looks and feels the same. Let’s look at two examples:

Why would you care about that?

Now, this kind of malarkey is not possible in every circumstance. It is literally impossible to make Mac and PC screens look the same, but that’s not big news. However, responsive layouts and responsive typefaces create a better digital reading experience. The more readable the typeface, the better the reading performance of a site. Most people can’t discern good from bad typography, but everyone can feel it. For now, we hope that our provisory typeface doesn’t make you uncomfortable.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this, we’ve just started a series that explains Responsive Typography from scratch: Here is part 1.