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The typography in the majority of the apps is gorgeous, leaning heavily into Helvetica Neue…

Anyone who deals with typography and typefaces on a daily basis will see this sentence as a big, fat stick of contradiction. Helvetica Neue is one of the most boring and overused (and misused by amateurs) typefaces the world has ever seen. Helvetica is just geometrically sound like any grotesk, not gorgeous by any stretch of the imagination. It’s frustrating that this new interface couldn’t have used more readable type with thicker weights.

9 days ago on The design of iOS 7: simply confusing 3 replies 8 recommends

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Didn’t read the article, I just wanted to say that I love Steve Kim’s art.

22 days ago on Online classes can be enlightening, edifying, and engaging — but they're not college 3 recommends

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What would be an example of a layout you see as smartly filling space?

Our definitions of either veer towards two separate ideals. I see a design that has carefully constructed poise and restraint as smart. A lot of thinking and practice has gone into things that look like they have “too much whitespace” to the untrained or uninformed.

To me, there is nothing smart about using HTML and CSS to fill up space automatically with elements that have little to no hierarchy. A thumbnail of a photo should be a thumbnail—if it is an impressive photo, then its thumbnail will make you want to click it. If it is not an impressive photo then making the thumbnail as big as possible will not make it any more impressive.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 1 reply 1 recommend

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Not being sarcastic at all. Thing now looks like Google Images with none of Google Images’ utility.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 1 recommend

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I do not agree with that view point. If you find an abundance of white pixels offensive, have you tried go out into the sun lately? Shit’s bright, yo.

There’s an unfortunate perception that whitespace is bad and that line length of text should extend 100% across a widescreen monitor, cells in a table should have no padding whatsoever, that things need to be as dense as possible to fit as much as possible on a screen at any one time. This does not help the eye sort through all that information easily or comfortably.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 2 replies 6 recommends

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Old Flickr was one of the last bastions of clear typography in a sea of social sites. It had a design language that no other network at the time was doing, and they were doing it very well. That’s what gave it soul—something good, something crafted well (neither of those sites you reference are crafted well; Fancy is very copycat-ish with messed up margins, so.cl has a very confusing hierarchy).

This new approach has none of that. It’s trying to take a cool page from curated found image sites like Haw-lin and apply some social media glaze. It’s literally a deluge of images floated left with a max height and tiny margins between them. If you were a photographer (or any sort of image maker), would you allow your work to be squished on a wall like that? There is absolutely no reason to do that.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 1 reply 4 recommends

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This new interface is not good design; it’s an extremely claustrophobic experience, trying to fill up as much screen as possible with unrelated images in a feed and awkward black borders compensating portrait oriented images. The “old” design was much more clear, sane, and like a gallery.

Now it’s just dumb, like a street light with a million stickers and wheatpaste advertisements stuck to it.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 3 replies 4 recommends

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Yeah I saw that. You can win if you want this time, but with Flickr like this we all lose.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 2 replies 1 recommend

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Found this in the Flickr forum’s super big complaint (feedback?) thread:

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 3 replies 2 recommends

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They killed it. Flickr was peacefully in a coma but they killed it and created this monster with no whitespace, no typographic clarity, and no soul.

30 days ago on Yahoo revitalizes Flickr with huge images, sharing, and a terabyte of free space (hands-on) 4 replies 4 recommends

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Macaroni and cheese or vegetable and tofu Pad Thai.

about 1 month ago on How Google beat Apple to a streaming music service