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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4540 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do people feel about white space in web design?

There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.

I'm also trying to find professional web design blogs or posts that point out how annoying this trend is. Instead all designers seem to have nothing but nice things to say about white space. Rather than making me think I'm wrong for going against all designers I instead just think the whole profession is wrong.

It's awful. I'm sick and tired of web pages which are about two inches wide on my 24" monitor. Like @Astranagant said, a lot of this is because stuff increasingly gets designed to fit the vastly inferior capabilities of phones. The justification about reading comfort is weak nonsense, imo. I have a much easier time reading text all the way across my monitor than in a tiny column. And really, if some people prefer small columns of text then the right thing to do is let them adjust their browser width to fit their desires. But when the text is artificially limited, I can't expand it to fit my preference.

And as you have noted, basically the entire design profession is dead ass wrong about this. But unfortunately, that's not too surprising. UI design in software is absolute garbage compared to 20 years ago. Everyone is chasing the same stupid trends, or worse, is trying to optimize everything to squeeze out one more marginal user (without any regard for the experience of the users they already have). There's very little quality software interface design being done these days.

But when the text is artificially limited, I can't expand it to fit my preference.

You can modify the CSS—by right-clicking and choosing "Inspect", or by using a browser extension like Stylus.

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