Comment by pjerem
2 years ago
It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.
It would be ok if the vast majority of screens were high dpi. But they are not. It’s not a question of being broke or not.
Affordable high-dpi screens are pretty much a recent thing. It keeps being rare (and expensive) on every laptop that isn’t a Mac.
Most companies bought hundreds of 1920*1080 screens in the last decade and they have no real incentive to throw them out of the window neither they feel the need to go 4K even when they buy new screens.
Good hi-dpi+multiscreen support on windows is no more recent than Windows 10 1703. On Linux it’s still garbage.
Millions of people are stuck working with low-dpi screens. It’s not like you have that much power over your employer to ask for a better screen without him changing the whole fleet because all your coworkers now wants one.
So I agree with you. In an ideal world, low-dpi should be something from the past. But it isn’t. And in our real world, the real shame is that designers (including font designers) stopped caring for the vast majority of people who don’t use a hi-dpi screen to work.
> It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.
A good designer would think about how his creation will be used in the Real World IMHO.
You are right. And those good designers, they exist. I know some of them. And I think they are pretty rare.
I'm not criticizing the people themselves but what we expect from them. Most companies will hire their designers looking at some portfolio that the recruiter barely liked. You'd better have colorful big margin mockups to show on your Retina screen rather than showing that you truly care about the fact that your end users are forced to use garbage screens with blur everywhere because they are still using VGA connectors.
I'll pass on the fact that everyone seems to agree that any single app will be used in fullscreen and that it's ok to expect enormous visual real estate. Even task management software like Jira or Todoist just never had the realization that allowing their window and the contained information to be presented in a compact way should be a basic feature.
Just for fun I tried to run Todoist on a 1440x900 resolution (which, sadly, is pretty common for non technical workers). In full screen, you cannot see more than 12 single line tasks. 12 ! On the same screen i can display a 16*39 spreadsheet at 100% zoom. Why do a modern software artificially limit you to 12 units of information and everybody looks do be fine with it ?
And if you want to resize the app for it to be tinier, you are limited to a minimal size that is barely 1/3 of the screen that shows you 7,5 tasks.
I'm not complaining about Todoist especially. If I have it installed it's for good reasons. But it's the same with barely any modern software : you'll struggle to use it if you don't happen to have the same screen as the designers.
And the designers almost always acts like the software they are working on is anyway at the center of your workflow and that it gives them the "right" to use all of your screen real estate when in fact this is super rare : I don't do my work with Todoist or Jira, they are just here to help me quickly get some information. The only software that deserves all of my pixels is the one I'm actually doing my work with (for me it's my IDE but it could be Photoshop, or Excel, or any production app ...).
So, I'll correct myself : when I say "designers don't care", i would rather say "companies don't care". What is important is that the product is visually appealing enough to ease the work of the sales department.
^ this shouldn't be in gray.