Comment by dang

4 days ago

[stub for offtopicness]

All: please note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

Yes, sites that don't work on your device are annoying—but uninteresting, offtopic, irritable threads are the closer-to-home annoyance here.

39 comments

dang

Reply
psini  4 days ago

Please don't let the comments deter you from giving the site a try! Ok navigation is finicky on mobile but this isn't a blog post, it's quirky, I find the humor funny and the subject matter deserves some artistic liberty on the presentation side

  • dang  4 days ago

    Sorry—I feel bad about moving this one because you were on the downhill (good!) side of the contrarian dynamic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542904), but the subthread mostly reverted to the uphill (bad!) side, in keeping with this sequence of sadness:

      1. objections
  2. objection to the objections (<-- you were here)
  3. objections to the objection to the objections

    ...so it veered further off topic. (and yes I suppose my comment here is a 4-th order objection)

  • Normal_gaussian  4 days ago

    Its notable that on desktop, the navigation is excellent. Custom navigation is rarely great, but this fits the content so well.

    • jahsome  4 days ago

      I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?

      "Custom navigation" means I as a reader need to split my focus between learning how this thing works, and consuming the information presented, which is presumably the goal of this page. I can't say for sure because the instant my screen started scrolling the opposite axis I smashed the back button.

      Pick a lane: this kind of stuff is fine as a "design" showpiece, but if the goal of a page is to convey information, why introduce distractions over sticking with familiar patterns?

      7 replies →

  • zahlman  4 days ago

    I use NoScript on desktop and was confronted with a complete jumble of words overlaying each other, each individual piece apparently word salad. I can't even understand what the intended purpose of the page is. My best guess is that it's trying to demonstrate a font... ?

Fraterkes  4 days ago

This is kind of a seminal resource for a lot of new type-designers. This appearing on hn only for everyone to moan about how the mobile site is lacking kinda makes me feel like I should spend less time on here

defanor  4 days ago

It is too annoying to carefully scroll to the small ranges at which texts are visible, with a custom horizontal scroll, to fish out small bits of text, which do not even seem to be written well. And that is after enabling JS, without which it is broken, yet not obviously (not much more than with JS). Websites about design and typography tend to be broken and illegible, but this one seems to stand out even among those.

But as with quite a few of other such websites, disabling CSS actually renders it easily legible and navigable, even without JS.

JadoJodo  4 days ago

I do find this kind of analysis fascinating, and yet (personal choice in creative outputs aside) I also find what seems to be the increased use of swearing in blog posts/website copy to be, frankly, lazy.

niek_pas  4 days ago

[flagged]

  • RHSeeger  4 days ago

    Its not even just mobile. Scrolling down on my desktop using the scroll wheel... Page goes down, then right, then down. I find it disorienting and completely turns me away from the site. I've seen it before and every time, it's a net negative to the site in question; sometimes a lot.

  • Normal_gaussian  4 days ago

    I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the author does not in fact specialise in web design, and thus its quite expected that when they do something unusual that it won't work for some portion of the audience.

    It works fine on some mobiles.

  • dfee  4 days ago

    I tried scrolling right and left and reloaded the page a couple times.

    Turns out scrolling down is translated to scrolling left.

  • rzwitserloot  4 days ago

    This could have easily been a youtube short or whatever 'vine offshoot' is your particular favourite flavour.

    On one hand, videos are terrible for accessibility. On the other hand, by being a website, in theory this stands a better shot. And yet, someone on a mobile phone probably has a much worse experience trying to consume this content than the equivalent as a series of shorts, one for each letter.

    I don't know what conclusions we are meant to draw. I just found it an interesting realisation.

  • jeroenhd  4 days ago

    It's not immediately intuitive but hardly unusable. Reminds me of apple.com (and that's not a compliment).

  • blahgeek  4 days ago

    This page works beautifully in my iPhone. As I scroll down, the content slides and animates. I actually came here to say that I’m stunned that this effect can be good in mobile, only to find out your comment :D

    • niek_pas  4 days ago

      I'm on iPhone too; I'm referring to the way scrolling down with your finger animates the content sideways, which I really don't think works well — it would have been better to just be able to scroll sideways.

    • wpm  4 days ago

      As I scroll down, the content moves side to side which is vomitous and disorienting.