Comment by ryandrake
19 hours ago
I think when you make such strongly opinionated design decisions on your website, you're deliberately inviting strong criticism. They could have used a readable vanilla bootstrap theme and HN would be actually discussing the actual text content instead of the design, but they didn't, and here we are.
The idea that opinionated design is intended to court controversy or criticism is, itself, very cynical. The corollary to that is that all design should be vanilla to make it as unobjectionable to the widest audience possible.
Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.
But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.
Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.
Actually, HN wouldn’t be discussing it at all, most likely. At least not this much. The design is not only good, it has also successfully incited a passionate response from a bunch of people who don’t appreciate it. Win-win!