Why (No) Comments?

I’m going to be brutally honest here. When I got the idea of starting up a company blog, and decided that it’s worth a shot – I just sat one evening after work and put it together. No “big thought” went into it as there was not enough time – we were just coming up on the scene, we had ridiculous deadlines to meet and rfps to answer. That’s kind of the main reason commenting was postponed for a later date – there was just no time to style them, make them fit the overall look and feel of the site – we didn’t want to half-ass it all the way. ;)

Some time went by and we began receiving replies to blog posts in the email and that was a sure sign it’s time to enable commenting – so here they are and I hope we’re going to have some good inspiring discussions.

One particular email that I would like to address in this post is from a person which I will not name here (solely for privacy reasons), but it concerns the post “Who Should Design Your Web Site”. First of all I would like to thank her for taking her time to write in. Secondly I’d like to address some of her questions and thoughts from that same email response.

Basically – the way I understood she disagrees with my opinion towards graphic designers (please note that I am not bashing graphic designers in that post, which I have mentioned in the intro to that same post). Her main argument is that not all graphic designers are like that. Well of course they are not all like that, if I wrote/said that it would be just silly, but I do apologize if I didn’t make it clear enough that I wasn’t having each and every graphic designer in mind, but I was referring to graphic designers who think they are “know-it-alls” and there are plenty of them – believe me, that was the reason I decided to write the post.

Beside this – she has made some really good points in her email, stating that the problem that post is addressing is not limited to design for the Web, but to other fields as well.

Another point she made was that the typography on our site – I quote – sucks because of the insufficient line height (or leading if you will) that makes the text hard to read. Then she added that our content suffers of “river of spaces” running vertically through the text, and this is a matter I’d like to take a moment and discuss.

While I thank her for the constructive criticism – I don’t necessarily agree on all points. First of all – our texts are really short, therefore they don’t need to be super-readable, and we think they are readable enough and that they fit the design well. It’s not like it’s a book that people will read for hours at a time. We do understand that justified text is harder to read because of the inconsistent word spacing, but as we said – we kept our copy short, so justified text seemed like a good option. Now that we have a blog – it’s probably a good idea to reconsider that and see if left-aligned text is a better solution. Another reason would be the fact that justified text in browsers are really inferior to justifying in – let’s say Photoshop. There is no hyphenation and spaces can really stretch, especially in short line lengths and big words (like when writing in German).

Anyway, we just wanted to let you know that we have refreshed the site a bit, and we hope we’ll have some good discussions in the comments. Even though it has already started (for some) we would like to wish you a great weekend and a super-productive upcoming week. Cheers!