gffrd
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
1,118
Submissions
400
Member since
Apr 5
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 days ago
This means they've figured out a way to keep the screen from wobbling when poked … let the theorizing commence!
Comment · 9 days ago
Actually, that sounds quite similar.
Comment · 12 days ago
> The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.
So … designers?
Comment · 18 days ago
The market is: people with homes and an iPhones. That is to say, a fair number of people.
Comment · 18 days ago
Apple is splitting out a valuable use case that is confusing to people when lumped in to a “do everything” product (iPad).
Comment · 1 month ago
Wine grapes aren’t good for eating. People buy big, sweet grapes with thin skins and no seeds … which is virtually the opposite of what grapes grown for winemaking are.
Comment · 1 month ago
Go wild. Cancel 'em all.
Comment · 1 month ago
That assumes the market is saturated, and there's nothing you could do to convince a non-customer to become a customer.
Comment · 1 month ago
I think they're grabbing at universally-understood frictions that people associate with pleasure or anxiety … or, most powerfully, identity.
We all know the feeling of wanting to be successful, or to go on a great vacation. Showing these scenarios creates strong emotional response in the audience - we're now the people winning at work, going on a great vacation. This is especially important when you're selling something dull. See: insurance.
Comment · 1 month ago
Imagine the fear these people will feel walking in to a vacation planned by … a ROBOT!
Comment · 1 month ago
These are modern infomercials. Concrete pains ("planning a vacation is hard!"), shallow solutions that don't stand up to real-world use, and, in the end, a promise left unfilfilled. (And a thing in your drawer that takes up space.)
Comment · 1 month ago
> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
I'll play!
My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%.
The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone.
A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something.
Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen.
If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours.
If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot.
A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size.
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[1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes.
[2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one.
[3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S...
[4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller
[5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk
[6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...
Comment · 1 month ago
Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
Comment · 1 month ago
How do we know murder is bad?
Comment · 1 month ago
Why do people lie?
Some things I've learned:
• You're not in control of 99.9% of things. But you're fully in control of yourself, and how you respond to the things you're not in control of … which is most everything.
• Everything is balance, and the oscillation to achieve it. All imbalances will be reversed in time, including those in your advantage.
• There is only here and now. Allowing your attention to be captivated by things that already happened, things that haven't happened yet, things happening far away, or things bigger than you can control only serves to steal what power you do have.
• People just want to be seen. Or put another way, they don't want to be invisible. This accounts for the vast majority of human initiative, action, conflict … and money made.
ben [at} gffrd (dot) com