On Mar 13, 2005, at 3:27 PM, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:

> why the lucky stiff wrote:
>> The vit-core team (assigned to redesign ruby-lang.org) has unveiled 
>> our first two designs today.  We're rolling these out with a new blog 
>> so you can comment on each design and watch the RSS feed for updates.
>> http://redhanded.hobix.com/redesign2005/
>> Your feedback is essential to this project!  If you have comments, 
>> post them on the blog soon so we can move this project along.
>
> All design studies I saw so far at first sight look nice but at second 
> sight are not so good.
>
> http://redhanded.hobix.com/redesign2005/images/john-rubyred-3.0.png
> shows large text using serif fonts and small text using sans-serif. If 
> one uses both kinds of fonts it should be the other way round.

I was convinced that the conventional wisdom was that sans-serif body 
text fonts are more readable at the low DPI you get out of most 
monitors, though actually now that I spent a whole 60 seconds Googling 
I wasn't able to come up with anything substantive either way. 
Personally, I just redesigned my site, using serif fonts as body text 
... this might be less legible to some people, but, you know, I use a 
modern OS with decent anti-aliasing, so it all looks fine to me ;)

> One also should not use underlined and non-underlined links. Given the 
> link text/other text ratio one should stick to non-underlined links.

Consistency is important, but I'd argue the other way: You better have 
your links underlined, otherwise you're going to leave your readers 
madly scrubbing around the page hunting for links. Life's too short.

There are ways to tone down the visual impact of those underlines using 
CSS, if you're concerned about what all that underlining is going to 
look like.

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/