October 6th, 2024

Canvases versus Documents

The article examines web design trends, advocating for readability over immersive text, criticizing cluttered homepages, praising clarity in well-designed sites, and urging designers to focus on meaningful features.

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Canvases versus Documents

The article discusses the evolving trends in web design, contrasting traditional document-like layouts with more modern canvas styles. It notes a shift back towards bordered designs, which provide coherence and structure to web pages. The author critiques the current trend of using large, immersive text layouts, arguing that text should prioritize readability and quick comprehension rather than an immersive experience. The article highlights issues with overly cluttered homepages, suggesting that they often contain excessive elements that detract from the core message. The author praises well-designed websites like Pocketbase for their clarity and relevance, while criticizing those that appear hastily constructed using popular tools, which can signal low quality. The piece concludes by urging designers to focus on meaningful features that genuinely engage customers rather than simply imitating trends. It emphasizes the importance of balancing aesthetics with functionality and maintaining high standards in web design.

- The article contrasts traditional document layouts with modern canvas styles in web design.

- It critiques the trend of using large text for immersive experiences, advocating for readability.

- Cluttered homepages are seen as detrimental to effective communication.

- Well-designed websites are praised for clarity and relevance, while poorly constructed sites indicate low quality.

- Designers are encouraged to prioritize meaningful features over following trends.

Link Icon 9 comments
By @yawnxyz - 6 months
> Rather than an FAQ section, I wonder if websites will integrate a “LLM question” section instead.

FYI the point of FAQ sections is to "prime" your brain about certain ideas; they're not always questions that they're frequently asked. A blank canvas chat interface won't have the same effect.

> There’s too much slop on website homepages

Some of these homepages have been iterated by many teams of very smart people, and they're sloppy because they convert. That's it. It's not to convey meaning, like a Wikipedia article, but get someone to click "sign up" or "buy."

It's important to distinguish "conveying meaning" with "conveying feeling"

> hacked together with Tailwind + Cursor + shadcn

most YC and other generic (but pretty) landing pages are usually webflow

By @pintxo - 6 months
> Text is meant to be understood and quickly scanned. Websites are attempting a “canvas-style” design, generally better for conveying feeling, but for text, which is meant to convey meaning and immersion.

This might be, because lots of websites are not there to convey meaning but rather want to bring you in the right mood to do x. And it seems to be that humans - on average - can be far more easily brought into the right mood by manipulating `feelings` than through rational arguments.

By @jauntywundrkind - 6 months
I'd really like the page to be a canvas, made up of many addressable sub objects such as documents. Doable with rdfa or microdata, where elements can declare urls for themselves, but there's nothing but semantic web researchers and some experimental browsers & extensions for it. The page itself could rock & extend this premise, if it wanted.
By @kaiwenwang - 6 months
Oop, this is me. Thanks for the comments everyone, I've reworked my article to be more coherent.
By @tambourine_man - 6 months
I'm getting this error

402: PAYMENT_REQUIRED Code: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED

By @voat - 6 months
While a agree with a few niche points, that some pages don't look good in-between common breakpoints, and that sometimes typography can miss the mark in terms of legibility, I completely disagree with the idea that "canvas" style designs are bad. Look at the graphic design of any modern magazine, very often it looks more like the "canvas" design than the "document". Also, landing pages have nearly infinite real estate, and they are there to communicate as much information as possible, because it might be the only page the user ever sees.
By @Feathercrown - 6 months
This dichotomy seems like a very useful tool for analyzing media.
By @AlienRobot - 6 months
Is the article a canvas or a document?
By @0xCAP - 6 months
Nototo, a now dismissed web app, really nailed this. I'm gonna miss it so much.