Being young with good eyesight, I created many sites focused on design in a way that I thought looked clean: small font sizes with low contrast and lots of spacing. Having grown and adapted my tastes over the past few years, I still have good eyesight, but I don’t judge based on just my own eyes anymore.
My new philosophy is to think about what my parents would say about it. When I flip my phone around, would my mom’s first reaction be to grab her glasses?
There’s a lot more to good design than being trendy and making a product seem “clean.” I think good products give a timeless feel and don’t feel overdone. In software products, the font size doesn’t have to be under 16px. And physically, there doesn’t need to be a huge touch screen.
A lot of sites have their font-size set below 16px, meaning that on iOS, you’ll be zoomed in on a focused input and have to un-zoom or pinch around once you’re done editing unless they do some accessibility hacks to get around that. I didn’t mind this for a long time, because other people are doing it. But then I decided it’s really not worth it.
This is something that irritates me a bit with current design on the internet. Rather than sacrificing for the sizing to look “cleaner,” I’d much rather be able to intuitively accomplish any task that I came to the product for. I don’t like the idea of changing something about how I was living in that specific moment to use a product. No glasses, no squinting, and no unexpected page shifting.
Right now, something that meets these criteria for me is the new Honda Accord. Just a normal car, and that’s what I love. A touchscreen, but only for secondary items like the map. Well made knobs and buttons for just the stuff you actually use. The complete opposite is the modern Subaru Outback. What were they thinking?
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