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Amazon's Thin Helvetica Syndrome: Font Anorexia vs. Kindle Readability (teleread.com)

Posted by timothy on from the hey-tell-that-to-the-highway-sign-folks dept.

David Rothman writes: The Thin Helvetica Syndrome arises from the latest Kindle upgrade and has made e-books less readable for some. In the past, e-book-lovers who needed more perceived-contrast between text and background could find at least partial relief in Helvetica because the font was heavy by Kindle standards. But now some users complain that the 5.7.2 upgrade actually made Helvetica thinner. Of course, the real cure would be an all-text bold option for people who need it, or even a way to adjust font weight, a feature of Kobo devices. But Amazon stubbornly keeps ignoring user pleas even though the cost of adding either feature would be minimal. Isn't this supposed to be a customer-centric company?

12 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Trend towards illegibility by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The current trend towards very low contrast, low weight fonts by many websites and devices is most disturbing. One has to wonder why webmasters are so ashamed of their content that they want to make it so difficult for people to read it.

    1. Re:Trend towards illegibility by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm still hoping it's a stupid trend, like all those ugly flat icons in dull washed-out pastel colours and GUI elements that are invisible but that you're expected to already know that they're there, what they represent and how they work.

    2. Re:Trend towards illegibility by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Did we mention the whitespace?

      Because I see the trend to add a half an inch of space around everything to make a layout suitable for ... well, I don't know what actually. Not reading, that's for sure.

      My bank recently changed the layout of their web pages ... I used to be able to see all of my accounts on one screen. And suddenly I have to scroll the damned page to read the exact same amount of information on a 23" monitor.

      I think "webmasters" just continue to have no fucking idea about readability and functionality, and instead just do what all the other idiots are doing.

      Just an endless series of things in which all pieces of text get so much personal space as to be absurd.

      They're all taking plays out of the same book, I just can't figure out what the hell it's supposed to be making better ... well, I strongly suspect it's everyone optimizing for tablets and not caring how shitty it looks on everything else.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Trend towards illegibility by Merk42 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Did we mention the whitespace?

      Because I see the trend to add a half an inch of space around everything to make a layout suitable for ... well, I don't know what actually. Not reading, that's for sure.

      My bank recently changed the layout of their web pages ... I used to be able to see all of my accounts on one screen. And suddenly I have to scroll the damned page to read the exact same amount of information on a 23" monitor.

      I think "webmasters" just continue to have no fucking idea about readability and functionality, and instead just do what all the other idiots are doing.

      Just an endless series of things in which all pieces of text get so much personal space as to be absurd.

      They're all taking plays out of the same book, I just can't figure out what the hell it's supposed to be making better ... well, I strongly suspect it's everyone optimizing for tablets and not caring how shitty it looks on everything else.

      Or maybe they do user testing via interviews and/or giving different people different versions and it turns out the winning version is unfortunately the one you don't like.

    4. Re:Trend towards illegibility by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Care to give us more details of the methodology they used, what with you being such an expert and everything?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re: Trend towards illegibility by Aboroth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My theory is that now that there are people who do nothing except design and tweak the user interface, they can't ever be "done" or else they risk people realizing how wasteful it is to have that job position and lose their job. Most of the time, once a UI is done and works well, it's best to leave it alone with the required minimal changes that need to be done be assigned instead to the general project maintainers, not specialized "UX" designers. They might actually think they're useful, like most people want to believe, so they'll come up with things to justify their employment. It's easy for them to set up and game a "study" to justify whatever change it is they want to make to the UI in order to keep busy and keep their job. The more drastic the change is, the more work it is, the more they can argue the merits of keeping their pointless job going, and the more controversy and fluff they can inflate their head with to self-justify their own importance.

    6. Re:Trend towards illegibility by demonlapin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There's also the complication that people who are unfamiliar with a UI tend to prefer simpler ones, while those who use it all the time prefer dense presentations and are perfectly happy to learn complex command strings in order to speed their work. I would like a very different UI for my bank account than, say, an accountant would.

  2. Advertisement pretending to care about consumers by CajunArson · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hilarious how this so-called "poster" acts all high+mighty pretending to care about consumers vs. big bad Amazon while simultaneously shilling and name-dropping for a competitor of Amazon.

    The righteous indignation of the Pot over the Kettle's blackness is truly breathtaking.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  3. Amazon really screwed the pooch on fonts by kriston · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Since Day 1 of the E-Ink Kindles, Amazon has been indignantly screwing the pooch on fonts. It is hard to understand why this is still the case. Bookerly is not a good font; there is no actual science behind the claims made in their marketing about it. There's just no good size to select, either.

    At least they finally started allowing you to ignore the publisher-preferred font in recent years. Some books published that way were illegible and it's obvious that Amazon employees do not use their own products.

    --

    Kriston

  4. Probably a result of dev/designer demographics... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think we all see that there's a big push toward The New Shiny for implementing Web UIs, and a push toward hiring young frontier-chasers in place of older developers and designers who are perhaps more attached to older, less cutting-edge technologies.

    Well, surprise -- younger people IN GENERAL have an easier time focusing on close targets, perceiving low-contrast images, and dealing with generally lower light levels.

    Now, most of the designers I've worked with at least pay lip service to accessibility, universal design, and maybe even special-needs users. But when they're showing mockups to decision-makers, they still seem to push for what's trendy -- and, hey, the twenty- and thirty-somethings in the room have no trouble reading it, and if the forty- and fifty-somethings do, they sure aren't going to call further attention to their "differently youthful" status by complaining about it.

    As a result, we see today's visual design. If we squint enough.

  5. Re:Customer-centric? by idontgno · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Of course our customers are satisfied! What makes you think they have any choice in the matter?"

    --
    Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  6. Re:Font Geeks by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > If you have ever worked with designers they're normally pretty sure they know what is better for you than you do.

    Not in my experience as an OpenGL/WebGL, UI, and graphics expert.

    Most designers focus on form and forget that function is WAY more important.

    I work for a fortune 50 company and most UI designs _visually_ tell me they don't know what the fuck they are doing half of the time. They pursue change for the sake of change without taking the time to **think** about what the fuck they are _actually_ doing and how it will impact the user's experience.

    i.e. They don't understand the importance of consistent button layout & usage, balance of whitespace to content, don't have a freaking clue about SNR (everything is monochromatic), don't understand anything about contrast (i.e. alternative table rows with 2 different backgrounds), don't care about things being mis-aligned by 1 pixel, don't understand the GPU's of any of the devices -- such as how to use a texture atlas, don't understand pow2 textures, don't understand kerning, Signed Distance Field (SDF) fonts, don't understand the pros & cons of skeuomorphism, etc. Basically all the UI + Graphics stuff they are SUPPOSED to know but don't jack on.

    Here are some of my UI rules:

    First rule of Good UI:
    * Empower the user to do what they want, and then get the hell out of the way.

    Second rule of Good UI:
    * "Contrast" is the difference between signal and noise. Too much signal effectively it means zero contrast. Congratulations, you just made EVERYTHING become noise.

    Third rule of Good UI:
    * The holy trinity is Signal, Noise, Whitespace. Whitespace is not signal, and not noise, but is the boundary between the two.

    Fourth rule of Good UI:
    Function is more important then form.

    Fifth rule of Good UI:
    An expert knows when to follow the rules and when to break them. A **little** spice is fine, such as skeuomorphism. Anti-skeuomorphism means zero spice = bland, boring, and looks like crap with the latest fad of "flat" UI & gaudy colors.

    Sixth rule of Good UI:
    If your UI is not running at _least_ 60 Hz (sub 17 ms), you're doing it wrong. If you don't understand the difference between 24 (or 30 Hz), 60 Hz, and 120 Hz you really don't have a fucking clue about smooth UI.

    Seventh rule of Good UI:
    If you don't understand the importance of _trying_ to target 1 ms response time for everything, you're doing it wrong.

    Eighth rule of Good UI:
    If you don't know how to design fonts for low-density SCREEN displays (sub 72 dpi) (aka pixel fonts) vs medium-density PRINT (sub 300 dpi) you don't know your craft.

    Ninth rule of Good UI:
    UI & User Experience is built upon software. Software is built up on hardware. If you don't understand the importance of ALL three, such as the size of the texture cache, you're doing it wrong.

    Tenth rule of Good UI:
    If you don't give users the option to customize the colors and placement of widgets, you're doing it wrong. Congratulations, you probably made all the color deficient people pissed off! One of the reasons World of Warcraft became popular -- because all the UI mods empowered users.

    All the modern UIs from Apple, Google, Micrsoft is a complete clusterfuck of these principles. It is like everyone forget everything we learnt about UI from the past 20 years.