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Far From Being a Utilitarian Afterthought, an Astonishing Number of Design Choices Go Into Pagination (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In his landmark 1931 book An Essay on Typography, the British typographer Eric Gill discusses everything from the proper place for the tail of an 'R' to terminate to which type of word press might best serve the amateur typographer. He casts the printed word as sacred. But there's one thing -- a silent, steady workhorse found in nearly every book -- that Gill fails to address: the lowly page number. The functional role of the page number is simple: it provides order and sequence to a text. And while it is a supremely utilitarian design element, more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
Nowadays, the layouters and designers have long been sacked.
Widows and orphans on every (other) page, nobody knows anymore that title size and the extra space below should be a multiple of the normal text, so the alignment of the articles in the previous and next columns are completely ignored. If it is too obvious, some poor soul inserts a vertical line between the columns.
Look closely at your local newspaper and check one online from 30-40 years ago and you'll immediately see the difference.
Since the day Pagemaker was invented, it has gone downhill.
I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently.
Sorry, there is no more pagination on the web.
Now all of the content for each site is concatenated together into a single endless page which stuffs more crap onto the bottom every time you scroll down a bit.
True story. I once eagerly devoured a documentary on Helvitica.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently.
Sorry, there is no more pagination on the web.
Now all of the content for each site is concatenated together into a single endless page which stuffs more crap onto the bottom every time you scroll down a bit.
That infinite scroll bullshit annoys me to no end. I'm always happy to find a site where I can specify the page I want to see or the number of lines / elements by tweaking the URL.