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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Design critique megthread
 
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Anony Mouse
Jan 30, 2005

A name means nothing on the battlefield. After a week, no one has a name.
Lipstick Apathy
It looked like an "IB" to me because the warpy part that goes through the middle looks too much like the descender of the j.

* # ¿ Feb 4, 2015 08:12
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# ¿ Jan 23, 2026 13:23
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Anony Mouse
Jan 30, 2005

A name means nothing on the battlefield. After a week, no one has a name.
Lipstick Apathy

Omits-Bagels posted:

I agree about the title fonts. Any idea what a better size would be?
When it comes to titles, headers, and other emphasized features, a good rule of thumb is to differentiate in no more than 1 or 2 ways. Basically just the bare minimum needed to communicate some hierarchy without going overboard. Right now your headers stand out in four different ways - they're a different size, color, and font than the rest of the copy, and they're uppercased. Play around with it a bit but my first impression is to remove the uppercasing and tone down the size to maybe 150% of the body copy, and consider using one font throughout.

* # ¿ Nov 24, 2015 08:40
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Anony Mouse
Jan 30, 2005

A name means nothing on the battlefield. After a week, no one has a name.
Lipstick Apathy

Omits-Bagels posted:

I've made a few changes to my site so I'd love some more feedback — http://thesavvybackpacker.com

I'm just looking for general ways to improve the design, layout, colors, etc. Any help would be great.
I think it's looking good overall. It's no-nonsense and readable and doesn't try to be needlessly flashy, which is good because people are primarily looking for information.

My main critique is that I think it's a little too dense on desktop. Elements should have a bit more white space around them, headers should have more room, and body copy should be a smidgen larger.

I tried changing the font-size to 18px and found it much more readable. Keep in mind that you need to balance font-size and container-width to maximize readability, which means that the wider an article is the larger its font-size should be to compensate and vice-versa. A good rule of thumb is 8-12 words per line; right now you're at more like 15+. Here's a great article on the subject (which is also quite readable, note the larger font-size and just a smidgen more whitespace between things).

Headers should have a bit more breathing room, enough that they're not butting right up against their paragraphs but still provide a clear visual separation between sections of the page.

I noticed that you're using some semantic HTML like <header> and <footer> but not <main>, <article>, <section>, or <figure>. I'm no SEO expert but stuff like that can impact how Google crawls your site so it's worth a look. You do rank pretty well in Google results for "backpacking europe" so kudos there!

Some things seem a little inconsistent, likely due to how the site has evolved over time. You might want to clean up some things like tables of contents (some articles hyperlink the ToC to the sections, some don't), using <strong> tags in some places where you should probably use headers, etc.

It's good that you're organizing your articles in the left sidebar, but I notice that the articles themselves are part of categories (like "Product Reviews") which are a bit obfuscated from the user. For example, there is no way to go directly to "Product Reviews" from the main page or sidebar. Instead I have to click on "Packing Tip and Lists", then "Best Hiking Socks", and then click on the "Product Reviews" category tag on the hiking socks page. Something as simple as a link to a page with all of the categories listed might help with that.

Finally, clicking on the "XX Comments" link in an article just scrolls to the bottom of the page, but there aren't any comments! Maybe it's just broken and you're fixing it?

* # ¿ Apr 30, 2016 06:22
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Design critique megthread