Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics, Too

Hank William on Jakob Nielsen’s failure with useit.com’s unusable, illegible site:

Unfortunately, I have to say, Jakob has perhaps the worst site design I have ever seen. It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit.

I have to agree. I’ve found Jakob’s site in dire need of some of his own usability magic—the font is too big, the leading too tight, the yellow color too brash, and the margins too small, or in some cases nonexistent. It makes his site useless for long reading because of the visual noise of his type and color choices. It’s 2008—one would think Nielsen could find time to take his own advice and put “line-height: 160%” into his stylesheet to make a free, fast, and huge usability improvement to his site.

This site (kylemeyer.com) parallels Nielsen’s site in a couple ways:

1. This site, too, is devoid of images used for the design
2. We both use yellow as an accent color

Despite these, this site is much more legible because of the reduced contrasts in design and sensible default type. These are not design concerns—proper type is a finite proposition. Type can be legible, or not. Surely he doesn’t mean his site to be an example of poor usability, but it appears that this is the case.