420 Creative - Portland Web Design Studio

UI guru Jakob Nielsen’s site is unreadable

Aug 22 2008

Angie Herrera

Design, Web Development

Or so says Hank Williams at Why Does Everything Suck? You know what? I fully agree. For me, it boils down to horrible, practically non-existent typography. Clearly Nielsen's site is usable (if it weren't then I doubt he'd be much of an expert). But Hank isn't talking about usability here. He's talking about readability, which while it can be considered a *part* of usability, the two are not the same. And readability and typography go hand in hand. Unfortunately even great experts like Nielsen don't realize that typography is a part of design. In some cases, typography **IS** the design. Mark Boulton's company website is a beautiful example of this.