rogerd - 3:33 pm on Jun 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

Why do good designers tend to use ultra-tiny fonts? In visiting high-design content sites - sites of graphic designers, artists, architects, etc. - there is a tendency to use really tiny type (often in graphic form rather than text form). After seeing pixelsurgeon mentioned in another thread as an example of great design, I checked it out and found lots of tiny type, including a column of links that was truly illegible.

The weird thing is, I'm part of the problem. If I see a site with a big Times New Roman H1 tag, my first thought isn't how easy to read it is... instead, I think, "must be that guy's first attempt at web design..." And when I see a red background with some big, bold images and a tiny row of yellow type in the middle, I think, "they hired a design pro for this job".

Do our brains interpret small type in funky fonts and colors as "high design content" just because simple HTML pages don't normally incorporate that look? It seems like the less usable the page is, the "better" the design looks. If I'm working on a design, the left side of my brain is telling me to use simple, readable, user-resizable text while the right side is whispering, "ugly! ugly!"...