The web interface specialists at 37signals have turned their experience on themselves and served up at nice redesign of 37signals.com. The old site lives on as the 37signals manifesto (worth reading for any web professional).
With the new site comes a White Paper on Contingency Design (‘design for when things go wrong’) that builds on the examples of contingency design, good and bad, at the previously linked Design Not Found.
The guys at 37signals also maintain a fine blog, Signal vs. Noise.
I hope they sell a lot of that simple ’cause that’s damn good stuff. I’m glad someone like them is leading the charge.
Too bad they host on servers that say a CSS file is “text/plain” instead of “text/css”, which leads to Mozilla not loading the CSS. *sigh*
They do some good stuff, but I’m getting very tired of seeing lots of white combined with teeny weeny text. It seems almost compulsory in much of the Web design/weblog world, but would drive me barmy if I was using their proposed 37FakeBank.
Designers, cast off your print shackles and try bumping up your fonts by one or two px once in a while, maybe even be daring and try a background other than white in a non-Flash site. Your Mac won’t explode y’know.
(I realise even mildly criticising 37signals is probably punishable by death in 27 states of the US, but it’s vital to bitch a little occasionally otherwise before you know it you’ll be writing kiss-arse comments praising kottke on metafilter; be warned)
I realise even mildly criticising 37signals is probably punishable by death in 27 states of the US…
Don’t be silly. We love criticism and appreciate your comments. Your kind host Steven offered a few suggestions on this very site regarding Design Not Found and we implemented all of them. We’re always listening, always trying to improve.
We’ll have a look at the little text issue. Where specifically is the little text bothering you?
(and, FYI, none of us have ever been print designers 🙂
Designers, cast off your print shackles and try bumping up your fonts by one or two px once in a while, maybe even be daring and try a background other than white in a non-Flash site. Your Mac won’t explode y’know.
That was the best thing said on the aov for god knows how long.
I’m not saying I’m innocent, but that perfectly sums up the web design click for me.
No electric chair? Web design discussions must be mellowing nowadays!
The print comment wasn’t aimed at you guys, neither was the broad point really; you’ve got your own distinctive approach (the more of those there are around the better), it’s hardly your fault stark white’n’tiny text is sufficiently prevalent to prod me into exhibiting my bad habit of getting ludicrously opinionated about minor Web design matters.
Personally I’ve found that bumping up body/navigation font sizes from around 11px to more like 13px+ can make sites more readable and better looking; that’s merely based on personal opinion, experience and observation. Lots of very small text often seems offputting even for those with young eyes and sharp monitors.
37Fakebank, for example, has miniscule main navigation links (could they be any smaller without becoming clusters of random pixels?); surely adding a few px here and there wouldn’t compromise the design but would improve readability and make clicking around much less fiddly..? Isn’t type that small the preserve of contracts and dodgy privacy policies?
All good points, Matt. We’ll keep them in mind. Thanks for the feedback.
Too bad they host on servers that say a CSS file is “text/plain” instead of “text/css”, which leads to Mozilla not loading the CSS. *sigh*
It actually seems to be a problem with Mozilla (I’m on 0.9.8) interpreting the DOCTYPE declaration properly and then reading the stylesheet. So while our homepage does validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional, Mozilla think it doesn’t and skips over the stylesheet for some reason. Change the DOCTYPE to HTML 4.0 Transitional and Mozilla reads the stylesheet correctly.
The pages on 37signals.com have now been modified to accomodate this issue.
It’s not a problem with Mozilla. It reads the DOCTYPE just peachy. The problem is that it relies on the content-type declaration given by the server. The server sez the CSS file is “text/plain”, when it should be “text/css”. What you did to get Mozilla to read the CSS was to move it into “quirks mode”, which renders pages similar to how 4.x/5.x browsers would, and doesn’t care what the server tells it when loading CSS files.
It wasn’t necessary to change the pages, all you had to do was tell your web host to change the content-type, or upload your own .htaccess file.
Huh, interesting. We’ve never had a problem on any site before, ostensibly because we’ve always been operating in Mozilla’s “quirks” mode.
I’ve now changed the .htaccess information for handling css documents. They should now appear as text/css.
This whole process is awsome! I think it’s great when companies like 37signals respond to user feedback. It makes me feel warm inside, just like when Google adopted Kottke’s recommendation for Google’s News Headlines.
One of the ongoing stereotpyes of web companies is that they distance themselves from dealing with users. The stereotype is largely justified, and I had this problem recently trying to contact banks in London. I sent out 7 emails to major banks asking for information about opening an account and only one (Lloyds) ever got back to me. I sent the emails to the contact address they had posted on their site. I think it’s so disappointing that these companies fail to see the importance of maintaining a repsonsive web presence.
Well done!