Making Digital Humanists Cry

Week 8: Portfolio Critiques

Ah, the dreaded critique! How dare you criticize my style?

Actually, this was useful.

I had some layout issues that were much more apparent showing my site on the big screen. The site title was off to the left beyond the start of my headings and paragraphs. The page appeared unbalanced. I merely had to remove the negative left padding. The location of the navigation menu is still odd and unbalanced. I would like to figure out a way to make it sit vertically in the left margin. My Beaker image on the home page and my Lewis Chess Queen on my About page could be positioned better. I will look into these some other time.

I also realized I had fallen in love with my font selections, but they weren’t doing me any favors.

I was and still am using Alegreya for the main text. It is an improvement on Times New Roman and projects the proper studious tone. The problem was that the font size was too large for the line spacing and it look scrunched (technical typography term, I’m sure). Reducing the font size from 22pt to 20pt did not do the trick, but then I remembered the line-height parameter. I increased that to 150% and it looks much better.

The team did not care for the Special Elite font I was using for the headings, navigation, links and footer. I liked it because it looked like a typewriter font. It wasn’t bad, but it did look funny for links in the text. I ended up changing that to Montserrat - a clean, non-serif font. I could have just changed the font for links and left the remainder with Special Elite, but too many fonts on a site is as bad as using too many colors. I was happy with changing the rest to Montserrat too.¹

I was hunting for a good font for my site title on Google Fonts, which is useful for previewing and pairing fonts. Nothing jumped out of me but I saw the name Inconsolata and I thought it was a perfect match of form and content. I did not love the font itself otherwise. Using it might even be considered a “type crime,” but it was too perfect to pass up.² I’ve since changed the site title to Montserrat as well.

In working on my site, I noticed some idiosyncrasies of Github-flavored Markdown that I don’t care for:

• You have to manually number your footnotes and place them at the bottom of the page. The footnote reference also interferes with the line spacing.
• You absolutely must add an extra line between paragraphs of any element types (headings, paragraphs, lists) – this was a big problem on my CV page. It would appear properly on my local host and in the Markdown preview package available in Atom, but not live.
• You have to use HTML code blocks to add extra space between paragraphs or sections on the page – just adding line breaks to Markdown doesn’t do it.
• No tab indent without using bullets or block quotes or resorting to CSS.

My Markdown file for this page shows all of these issues.

Of course, this is the purpose of Markdown - to separate presentation and content, but I need some minimal presentation features when writing longer pieces. Writing in Markdown all these weeks has also brought to light how reliant I have become on spellcheck and autocorrect. The Atom editor has some, but it is not as robust as the one I am used to in MS Word.

---