The Old New Yorker
As I was reading through the July/August issue of Print Magazine last night I came across a shocking quote. There was a piece about the redesign of The New Yorker’s website entitled, “The 2.0 of the Town”. In the article there is a direct quote from thier Web Editor, Blake Eskin, which states,
“There’s a level of precision that you can’t achieve online—you can’t control kerning or line spacing, for instance,”.
I spent a lot of time last night and this morning mulling this quote over, and I just can’t seem to reconcile it. We’ve been living with CSS for quite awhile now, and while I know there are still people out there who have not gotten the hint yet about the positive side of what standards can do, I would expect a little more from someone who is clearly involved with online content at one of the largest and most cherished magazines in this country. The line-height and letter-spacing attributes, which control leading and kerning respectively, have been accepted and are useable in browsers as old as IE4. Yet, according to The New Yorker this type of finite control for webpages doesn’t exist.
My only hope is that this statement was taken out of context or is some type of printing error. There are a few anomolies within the quote that make me wonder if that’s the case. For instance the em dash, which breaks the quote succintly, makes me wonder what was left out after the first half of his sentence and before the second half. I also thought it was very weird that the quote ended with a comma. Was there something else after that? Was it a typo? Why does it end like that?
Whatever the case, I’m simply surprised that bold statements like this can make it into a major design publication without being fact checked, smited and dumped into some lower-level ring of the netherworld.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
But isn’t there a little truth in that statement? I wish it wasn’t true, but it is hard to have the sort of precision (especially typographically) that you can have in print design. Users can control too much of the game on their end for there to be hard, fast pixel-perfect precision.
How do we reconcile the two issues? I don’t want to feel like I’m forcing users into a certain box but the frustration of designing something for the user/browser to mangle is also unappealing.
July 5th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
You make a good point Nick. Darn my penchant for being too literal. Yet…
This is a perfect example where some simple clarification of a quote could have made all the difference between comprehension and confusion.
While I do agree that eventual control of typographical elements on the web are out of the designer’s hands due to user preference, browser defaults, etc., we have been given an amount of control (through css) that we can exert over our designs as they go out of our studios.
During the concept and design phases of a site we can employ our baseline standard as regards typographic control. We can exert a level of precision within our text elements. And, yes, this can be overridden at the browser level, but that control still exists within the css we originally created. That control still has a bearing on what a user sees despite their personal viewing preferences.
At the end of the day, pixel-perfect precision is not attainable at this point. There are just too many factors involved, and I, like every other designer, will have to live with it. I guess it’s much the same way that I need to live with poorly delivered and somewhat vague statements from my perfectly kerned and leaded design magazines.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Hey, thanks for reading the piece so thoughtfully. I interviewed Blake Eskin for about an hour, and he went into terrific detail about many aspects, editorial and technical, of working on the web and on the New Yorker site in particular. Unfortunately, because I was working in such a short space, all I could use was this short sentence. If there are any mistakes in my story, I certainly take responsibility for them, but I think Nick is right, despite your very valid point about CSS.
Here’s the sentence in question:
Part of the challenge for exacting print people, as web editor Blake Eskin observes, is that “there’s a level of precision that you can’t achieve online—you can’t control kerning or line spacing, for instance,” so content and search-engine functionality are key.
July 6th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Wow! Thanks Emily for commenting on your piece.
I think my problem simply lies in the breadth of the statement as it stands. To say that we can’t control kerning and leading is, I think, a clouded statement that needs a bit more definition. We can control kerning and leading within our designs, and, yes, that control can be adjusted by the end user, but the ability to control type elements is still there.
I understand, upon further reflection, what Mr. Eskin was trying to say. Yet, if I take an objective step back and look at the sentence from the viewpoint of an individual who perhaps does not work in the web design field, or someone who is just moving in that direction, I have to ask myself does the latter half of his quote clarify or confuse me as to the capabilities of working with type on the web?
With that said, I know I’m splitting hairs. Thank you very much to Emily Gordon and Nick for your thoughts, insight and stimulating conversation.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Well, it is definitely important to remind designers that our need for flexibility doesn’t remove our need to explore more effective/appealing typographical presentations.
And your post is the first thing I’ve read in a while that tries to pull back the reins a little and remind us that we aren’t as powerless as we might think we are and can’t give up our responsibilities yet.
Thanks for maintaining the balance.