#egregious UI changes

[ailurinae]

Reminder, you can undo the horrific dashboard changes with with Tampermonkey and https://github.com/enchanted-sword/dashboard-unfucker by @dragongirlsnout (this script actually has two methods to fix the issue, in case you have issues with one)

Or Stylus and https://userstyles.world/style/11286/old-tumblr-dashboard-july-2023 (not sure of tumblr username of this author)

Tampermonkey and Stylus both are available for Firefox and Chrome (probably most Chromium based browsers).

Note: usually I recommend Violentmonkey or possibly Firemonkey, as they are open source and have no Google Analytics, unlike Tampermonkey, but Dashboard Unfucker currently only supports Tampermonkey.

Friday, August 18th, 2023

🌟 New

We've streamlined our navigation in a way that will make it much easier for new and infrequent users to level up their experience here. Thanks to everyone who offered feedback, it was a huge help in refining it!

The Activity redesign is now live in the Android and iOS apps! It should be much easier to identify unread notifications, as well as notifications from your treasured mutuals and blogs you follow.

🛠 Fixed

Blogs that you have recently refollowed after unfollowing will no longer be hidden from your Dashboard. If this has happened to you, please unfollow and refollow the blog(s) in question one more time.

If you have allowed mature content, you'll no longer be warned when visiting a blog that contains mature content.

Clicking elements of a reblog's header will now take you to the same places in the iOS app as they do in the Android app and on web.

The year timestamp has returned to Messages for items that are over a year old.

On web, we had some brief issues on Wednesday with blog information (such as avatars and the follow button), but they've been fixed.

Spotify embeds are working again! Thank you to Spotify for helping us resolve this issue!

🚧 Ongoing

Staff are hard at work updating our docs. If you see anything confusing or out-of-date, please send some feedback!

🌱 Upcoming

Nothing to report here today.

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we'll get back to you as soon as we can!

Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with the community.

[dracolunae]

WHY IS THE BLOG SECTION ON THE SIDE NOW???

[heedra]

i do generally agree with the frustration at the ui and advertising changes on this site and on web 2.0 in general these days but i think its very funny how ppl treated the one piece thing like it was a uniquely egregious sign of web 2.0 decay as if the 2000's neopets experience wasn't logging on to look at the site news and see that the headline was "TAKE YOUR NEOPETS TO THE NEW MOUNTAIN DEW STORE IN NEOPIA CENTRAL AND SATE THEIR HUNGER WITH BAJA BLAST"

[uroboros-if]

i am actually so insane abt this if holy shit like holy SHIT????? it's rare that an if pulls me in so immediately as my personal preference is to go for completed ones (free so i am missing out on some itch and several cog ones lmao) if not long wips but every single aspect of this if is lovely and the sum is even greater than that somehow

the whole premise and wordbuilding is sublime and the fact that we are a 'useless' god is amazing love proving the inherent worth of just existing and that any kindnesses are all the more valuable because it's for you as you not for what u can do but i digress

such charming lovely well rounded characters and augh i can smell the angst and pain (i love it) and the gods v mortals conflict.................... also ur writing style is so flowy and like. elegant?? idk it's pleasing to read and rlly fits the tone of it!!!

not to mention the variability and just much more complex relationships/choices? i don't mind stat checking mainly cuz i haven't happened upon particularly egregious uses of it but i love this approach - reminds me of atoc!! and ur ui is amazing............. just GORGEOUS and works smoothly!!!!!! the tutorial esque bits are incorporated well too so it's def great for anyone who's first foray into ifs is uroboros!!!!

oke bye take care <3

!!! I cannot tell you how absolutely honored I am to hear that you gave this IF a chance, even if you usually go for completed works. 🥹 I am in the same boat where I only submit myself to waiting on WIPs if they particularly captivate me!

I'm ecstatic you loved the setting, themes, characters and style of the IF! It's a little different from other IFs, not necessarily better or worse, but it can be a little unfamiliar navigating such a writing style, so I'm grateful it isn't so annoying to read and it came across properly to at least some, haha. 🥹❤️

Similarly, I'm also so happy you enjoyed the non-story aspects of it, such as the UI and variability! The variability is overwhelmingly the most difficult part of writing Uroboros, but I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. I wasn't sure if anyone would care much about it, and it's so exciting that some do! I have to start skipping them and revisiting them later, however, as I end up drowning myself writing all the different choices. 😭 I'm also super proud of incorporating the tutorial bits!! I don't like throwing it all in one go.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write your thoughts. It still blows my mind for people to write at length about it, let alone share their thoughts at all. This truly means the world to me. Thank you again, dumplingcatho!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️

[cybergoth-damsel]

Amazing how big companies pave the way for ever-worsening products. Fortnite's whole addiction strategy revolves around hoarding skins and yet every time their locker interface changes it gets more unwieldy to manage the heaps of garbage clogging up your inventory.

(For the duration of the following paragraphs, please keep in mind that fortnite is currently selling a $40 cosmetic car body)

As of writing, the knockoff-spotify ui only actually changes what you have selected when clicked about 80% of the time. Even when it does, there is noticeable half-minute lag between the selection changing and the detail-editing button actually applying to the selected object. The only reliable element of this interaction is the overjuiced button tweening. There are few useful hotkeys either, so every change is mouse-only as you click through god awful menus and scroll bars.

Even EA distributes more tools for navigating their overflow of microtransaction waste. The Sims 4 at least allows you to search items by color and style, as well as what "pack" it's from. Hell, if you'd at least allow the user to tag the items themselves you'd make an unfathomable leap in navigability. You can't even sort objects by whether or not they're cell shaded - something getting increasingly egregious as Fortnite churns out anime OCs by the minute.

And yet Epic is dead set on forcing Fortnite into the shape of a mEtAvErSe PlAtFoRm. Placing the successor to the Rock Band games behind the 5 minute Fortnite loading screen and ui all for the sake of selling SONGS on the Fortnite store. Rocket Race and Lego Fortnite are both surprisingly competent little games, so much so that you can tell the only reason they're stuck inside Fortnite is so that you have to participate in the same microtransaction ecosystem, with cross-compatibility further obscuring the actual worth of each purchase.

If Epic really wants people to fully buy in to their games-as-service sandbox (that makes VALVE look open source by comparison) I'd like to think they'd at least consider making the experience of booting up the game on modern hardware like... manageable? fine? At least not worse than it has been?

They have a lot of nerve is all I'm saying. Is that clear? Am I communicating that?

[glassmarcus]

Sonic Frontiers is an errand running power fantasy

*Played in November 2022, Written in December 2022

If you know anything about the development details of Sonic Riders, you know that its prototype was supposed to be more of a Tony Hawk like game instead of a standard racing game. That may be disappointing to hear considering this sounds like a pretty rad idea. Well I have good news. Sonic Frontiers is pretty much a Tony Hawk game. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and other open world/zone games and while those parallels are somewhat valid, they don't really get to the heart of what this game is. Sonic Frontiers is simply a game where you go around and perform sick tricks to get collectibles, and it's always fun because you just happen to be doing it as Sonic the Hedgehog.

Once you got really good at them, the beauty of the old Tony Hawk Pro Skater games was seeing how many task you could complete in a run. It was usually feasible to get 1 or 2 task out of the way within the 2 minute limit, but when you could knock out half of the objectives, you felt like a well oiled board sliding machine. Sonic Frontiers replicates the soul of this. It doesn't have a time limit, but it does have a ton of task to complete. Task which flow into each other seamlessly within it's giant skate parks masquerading as overworlds. It might seem weird for these environments to have grind rails and ramps plastered over the landscape, but it's only weird if you view this as a real place and not the skate park editor level that it is. I mean that more literally than you might think, as you actively build rails and springs as you progress through the island and these act as a sort of fast travel. It taps into the integral joy of seeing how fast you can get from point A to point B and how cool you can look while doing it.

None of the activities you do in Sonic Frontiers are all that interesting individually. Killing enemies is fun, but it's not the peak of stylish action by any means. Grabbing memory tokens are usually enjoyable obstacles, but they lack meaningful challenge usually. The puzzles are baby tier and don't take much thought. Cyber Space Stages are a good change of pace, but lack personality. None of these are anything special and I do wish there was more variety in each category, but doing so many of them, so fast makes it feel like you are getting a lot of shit done. The game can easily flow from puzzle to token to token to mini boss to stage within a few moments if you know what you're doing. And if you don't, then it takes longer, but it's still pretty quick. Sonic Frontiers is bursting with activities that feel like chores, but gives you the speed and tools to knock out those task in moments. It's what it feels like to truly speed run the mundanity of life. I don't know if I'm making this sound appealing by comparing it to doing chores, but I assure you I enjoyed pretty much the entire game. Even the rough parts.

And there are a lot of rough parts. Rough Parts such as: The animations being bare bones; The cutscene budget likely not existing; The physics not quite making sense; The UI feeling like a place holder that accidentally got fully produced; The Hellish pop-in diminishing the routes you can plan for on the fly; The dearth of new enemies pretty early in the game; The combat not knowing the meaning of the word ‘balanced’; Experience capping mid way through the game; The offensive amount of unskippable prompts and repeating cutscenes; The entire 3rd Island thinking it’s Sonic Colors; The 5th Island pretending it isn’t the other half of the 1st Island; Big the Cat trivializing the entire gameloop; The exiguous amount of Cyber Space level motifs; The final boss being hidden and optional; The resurrection of Pin-ball, the most egregious sin of them all. This game is not finished cooking and makes some pretty weird decisions.

I could probably keep going. But the point is, none of this shit matters too much because I get to be Sonic going fast on a big map. And that's all anyone really wants. Since Sonic Adventure, people have tricked themselves into thinking hub worlds were good because they gave you a little playground to run in. Heck, that's basically why Sonic Jam is still cooler than every other Sonic Game Compilation. Sonic is about freedom, and giving a nonlinear open level is about as free as it gets. Sure, physics are wonky, but they are fun to tame and use to your advantage. Upgrading speed takes forever, upgrading ring capacity is stupid, and collectibles could have more meat to them, but simply having a goal that requires Sonic to use his unique mechanics is enough. Cyber Space levels are soulless and I don't remember any of them. But getting an S rank on a few was exhilarating and they actually allow you to skip sections and platform yourself. Combat lacks depth and challenge. But it's still fun to make quick work out of enemies once you learn their behavior. There are flaws that stunt its potential, but never invalidate its value. Frontiers is fundamentally good. What I got out of playing it is about equal to what I got out of Mario Odyssey, but in a 1/3rd of the time. The game is at worst, fine. But it does plenty to elevate itself above that.

Sure going fast and homing attacking stuff is fun, but there are little flourishes that give it that extra oomfp. They did not need to include the Drop Dash in this game, but they did and I love it. Instead of being a way to maintain momentum, it sort of acts as a Spin Dash replacement. It’s not really much better than the boost overall when on a flat surface, but if you are on a hill you can really rack up speed. Using the Drop Dash in optimal locales feels like you are playing the opening cutscene of Sonic CD at times. And I did not expect the game to achieve this in any capacity. There's also the trick system which acts as sort of a small reward for taking big jumps and using certain springs and ramps. Because it's not something you can do whenever you want, it feels nice to just hit as many tricks as possible while it last and gain as much XP as you can. The game is perfectly fine without it, but the occasional bell and whistle to movement is appreciated and makes every bit of over world exploration more enjoyable.

I want to separate the Cyloop from the other new mechanics because I think it's more than just a bell or whistle. It's surprisingly integral to how this game works. It has its uses in combat as sort of a guard break, launcher, and heal. But its main importance comes in the islands themselves. The Cyloop is an alternate interact button. There are so many boring things you could theoretically do with the actual interact button. Blow out torches? just press X. Activate this switch? Just press X. Reset this puzzle piece? Just press X. Frontiers could have done all of these things, but uses its actual interact button as little as possible. Most miscellaneous actions that aren't talking, are performed by cylooping. And it sounds kinda brain dead, but quickly running in a circle is far more interesting then just pressing a context sensitive button. It creates its own intuitive design dialect that applies to many situations. And while all this dialect amounts to is: ‘If all else fails, Cyloop’, That's a much more interesting action than ‘press X when prompted’. It's a very sonicy way to go about making a generic action. Because you aren't required to stop moving in order to do it. Running around in a circle is simple fun that doesn't really get boring. Nights into Dream knew exactly what was up 25 years ago and I'm glad Sonic Team returned to the concept.

I liked combat far more than I thought I would. Enemies in the beginning could take a bit to defeat and really slowed down the flow of the game. The special attacks make quick work out of some, but those have some pretty lengthy animations. Luckily they provided the one thing flashy, substance light combat needs to be good: Animation cancels. Because you can cancel all but 2 animations, you are: A) not forced to wait at all during combat and not have to deal with ending lag, and B) a walking combo video. Outside of the horrid mini bosses you are forced to deal with or the actually good mini bosses you are forced to deal with, enemies are practically soft combo labs. Whenever you see a standard enemy and have the thought "oh lemme see if I can get 3 hits off, do a saw blade, cancel out and finish with a loop kick" you have full reign to execute on that or just run past them. Like I said, the mini bosses are hit and miss and mostly act as platforming challenges rather than combat exercises. The true test of your combat abilities come in the boss fights. Not that they are harder or anything. They are the same as a regular enemy once you get up close. They are all trivialized by the parry, and specials melt the health bar. But you look and feel cooler than ever before doing what you normally do to basic enemies to these walking angelic nightmares. These fights have all the spectacle and hype you’d expect from a Sonic Final Boss, but it's for every boss. They are the least polarizing thing in the game. Most people love them as far as I can tell and have the least amount of caveats attached to them

These bosses act as the perfect punctuation to the individual stories of each island. The story by the way, is adequate this time around. I say adequate as a positive, as the last decade of Sonic stories have been gutter trash. I don't think Sonic Frontiers has a better story than say Sonic Adventure 2 or Sonic and the Black Knight just due to how passive and routine it ends up being. It also does help that the plot is a reskin of Shadow of the Collossus. So it's still good, but kind of played at this point. What really drives it though, are the character interactions courtesy of the king himself, Ian Flynn.

This is where I have to release my Sonic fan limiters and go off a bit. When I picked up that issue of Archie Sonic in the middle of 3rd Eye Comics when I was 11 years old and saw how fucking rad those stories were, I never would have dreamed that the same guy working on them would be a writer on a Sonic game. Sure, he's only really in charge of dialogue, but this is only the first step. Ian Flynn cannot be stopped and will soon hold all the stones. He has proven himself many times over in the past 16 years and even more so in this game. The characters finally act like themselves. Sonic only cracks jokes when appropriate and they are actually funny when he does. He's cool for the first time in 13 years. A character built to be cool is finally cool. That's so cathartic, and honestly that's the easiest thing this game achieves writing wise. Amy is not annoying and veers into positive female role model territory; Knuckles is not a joke and his life situation is treated with respect; Tails' decade long character assassination is addressed and is rolled back in a fitting way; Eggman is no longer a cartoon, but a true villain with actual depth and is effortlessly humorous. They all have their own character arcs that, and while are bit undercooked due to the game being undercooked, are delivered in a believable way. It makes me excited to see what's in store for them. I'm excited for the future of Sonic stories in general.

I'm used to only getting my fix through the comics, but now I'm pretty certain that Flynn is going to have a bigger role in story structure next time. All the ingredients are here. The comics are canonized in this game pretty much. Comic characters already appear in Sonic Runners. We're so close to having NEW cast members in a Sonic game. I know Sage is a new character, and she's great and all, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about anthropomorphic [insert name here] the [insert animal species here] who is a major facet of the roster and a main stay of the franchise. Ever since Sonic 06, Sonic Team has been scared shit-less of these types of characters. The last one that stuck was Silver. Since then, the total cast has been underrepresented and the returning cast is just in the background while Sonic does all the work. It seems like they aren't confident introducing new characters. That's where the comics come in. We already know people love Tangle; We already know people love Whisper; We already know people love Surge. The data is there and has been since 2018. Testing is complete. They just need to be put in a game. This is such easy money that I don’t even think Sega will mess it up.

I know I have no right having optimism after the past 2 decades of Sonic Team shitting the bed, but fuck it. Keeping your expectations in check is not what this franchise is about. Since Sonic Colors we've been playing it safe. And that was when I truly started getting bored with these games. Now I want them to try new and old things. And I want to be excited about it. So I will be. It really feels like they're going for it this time around. They're putting more trust in the community than critics, making sure they're catering to people who actually like the games rather than trying to win over those who don't. It’s what Sonic Forces felt like it might have done if it wasn't based on surface perceptions of what people want. Frontiers is the genuine article. It's rough, and had more issues than I can list, but I'd be lying if I said it's not basically what I've been asking for.

Also the music is good. Undefeatable is a top 5 Sonic vocal track easily and Vandalize isn’t far behind. The Cyber Space music saves them from vanishing in my mind. Fishing Vibes makes me want to go back and get my masters so I can listen to it while I study. It lies on the side of Sonic soundtracks labeled “Not Sonic Chronicles” so it’s extremely good, go figure. This last paragraph is a formality.

[vsa-pieldepapel]

Asks about tumblr/twitter situation not special interest adjacent

Alright apologies for the defensiveness, im a veteran witness of tumblr dramas of all sorts having been in this site since 2013 so its like that old guy farmer who always has a shotgun at hand to ward off any danger kek. The tangential rant was just concept association, I still think it’s purely coincidental though (elaborating a bit below)

The community labels were implemented without any terms of service changes before shit went down on twitter though, it was a matter of discussion why there was a discrepancy even

A friend speculated the rollout of terms of service changes would be gradual and so far he was right on that one (speculated it to be much like you’re saying here, progressing more or less based on reception) first the labels to pitch the idea to the general populace then the first shift on changing the TOS. you’re right tumblr is still a dwindling strange site so I can completely see them using this opportunistically to attract user base from here on so who knows maybe it was not coincidental But I think this first rollout was planned to happen now, and the twitter thing happened to coincide and tumblr was like well shit, we can use this Situation!

Even attracting new users though issues remain because

Of this ^^^^ above. Even with what you say anon, “just mildly” feels like being generous lol. Tumblr will unleash full fury on whoever they deem an acceptable target, and when they do theres no slur or intimidation tactic or even IRL event thats going too far (a couple superwholock dramas that leaked into actual irl con incidents come to mind) I think the tone of the violence is the different thing but tumblr and 4chan are nests for terminal online-ness. Artists who focus on fan merch and fanfic writers may be able to carve a niche but normies… never hahaha

In this respect tumblr is very old web-reminiscent which by itself is something I actually like about it and I hope it doesn’t get sanitised (if it does, to a minimal degree) Sure it’s ridiculous and inaccessible to the new user and an eyesore and a point of many a discourse I remember, but it helps indie people really personalise their brand and from the isolated teenager lens it permits a vast array of self expression.

I agree with you that it can get egregious and it definitely does not help the mainstream access though HAHA. To me its an endearing cringe at this point though I think tumblr really benefits from branding itself as an alt site, not as a mainstream social media joint

Reddit is egregious for non UI related reasons though. im not a fan

I agree!! I think the facetiousness is to not be too evident to the massive corpos like apple so they can get away with more, but it has the effect of also being unclear to the user base : ( tumblr should have addressed the problem in a more targeted way, banning it all outright was both ineffective and ended up financially fucking the site over and its still recovering

[shogunomicon]

Wow Tinder is fucking unusable now. I haven’t had installed in like well over a year but what the fuck happened?

Three different subscription tiers for increasingly comedic amounts of money; you can barely even use the app without subbing

limited amount of likes per day unless you’re a premium member (hence previous point)

fuckin premade profile tags that are entirely useless unless you base your personality around like “wine” or “disney”

some kind of snapchat discover-esque thing where you can watch maybe the worst content-by-algorithm of all time

The one cool feature it uses to have where it could connect to spotify and show your top artists is super fuckin broken (mine will not update from when I last used it and it won’t even let me change it from what I had set)

frankly I really don’t want to see “who liked me” because that doesn’t really feel like the point of the app. I’m not paying for that feature and I don’t want the freebies I just want the beautiful RNG and the stars align to get matches like the old days

there’s this really weird push to give as much information as possible (not just for your profile but to the app itself for “verification purposes” too). Like you can’t forego listing your job title, job location, school location, city, instagram, etc without it reminding you constantly that “you only completed XX% of your profile!”

Similarly if you don’t want your profile listing your age or location for whatever reason (like I dunno privacy?) that requires a Tinder Plus ™ Subscription, baybee!!!

No seriously that last point is fucked up. I’m a guy, I don’t have to worry that much about my information on tinder because I’m not in much danger outside of the slim chance of getting hate-crimed if I match with the wrong guy (and I’m barely talking to tinder men as it is). If that shit rubs ME the wrong way I can’t imagine anyone who may be part of a more vulnerable group would even want to engage with the app in the first place.

the ads are just so fucking aggressive like they just appear in-between people and if you accidentally tap on them they open the obvious, obnoxious website you’d expect. Not only that but ads have been integrated right into the app functions (like a bunch of those “passions” tags are promotional). Shit like spotify integration has always been a form of advertising I guess but this isn’t even functional it’s just egregious (not like the spotify part is functional anymore either).

just in general the ui is a confusing nightmare hell zone where like just finding people you’ve matched with underneath layers and layers of requested monetization is ridiculous. Also parts of the app still look and feel the way it did like 6 years ago or whatever so you can clearly tell none of the money went into functionality

this one isn’t a problem with the app but I feel even shittier about myself after only a day on it again. I was kind of hoping to have like some fun, maybe not actually meet anyone but get at least a bit of a confidence from matching with people but the entire experience is just like soul sucking and I’m going to choose to blame the app instead of my own mental health

[antagonistchan]

god damn

Mass Effect 2 has always been my least favorite of the trilogy

i still love it, but not as much as i love 1 or 3

and honestly

this is even more true in the Legendary Edition. the Legendary Edition widened that gap even further.

like, with each game, the Legendary Edition’s upgrades get more and more subtle. in ME1, they’re the most visible; in ME3, they’re the least. but that’s not the entire story.

the original ME1 had absolutely garbage graphics. that’s just the baggage almost every game from 2007 has, 2007 fucking sucked for game graphics. it could look good on occasion, but just from the sheer strength of having a good enough art style to make up for the garbage graphics. most of these occasions were when you were looking at something that was clearly supposed to wow you, like the view of the nebula surrounding the Citadel; otherwise, things tended to be fairly unimpressive. and it wasn’t just the graphics that were a problem. certain aspects of the gameplay were extremely clunky and awkward, and the UI was okay at the time but our understanding of good video game UIs progressed significantly over the course of the late 2000s.

in the Legendary Edition of ME1, this is no longer true. the entire game looks spectacular. ME1′s graphics have been fully updated to modern standards. i think the polycounts are still ultimately the same, but by the time ME1 came out we’d already basically gotten as far as we ever need to with polycounts. there are only so many polygons you actually need before increasing the polycount just becomes overkill. on top of that, the UI has been fully revamped to be more like ME2 and ME3′s UI, and the vast majority of the clunky gameplay issues have been resolved. the Mako in particular controls so much better. LE1 is the game ME1 was always meant to be, with all the junk wiped off. the junk had its charm, and i still absolutely intend to play the original on occasion, but overall, removing the junk made this amazing game shine even brighter.

the original ME3 was already a fucking spectacular game graphically. not only did it look amazing when it came out in 2012, but i honestly think it holds up today. it still looks very modern. and ME3 never had ME1′s problem of “junk obscuring the quality of the core game”- ME3′s flaws have always been more in the core game itself. i absolutely adore ME3, but i’ll admit, it’s an extremely flawed game and fixing those flaws wouldn’t be possible just with a remaster. so, when its flaws can’t be fixed with a remaster and its graphics still hold up amazingly well today.... i was extremely afraid that LE3 would be underwhelming.

thank god i was wrong. in the Legendary Edition of ME3, the game overall looks the same. again, the game already looks good by modern standards, why fix what ain’t broke? so they didn’t. but yet, while the game overall looks the same, it looks noticeably better, SOMEHOW. the longer i play LE3, the more and more subtle improvements i find myself picking up on. for instance, the way Husks and Cannibals get more and more visibly damaged as you hurt them (burning and emaciating when you set them on fire, chunks of flesh flying off as you shoot them, etc.). or Anderson’s clothes looking slightly more detailed. on the final Mars scene, Dr. Core seemed more visibly damaged. etc. and i’m sure there’s also a ton of stuff that i haven’t noticed yet, but has still contributed to this general feeling of “this looks better somehow”.

the graphical improvements of LE1 feel like making ME1′s garbage graphics finally good. meanwhile, the graphical improvements of LE3 feel like taking ME3′s already really good graphics and adding subtle and refined improvements that result in a game that looks the same but better, somehow. i really love these two improvements. too bad now we have to talk about LE2.

the original ME2 was an okay looking game. it was good by 2009 standards (and graphics from 2009 do not suffer the same curse as graphics from 2007; 2007 wasn’t a general sign of the era, it was just a particularly bad year because the industry was having trouble coping with the jump to HD), but it hasn’t aged nearly as gracefully as ME3′s graphics. but the graphics weren’t as garbage as ME1′s either. it was okay.

and the Legendary Edition of ME2 feels just about the same. the graphical improvements in LE2 are more drastic than they are in LE3, yet somehow they’re less noticeable. most of the time, it doesn’t really feel like i’m playing an improved version of ME2, it just feels like i’m playing ME2. LE3 and ME3 look almost fucking identical and yet LE3 still feels like a massive improvement somehow because the few changes they did make are so good; ME2 and LE2 have tons of extremely noticeable differences and yet it just feels........ the same. and actually, in some ways, LE2 is a little bit of a downgrade. for instance, the lighting on the Normandy. in ME1 and ME3, the Normandy was pretty darkly-lit; by contrast, the Normandy was brightly-lit in ME2. i prefer the dark lighting, but i always found it cool that ME2 did contrast the others in this way. and in LE2, the Normandy is still more brightly-lit than the other two games, but noticeably not as much. but that’s just one minor thing- the bigger and more consistent issue is that LE2 can feel really sloppy a lot of the time. there are so many assets that i can tell they haven’t changed. a few models that are egregiously low-poly (i said earlier that polycounts have mostly been solved since around ME1′s era, and yet...), a ton of video and picture files that clearly haven’t been updated (any video or picture of Anderson looks really weird, because in LE1 and LE2 Anderson uses the ME3 model, but in the original ME1 and ME2 he looked a bit different, and because all the pictures and videos are unaltered, any pictures or videos you see of Anderson.... look like the old Anderson), textures that are really low-res (especially weird because from what i understood the entire LE project started off as just a texture upscale?), a number of other things that i can think of but won’t list because this list is already so long....... LE2 just feels like a pretty sloppy improvement overall.

in the end, this isn’t that big a problem for me. the improvements to LE1 and LE3 are strong enough that i can put up with the comparative weakness of LE2. but it has widened the gap that already existed between ME2 and ME1/ME3 even further.

[miloscat]

[Review] Conker: Live & Reloaded (XB)

Let’s see just how well this misguided remake/expansion holds up. This will be a long one!

Conker’s Bad Fur Day is my favourite N64 game. It’s cinematic and ambitious, technically impressive, has scads of gameplay variety with fun settings and setpieces, and when I first played it I was just the right age for the humour to land very well for me. A scant four years later Rare remade it for the Xbox after their acquisition by Microsoft, replacing the original multiplayer modes with a new online mode that would be the focus of the project, with classes and objectives and such.

First, an assessment of the single-player campaign. On a revisit I can see the common criticisms hold some water: the 3D platformer gameplay is a bit shaky at times, certain gameplay segments are just plain wonky and unfair, and some of the humour doesn’t hold up. It’s got all the best poorly-aged jokes: reference humour, gross-out/shock humour, and poking fun at conventions of the now dormant 3D collectathon platformer genre. I also am more sensitive these days to things like the sexual assault and homophobia undertones to the cogs, or Conker doing awful things for lols. Having said that, there’s plenty that I still find amusing, and outside of a few aggravatingly difficult sequences (surf punks, the mansion key hunt, the submarine attack, the beach escape) I do still appreciate the range of things you do in the game.

As for the remake, I’m not sure it can be called an improvement by any metric. Sure, there’s some minor additions. There’s a new surgeon Tediz miniboss, the new haunted baby doll enemy, and the opening to Spooky has been given a Gothic village retheme along with an added—though unremarked on—costume for Conker during this chapter based on the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing flop. Other changes are if anything detrimental. The electrocution and Berri’s shooting cutscenes have been extended, thus undermining the joke/emotional impact. The original game used the trope of censoring certain swear words to makes lines more funny; the remake adds more censorship for some reason, in one case (the Rock Solid bouncer scene) ruining the joke, and Chucky Poo’s Lament is just worse with fart noises covering the cursing.

The most egregious change, and one lampshaded in the tutorial, is the replacement of the frying pan (an instant and satisfying interaction) with a baseball bat which must be equipped, changing the control and camera to the behind-the-back combat style, and then swung with timed inputs to defeat the many added armoured goblings and dolls carelessly dumped all throughout the game world. This flat out makes the game less fun to play through.

On top of this, all the music has been rerecorded (with apologies to Robin Beanland, I didn’t really notice apart from instances where it had to be changed, such as in Franky’s boss fight where the intensely frenetic banjo lead was drastically reduced as a concession to the requirement to actually play it in real life), and the graphics totally redone. Bad Fur Day made excellent use of textures, but with detail cranked up, the sixth generation muddiness, and a frankly overdone fur effect, something is lost. I’m not a fan of the character redesigns either; sure Birdy has a new hat, but I didn’t particularly want to see Conker’s hands, and the Tediz are no longer sinister stuffed bears but weird biological monster bears with uniforms. On top of all this you notice regular dropped details; a swapped texture makes for nonsensical dialogue in the Batula cutscene, and characters have lost some emotive animations. Plus, the new translucent scrolling speech bubbles are undeniably worse.

I could mention the understandable loading screens (at least they’re quick), the mistimed lip sync (possibly exacerbated by my tech setup), or the removal of cheats (not a big deal), but enough remake bashing. To be fair, the swimming controls have been improved and the air meter mercifully extended, making Bats Tower more palatable. And some sequences have been shortened to—I suppose—lessen gameplay tedium (although removing the electric eel entirely is an odd choice). But let’s cover the multiplayer. Losing the varied modes from the original is a heavy blow, as I remember many a fun evening spent in Beach, War, or Raptor, along with the cutscenes setting up each mode.

The new headline feature of this release is the Live mode. The new Xbox Live service allowing online multiplayer was integrated, although it’s all gone now. Chasing the hot trends of the time, it’s a set of class-based team missions, with the Squirrel High Command vs. the Tediz in a variety of scenarios, mostly boiling down to progressing through capture points or capture the flag. Each class is quite specialised and I’m not sure how balanced it is, plus there’s proto-achievements and unlocks behind substantial milestones none of which I got close to reaching (I don’t think I could get most of them anyway, not being “Live”).

The maps are structured around a “Chapter X” campaign in which the Tediz and the weasel antagonist from BFD Ze Professor (here given a new and highly offensive double-barrelled slur name) are initially fighting the SHC in the Second World War-inspired past of the Old War, before using a time machine, opening up a sci-fi theme for the Future War. These are mainly just aesthetic changes, but it’s a fun idea and lets them explore Seavor’s beloved wartime theming a bit more while also bringing in plenty of references to Star Wars, Alien, Dune, and Halo; mostly visual.

Unfortunately the plot is a bit incoherent, rushed through narration (unusually provided by professional American voice actor Fred Tatasciore rather than a Rare staffer doing a raspy or regional voice like the rest of the game) over admittedly nice-looking cutscenes. They also muddle the timeline significantly, seemingly ignoring the BFD events... and then the Tediz’ ultimate goal is to revive the hibernating Panther King, when the purpose of their creation was to usurp him in the first place! It expands on the Conker universe but in a way that makes the world feel smaller and more confusing. It’s weird, and also Conker doesn’t appear at all.

On top of this, I found the multiplayer experience itself frustrating. To unlock the full Chapter X, you need to play the first three maps on easy, then you can go through the whole six. But I couldn’t pass the first one on normal difficulty! The “Dumbots” seemed to have so much health and impeccable aim, while the action was so chaotic, obscured by intrusive UI, floating usernames, and smoke and other effects with loads of characters milling around, not to mention the confusing map layouts, the friendly fire, the instant respawns, and the spawncamping. Luckily I could play the maps themselves in solo mode with cutscenes and adjustable AI and options.

I found some classes much more satisfying than others. I tried to like the Long Ranger and the slow Demolisher, but found it difficult to be accurate. The awkward range of the Thermophile and the Sky Jockey’s rarely effective vehicles made them uncommon choices. I had most success with the simple Grunt, or the melee-range Sneeker (the SHC variant of which is sadly the sole playable female in the whole thing). You can pick up upgrade tokens during gameplay to expand the toolset of each class, which range from necessary to situational. But ultimately it’s a crapshoot, as I rarely felt that my intentions led to clear results.

Live & Reloaded is such a mess. The Reloaded BFD is full of odd decisions and baffling drawbacks, while the Live portion feels undercooked. I’d have preferred a greater focus on either one; a remake is unnecessary, especially only four years on, but a new single-player adventure would have been ace. And a multiplayer mode in this universe with its own story mode could be cool if it was better balanced and had more to it than just eight maps. As a source of some slight scrapings of new Conker content I appreciated it to some extent, but I can’t help being let down. I guess it’s true what they say... the grass is always greener. And you don’t really know what it is you have, until it’s gone... gone. Gone.

Yes, that ending is still genuinely emotionally affecting.

[nomadicism]

Tumblr Desktop vs Tumblr App

Dear @staff and @support

I know this is just shouting to the wind but...the difference in post features between the app and desktop, and the weird “can’t edit a post/draft that was made in the app” thing that happens when using desktop, are not...great.

Like...really not great.

I used to be able to post from my iPad and iPhone, and use more WYSIWYG text post options like dividers (inserts an <hr> into the body of the post), and numbered or bulleted lists. Can’t do that anymore, and I can understand that the UI challenges for supporting text features on mobile apps can be a PINA.*

But...I can do these things with Evernote, which has a billion more features so...what gives?

And now, the share from YouTube and post to Tumblr has changed such that Tumblr app doesn’t appear to grab the associated content (video description, source, etc) during the share...and I can’t edit the body of the post on desktop to add those things. This is the more egregious change.

This change is an issue b/c when I share from YouTube, I’m technically re-posting someone else’s content (made shareable for that purpose so it’s not like I’m violating the content creator’s preferences unless they explicitly state “don’t repost”). Which means that the content creator’s video description and source link are important. If I have to use the Tumblr app to edit that post then I’m further limited by the lack of WYSIWYG post features for this purpose.

I am very curious as to why these decisions were made.

Are these changes part of an effort to silo the users into “simplified” post type patterns? e.g. not mixing content/media types across different post types.

Because...if it weren’t broke, then don’t fix it? Any user experience issues that I ever had with the Tumblr app were never associated with the features that allowed me to add horizontal rules, or bulleted lists, or add descriptions and source links when sharing/re-posting from another application or platform.

I picked Tumblr (despite some of it’s limitations) for it’s features, and now y’all are nerfing the platform? I may as well have just gone all in on Medium and been crafting blog posts with HTML5 accessibility to begin with (e.g. ARIA, using <strong> instead of <b>, images with alt descriptions, etc).

Seriously, I love Tumblr, but what gives?

* Hi, I work in software development and am a UX designer + UI/front-end developer so I know a thing or two about complex user experiences and the eternal struggle of balancing cross-platform UI features with backend support.

[soulsborne]

What I’ll miss when we all go back to Dark Souls

Now that there’s been 2 Souls games (and Bloodborne) released since the original Dark Souls came out, the series has seen a number of ease of use considerations that will unfortunately be reverted when the remaster comes out. One of the more important ones — the password matchmaking system — will thankfully (mercifully) make a return, but here are some things from the newer games I’ll miss:

Improved user interface

Dark Souls did away with Demon’s Souls incredibly annoying item burden mechanic, which limited the amount of items you can carry with you at any given time. What that means as a result however is that you naturally end up carrying your entire item collection with you at any given time.

This can be alleviated by depositing unneeded items in your bottomless box (or selling them to Frampt when it becomes possible), and works well for weapons and shields that you’ll never use because you simply aren’t specced for them. This can be annoying if you want to sift through armor of course (I like to be able to put on a variety of armor, wouldn’t want to deposit any of it), but you shouldn’t be doing that under duress anyway.

Where the grid menu system becomes a godsend is in your consumables inventory. I’m doing a playthrough of Scholar of the First Sin on PS4 right now and have needed to dip into my consumables a fair amount, from needing to cure poison with moss and even a Divine Blessing once or twice to needing to raise my item discovery when hunting for a Gyrm Greatshield.

When you can quickly jump around the grid it’s a quick in-and-out, but when you’re trying to find a consumable in a relatively small list view and you need to keep them in your inventory in case you end up needing them between bonfires, you can see why the newer games, save for Bloodborne, have opted for a grid interface. Bloodborne to its credit though offers you a secondary item menu and doesn’t go overboard with differing status effects.

Replenishing durability

I’ve discussed the durability systems in a previous post, but it’s really great to be able to ignore repairing items unless a weapon or item actually breaks. The replenishing durability system reinforces the concept of gameplay existing between bonfires. An effect that persists after resting, in this case the durability state of the weapon, seems to contradict this philosophy and was not a welcome return in Bloodborne. Dark Souls III made the smart choice to bring it over from Dark Souls II, and when we return to Lordran proper, I’ll be sad to see the old system back.

Dual-wielding / Powerstancing

You could always off-hand a weapon, some weapons in the first Dark Souls even have specific off-hand traits, but where Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III differ is in officially incorporating dual-wielding as opposed to just wielding two weapons simultaneously. In Dark Souls II, if you met 150% of the requirements of both weapons in your hands, barring some combinations, you could hold down the two-handed button and enter a powerstance instead. This turned your left bumpers and triggers into attacks and combos that used both weapons at the same time.

This system was unfortunately dropped in Dark Souls III, instead opting for a less complicated and fluid, but still interesting set of specifically dual-wield weapons, which traded the ability to two-hand for the ability to wield two of the same weapon.

I think the powerstance system was a superior system due to its flexibility — different infusions and different types of weapons (i.e. swords and daggers) could be associated with your chosen combination — but I can see why this system was confusing and that there is a strategic benefit to being able to press one button to go from sword/shield to dual-wielding, rather than having to change your off-hand, and then hold the two-handed button to power-stance.

Dual-wielding helped players step outside of their reliance on shields, a mindset fully embraced by Bloodborne that has its own system of weapon transformations that somewhat resembles the powerstance system in Dark Souls II. It also greatly expanded the build variety, since every weapon could be relied on itself with a shield, or paired up with another weapon, often back and forth if the situation calls for it.

Using multiple copies of the same item at once

This is really useful for soul items, especially when the game gives you a plethora of low-value ones (which tend to be littered around in dangerous areas to entice the player without rewarding them too much). This is a godsend when it comes to turning in covenant items, which build up and have to be turned in for advancing rank.

This is egregious in Dark Souls. The shortcut in Lost Izalith requires +2 rank in the Chaos Servant covenant which is awarded after a staggering 30 humanity, which has to be turned in

one

at

a

time.

Humanity isn’t hard to come by. The game gives you numerous avenues to acquire it. You’re likely going to build up more than a few — possibly even all 30 — by the time you come to turn them in. There are a lot of unfriendly attributes of the Souls games that are a certain way on purpose, because they introduce challenge. You can’t pause, you can’t interrupt attack animations, etc. This is not one of them. There is no challenge to overcome by pressing the interact button over and over again. All the changes to Dark Souls I’ve mentioned prior are arguable to say they’re better, but I sincerely believe that this is a bad design decision and will be a shame to have to come back to.

Image credit: Undead Asylum: http://darksouls.wikia.com/wiki/Northern_Undead_Asylum Dark Souls III UI: http://www.gameandtype.com/2016/08/05/the-evolution-of-soulsborne-ui/ Dual-wielding Smelter Demon Greatswords: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=322179696

[lindarifenews]

How to manage search terms in the new match type world

With the ongoing changes to close variants in Google Ads, paid search marketers have had to adjust their keyword management strategies. Brad Geddes, paid search veteran and co-founder of ad testing platform AdAlysis, shared several examples of how these changes have impacted accounts and offered several tips for managing search terms in a new match type world at SMX East last month.

If you’ve done a lot of work in your accounts to manage the close variants changes to tightly manage keyword-to-query matching, you may have noticed that Google isn’t respecting your hierarchy like it says it’s supposed to. “There are so many exceptions to the rule there might as well not be a hierarchy,” said Geddes.

He laid out the three primary challenges: the control that phrase match once offered is gone; Google often ignores its own hierarchy rules, resulting in duplicate queries; and there are often poor intent matches. ” When google gets intent wrong,” said Geddes, “you don’t have a good short-term solution.”

Close variants changes are causing challenges in some tightly structured accounts, said Brad Geddes at SMX East this month.

The good news, he said, is that advertisers that didn’t work to address close variants in exact match are getting more impressions. E-commerce, travel and industries with a lot of similar adjectives and nouns, tend to fair well, too, he said. For e-commerce sites with the options on the product page (color, etc.), conversion rates don’t really suffer. If those are at the category level, though, that can be different story, Geddes noted. 

The ugly

Geddes showed many examples of less-than-ideal matching since the latest change to phrase match and broad match modifier close variants. For example, the query “trademark symbol” triggered the phrase match keyword “trademark logo.” The intent of each is quite different. “Trademark symbol” searchers are looking for the symbol to copy and paste into their documents, whereas “trademark logo” searchers are looking to get their logo trademarked, Geddes noted. That’s a big difference.

The biggest change, though he said, has been in “same word substitutions.” For example, “+trademarking” triggered on the search term “register a brand,” which is not only entirely different word-wise, “register a brand” was already an exact match keyword in another ad group.

In another example, the keyword “dental +implant +cost” triggered on the search term “dentures cost,” ignoring the modifier word “+implant.”

In the most egregious cases, Geddes said, many advertisers have ended up pausing all of their phrase match keywords due to the poor performance of the substitutions Google was making. The phrase match keywords in one account, for example, went from generating 104 conversions within the target CPA a year ago to generating zero conversions this September.

Hierarchy exceptions are often the rule. Google says it will give preference to the exact match keyword in order to avoid having queries trigger keywords in multiple ad groups. However, Geddes showed several more examples of Google ignoring its hierarchy and serving ads from more than one ad group for the same query.

How to analyze the close variants’ impact

To get a high-level look at how your keywords are performing by match type and close variant, Geddes says to export year-over-year Search Term report data from periods prior to and after the change and evaluate the differences with a pivot table in Excel.

#ProTip: Geddes says to be sure to download each time period from Google Ads separately, add a date range column to each and then combine them to avoid keyword issues with the date range comparison in the UI.

Use pivot tables in Excel to evaluate your match types and close variants performance.

“Look at CPAs [cost-per-acquisition],” said Geddes. “Many advertisers are going to see increases from higher competition, but if you see big jumps, you need to dig into the data.

Geddes also noted Levenshtein Distance and n-grams for evaluating close variants impact.

Levenshtein Distance, which Frederick Vallaeys covers and has a script for in this article, is another way to evaluate changes over time. It compares character differences between two phrases. You don’t want to do this for broad and broad match modifier, cautions Geddes, “because they’re naturally going to have wide distances.

An n-gram analysis can help you identify the substitution words Google is now using. “With n-grams, take query data and break down into 1, 2, 3-word combinations and see how often those words appear in queries,” said Geddes. “Aggregate conversion data and CPA by n-gram — just counts. Then do the same analysis for the previous year. What’s the delta between the two?” Those are the new substitution words. Do they need to be added as negatives?

Duplicate search terms are the biggest issue these days, said Geddes. Run a pivot table to identify duplicates and determine where you need to add negatives.

The new search term workflow

Brad Geddes’ new search term workflow.

In the updated search term workflow that Geddes laid out, he added “Does this keyword exist?” and “Add term as an exact match negative,” to address duplications. To identify new negatives, look at the pivot tables. Need to look at CTR, conversion rate and Quality Score differences in the pivot table reports.

You may find you need to restructure your account and either add or collapse campaigns depending on the keyword-to-query relevancy. For example, “if you’re using smart bidding, Google uses campaign level data so often you want a collapsed structure,” said Geddes. “For ad groups, if your landing page and ad copy don’t change, there’s no need to separate match types into ad groups. And organizing campaigns by match types is a budget consideration, not a bid consideration.”

The post How to manage search terms in the new match type world appeared first on Search Engine Land.

How to manage search terms in the new match type world published first on https://likesfollowersclub.tumblr.com/

[andreacaskey]

How to manage search terms in the new match type world

With the ongoing changes to close variants in Google Ads, paid search marketers have had to adjust their keyword management strategies. Brad Geddes, paid search veteran and co-founder of ad testing platform AdAlysis, shared several examples of how these changes have impacted accounts and offered several tips for managing search terms in a new match type world at SMX East last month.

If you’ve done a lot of work in your accounts to manage the close variants changes to tightly manage keyword-to-query matching, you may have noticed that Google isn’t respecting your hierarchy like it says it’s supposed to. “There are so many exceptions to the rule there might as well not be a hierarchy,” said Geddes.

He laid out the three primary challenges: the control that phrase match once offered is gone; Google often ignores its own hierarchy rules, resulting in duplicate queries; and there are often poor intent matches. ” When google gets intent wrong,” said Geddes, “you don’t have a good short-term solution.”

Close variants changes are causing challenges in some tightly structured accounts, said Brad Geddes at SMX East this month.

The good news, he said, is that advertisers that didn’t work to address close variants in exact match are getting more impressions. E-commerce, travel and industries with a lot of similar adjectives and nouns, tend to fair well, too, he said. For e-commerce sites with the options on the product page (color, etc.), conversion rates don’t really suffer. If those are at the category level, though, that can be different story, Geddes noted. 

The ugly

Geddes showed many examples of less-than-ideal matching since the latest change to phrase match and broad match modifier close variants. For example, the query “trademark symbol” triggered the phrase match keyword “trademark logo.” The intent of each is quite different. “Trademark symbol” searchers are looking for the symbol to copy and paste into their documents, whereas “trademark logo” searchers are looking to get their logo trademarked, Geddes noted. That’s a big difference.

The biggest change, though he said, has been in “same word substitutions.” For example, “+trademarking” triggered on the search term “register a brand,” which is not only entirely different word-wise, “register a brand” was already an exact match keyword in another ad group.

In another example, the keyword “dental +implant +cost” triggered on the search term “dentures cost,” ignoring the modifier word “+implant.”

In the most egregious cases, Geddes said, many advertisers have ended up pausing all of their phrase match keywords due to the poor performance of the substitutions Google was making. The phrase match keywords in one account, for example, went from generating 104 conversions within the target CPA a year ago to generating zero conversions this September.

Hierarchy exceptions are often the rule. Google says it will give preference to the exact match keyword in order to avoid having queries trigger keywords in multiple ad groups. However, Geddes showed several more examples of Google ignoring its hierarchy and serving ads from more than one ad group for the same query.

How to analyze the close variants’ impact

To get a high-level look at how your keywords are performing by match type and close variant, Geddes says to export year-over-year Search Term report data from periods prior to and after the change and evaluate the differences with a pivot table in Excel.

#ProTip: Geddes says to be sure to download each time period from Google Ads separately, add a date range column to each and then combine them to avoid keyword issues with the date range comparison in the UI.

Use pivot tables in Excel to evaluate your match types and close variants performance.

“Look at CPAs [cost-per-acquisition],” said Geddes. “Many advertisers are going to see increases from higher competition, but if you see big jumps, you need to dig into the data.

Geddes also noted Levenshtein Distance and n-grams for evaluating close variants impact.

Levenshtein Distance, which Frederick Vallaeys covers and has a script for in this article, is another way to evaluate changes over time. It compares character differences between two phrases. You don’t want to do this for broad and broad match modifier, cautions Geddes, “because they’re naturally going to have wide distances.

An n-gram analysis can help you identify the substitution words Google is now using. “With n-grams, take query data and break down into 1, 2, 3-word combinations and see how often those words appear in queries,” said Geddes. “Aggregate conversion data and CPA by n-gram — just counts. Then do the same analysis for the previous year. What’s the delta between the two?” Those are the new substitution words. Do they need to be added as negatives?

Duplicate search terms are the biggest issue these days, said Geddes. Run a pivot table to identify duplicates and determine where you need to add negatives.

The new search term workflow

Brad Geddes’ new search term workflow.

In the updated search term workflow that Geddes laid out, he added “Does this keyword exist?” and “Add term as an exact match negative,” to address duplications. To identify new negatives, look at the pivot tables. Need to look at CTR, conversion rate and Quality Score differences in the pivot table reports.

You may find you need to restructure your account and either add or collapse campaigns depending on the keyword-to-query relevancy. For example, “if you’re using smart bidding, Google uses campaign level data so often you want a collapsed structure,” said Geddes. “For ad groups, if your landing page and ad copy don’t change, there’s no need to separate match types into ad groups. And organizing campaigns by match types is a budget consideration, not a bid consideration.”

The post How to manage search terms in the new match type world appeared first on Search Engine Land.

How to manage search terms in the new match type world published first on https://likesandfollowersclub.weebly.com/

[suzanneshannon]

Six tips for better web typography

How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read at all times and contexts? How do learn from everyone else’s mistakes, too?

These questions encouraged me to jot down some rules that are easy to apply and have the greatest impact on legibility, based on my own personal experience. And, if you didn't know, I'm kinda a geek when it comes to typography. So, I thought I'd share the following six rules that I've come to adopt to get us started.

Rule #1: Set a good max-width for paragraphs

This is typically referred to as the measure in typographic circles and highly esteemed typographers will recommend that a paragraph have a width of around 75 characters for legibility reasons. Anything longer than that becomes difficult to read and causes unnecessary strain on the eyes because of the distance the eye has to travel left-to-right and back again (assuming ltr that is).

Here’s a quick example of a good max-width setting for a paragraph. Oh, and make sure to check out this demo on larger screen devices.

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Now, this all depends on a ton of factors that great designers contemplate when setting a paragraph. However, as web designers, the difficulty for us is that we have to make sure that paragraphs feel good in additional contexts, like on mobile devices, too. So, while this rule of ~75 characters is nice to have in our back pocket, it's most helpful when we’re trying to figure out the maximum width of our text block. More on this in a bit.

Also, I’d recommend setting that width on a container or grid class that wraps the paragraph instead of setting a max-width value on the paragraph element itself.

Kind of like this:

<div class="container"> <p>This is where our text goes.</p> </div>

p { font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; } .container { max-width: 600px; }

Otherwise, there may be moments in the future when there's a need for certain paragraphs to be bigger and have a wider measure (like for introductory paragraphs perhaps). In those situations, making a different container class that just handles the larger width of the elements inside them is a nice and modular approach.

I’ve found that by having a system of classes that just deals with the width of things encourages writing much less code but also much more legible code as well. Although, yes, there is more HTML to write but I’d say that’s preferable to a lot of whacky CSS that has to be refactored in the future.

In short: make sure to set a good max-width for our paragraphs but also ensure that we set the widths on a parent class to keep our code readable.

Rule #2: Make the line height smaller than you think

One problem I often see in the wild is with paragraphs that have a line height that’s just way too big. This makes reading long blocks of text pretty exhausting and cumbersome as each hop from one line to the next feels like an enormous jump.

On mobile devices this is particularly egregious as I tend to see something like this often:

For some reason, a lot of folks tend to think that paragraphs on smaller devices require a larger line-height value — but this isn’t the case! Because the width of paragraphs are smaller, line-height can be even smaller than you might on desktop displays. That’s because on smaller screens, and with smaller paragraphs, the reader’s eye has a much shorter distance to hop from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

This demo certainly isn’t typographically perfect (there’s no such thing), but it’s much easier to read than the majority of websites I stumble across today. In this example, notice how the line-height is probably much smaller than you’re familiar with and see how it feels as you read it:

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Rule #3: Make the margins small on mobile, too

Another common mistake I frequently see is the use of very large margins on either side of a paragraph of text, it's often on mobile devices that make for blocks of text that are difficult to read like this:

Just — yikes! How are we expected to read this?

Instead try using no more than 10-15px of margin on either side of the paragraph because we need to ensure that our paragraphs are as wide as possible on smaller devices.

I even see folks bump the font-size down on mobile to try and have a nice paragraph width but I’d highly recommend to avoid this as well. Think of the context, because mobile devices are often held in front of the user's face. There's no need to force the user to bring the device any closer to read a small block of text.

Most of the time, smaller margins are the better solve.

Rule #4: Make sure that the type isn’t too thin

This is perhaps my biggest complaint when it comes to typography on the web because so many websites use extraordinarily thin sans-serif typefaces for paragraph text. This makes reading difficult because it’s harder to see each stroke in a letter when they begin to fade away into the background due to the lack of contrast.

Here’s an example of using a typeface that’s too thin:

See the Pen Typography Example – Thin by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Try and read the text there. Do you notice yourself struggling to read it? Because we’re using the light weight of Open Sans in this example, letterforms start to break apart and fall to bits. More focus is required to read it. Legibility decreases and reading becomes much more annoying than it really has to be.

I recommend picking a regular weight for body text, then trying to read a long string of text with those settings. Thin fonts look cute and pretty at a glance, but reading it in a longer form will reveal the difficulties.

Rule #5: Use bold weights for headings

Clear hierarchy is vital for controlling the focus of the reader, especially in complex applications that show a ton of data. And although it used to be more common a couple of years ago, I still tend to see a lot folks use very thin weights or regular weights for headings on websites. Again, this isn’t necessarily a die-hard rule — it’s a suggestion. That said, how difficult is it to scan this headline:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

It’s a little difficult to see in this example but it's easy to missing the headline altogether in a large application with lots of UI. I’ve often found that inexperienced typographers tend to create hierarchy with font-size whilst experienced typographers will lead with font-weight instead.

Here’s an example of something much easier to scan:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 2 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

In this example, I’ve set the paragraph text to a dark gray and the heading to a color closer to black while applying a bold weight. It’s not a substantial change in the code but it’s an enormous improvement in terms of hierarchy.

Little improvement like this will quickly add up to a better experience overall when the user is asked to slog through a ton of text.

Rule #6: Don’t use Lorem Ipsum to typeset a page

I think this advice might be the most underrated and I rarely hear it raised in front-end, typography, or design groups. I’ve even noticed seasoned designers struggle to typeset a page because Lorem Ipsum is used for the placeholder content, which makes it impossible for to gauge whether a paragraph of text is easy to read or not.

Setting text in Lorem Ipsum makes good typesetting kind of impossible.

Instead, pick text that you really enjoy reading. Ideally, typesetting would be done with finalized content but that's often a luxury in front-end development. That's why I’d recommend picking text that sounds close to the voice and tone of the project if there's a lack of actual content.

Seriously though, this one change will have an enormous impact on legibility and hierarchy because it encourages reading the text instead of looking at it all aesthetically. I noticed a massive improvement in my own designs when I stopped using undecipherable Lorem Ipsum text and picked content from my favorite novels instead.

And that’s it! There sure are a lot of rules when it comes to typography and these are merely the ones I tend to see broken the most. What kind of typographic issues do you see on the web though? Let us know in the comments!

The post Six tips for better web typography appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Six tips for better web typography published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

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Six tips for better web typography

How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read at all times and contexts? How do learn from everyone else’s mistakes, too?

These questions encouraged me to jot down some rules that are easy to apply and have the greatest impact on legibility, based on my own personal experience. And, if you didn't know, I'm kinda a geek when it comes to typography. So, I thought I'd share the following six rules that I've come to adopt to get us started.

Rule #1: Set a good max-width for paragraphs

This is typically referred to as the measure in typographic circles and highly esteemed typographers will recommend that a paragraph have a width of around 75 characters for legibility reasons. Anything longer than that becomes difficult to read and causes unnecessary strain on the eyes because of the distance the eye has to travel left-to-right and back again (assuming ltr that is).

Here’s a quick example of a good max-width setting for a paragraph. Oh, and make sure to check out this demo on larger screen devices.

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Now, this all depends on a ton of factors that great designers contemplate when setting a paragraph. However, as web designers, the difficulty for us is that we have to make sure that paragraphs feel good in additional contexts, like on mobile devices, too. So, while this rule of ~75 characters is nice to have in our back pocket, it's most helpful when we’re trying to figure out the maximum width of our text block. More on this in a bit.

Also, I’d recommend setting that width on a container or grid class that wraps the paragraph instead of setting a max-width value on the paragraph element itself.

Kind of like this:

<div class="container"> <p>This is where our text goes.</p> </div>

p { font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; } .container { max-width: 600px; }

Otherwise, there may be moments in the future when there's a need for certain paragraphs to be bigger and have a wider measure (like for introductory paragraphs perhaps). In those situations, making a different container class that just handles the larger width of the elements inside them is a nice and modular approach.

I’ve found that by having a system of classes that just deals with the width of things encourages writing much less code but also much more legible code as well. Although, yes, there is more HTML to write but I’d say that’s preferable to a lot of whacky CSS that has to be refactored in the future.

In short: make sure to set a good max-width for our paragraphs but also ensure that we set the widths on a parent class to keep our code readable.

Rule #2: Make the line height smaller than you think

One problem I often see in the wild is with paragraphs that have a line height that’s just way too big. This makes reading long blocks of text pretty exhausting and cumbersome as each hop from one line to the next feels like an enormous jump.

On mobile devices this is particularly egregious as I tend to see something like this often:

For some reason, a lot of folks tend to think that paragraphs on smaller devices require a larger line-height value — but this isn’t the case! Because the width of paragraphs are smaller, line-height can be even smaller than you might on desktop displays. That’s because on smaller screens, and with smaller paragraphs, the reader’s eye has a much shorter distance to hop from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

This demo certainly isn’t typographically perfect (there’s no such thing), but it’s much easier to read than the majority of websites I stumble across today. In this example, notice how the line-height is probably much smaller than you’re familiar with and see how it feels as you read it:

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Rule #3: Make the margins small on mobile, too

Another common mistake I frequently see is the use of very large margins on either side of a paragraph of text, it's often on mobile devices that make for blocks of text that are difficult to read like this:

Just — yikes! How are we expected to read this?

Instead try using no more than 10-15px of margin on either side of the paragraph because we need to ensure that our paragraphs are as wide as possible on smaller devices.

I even see folks bump the font-size down on mobile to try and have a nice paragraph width but I’d highly recommend to avoid this as well. Think of the context, because mobile devices are often held in front of the user's face. There's no need to force the user to bring the device any closer to read a small block of text.

Most of the time, smaller margins are the better solve.

Rule #4: Make sure that the type isn’t too thin

This is perhaps my biggest complaint when it comes to typography on the web because so many websites use extraordinarily thin sans-serif typefaces for paragraph text. This makes reading difficult because it’s harder to see each stroke in a letter when they begin to fade away into the background due to the lack of contrast.

Here’s an example of using a typeface that’s too thin:

See the Pen Typography Example – Thin by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Try and read the text there. Do you notice yourself struggling to read it? Because we’re using the light weight of Open Sans in this example, letterforms start to break apart and fall to bits. More focus is required to read it. Legibility decreases and reading becomes much more annoying than it really has to be.

I recommend picking a regular weight for body text, then trying to read a long string of text with those settings. Thin fonts look cute and pretty at a glance, but reading it in a longer form will reveal the difficulties.

Rule #5: Use bold weights for headings

Clear hierarchy is vital for controlling the focus of the reader, especially in complex applications that show a ton of data. And although it used to be more common a couple of years ago, I still tend to see a lot folks use very thin weights or regular weights for headings on websites. Again, this isn’t necessarily a die-hard rule — it’s a suggestion. That said, how difficult is it to scan this headline:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

It’s a little difficult to see in this example but it's easy to missing the headline altogether in a large application with lots of UI. I’ve often found that inexperienced typographers tend to create hierarchy with font-size whilst experienced typographers will lead with font-weight instead.

Here’s an example of something much easier to scan:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 2 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

In this example, I’ve set the paragraph text to a dark gray and the heading to a color closer to black while applying a bold weight. It’s not a substantial change in the code but it’s an enormous improvement in terms of hierarchy.

Little improvement like this will quickly add up to a better experience overall when the user is asked to slog through a ton of text.

Rule #6: Don’t use Lorem Ipsum to typeset a page

I think this advice might be the most underrated and I rarely hear it raised in front-end, typography, or design groups. I’ve even noticed seasoned designers struggle to typeset a page because Lorem Ipsum is used for the placeholder content, which makes it impossible for to gauge whether a paragraph of text is easy to read or not.

Setting text in Lorem Ipsum makes good typesetting kind of impossible.

Instead, pick text that you really enjoy reading. Ideally, typesetting would be done with finalized content but that's often a luxury in front-end development. That's why I’d recommend picking text that sounds close to the voice and tone of the project if there's a lack of actual content.

Seriously though, this one change will have an enormous impact on legibility and hierarchy because it encourages reading the text instead of looking at it all aesthetically. I noticed a massive improvement in my own designs when I stopped using undecipherable Lorem Ipsum text and picked content from my favorite novels instead.

And that’s it! There sure are a lot of rules when it comes to typography and these are merely the ones I tend to see broken the most. What kind of typographic issues do you see on the web though? Let us know in the comments!

The post Six tips for better web typography appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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