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Unfortunately the web is a visual medium and humans evolved to identify things with their eyes.

Unless your audience is entirely the blind and partially sighted, visual identity is pretty important



True hackers only read the web directly as source files fetched by CUrl and opened in Nano anyway. Only normies need anything more than their minds to "parse" or "compile" source.


Most books get by with a cover and hundreds of pages of only text.


I have a bookshelf of books next to me and the only ones with even slightly similar spines are books in the same series, not to speak of the covers.

I opened a couple of text heavy ones and they all had different font choices and minor variations on page layout. Most of them had elaborate and unique chapter headings.

Book typesetting is a fascinating subject, I would recommend anyone who works with websites to look into the way typography influences the reader's subconscious. (Maybe we'd have less Helvetica spaffed all over the internet!)


> I would recommend anyone who works with websites to look into the way typography influences the reader's subconscious.

To me, paradoxically, it reached a point where my subconscious associates light or poor typography with serious material, and pretty web pages with empty ad-ridden content:

Serious vibe: http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/t/transint.html

Intermediate vibe: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/30/Social-and-parasocial-med...

Empty content vibe: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/12/23792382/google-notebookl...


Ebooks used to be plain text files, it worked well.




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