For one, I would make it possible to go forward with the "wrong" (according to the author) choice, and of course backwards to make changes. By only steering the user towards the author's ideal, you have no way to experiment.
But a lot of this is just too subjective. The advice about spacing and so on seems to be based on "just so" feelings about what looks right, not any actual evidence. I'd like to see something that's grounded in research about legibility, readability, and mathematically ideal proportions.
Using a clichéd "sci-fi font" for a sci-fi book feels like an old trope that needs to die already. I get the point, but the author leaves no room for error here.
It's like asking for "actual evidence" about what color you should wear to dinner. It depends on the context and setting, and current social attitudes and your positioning relative to them, and your own sense of what looks good based on those elements.
Unless you go out of your way to fuck it up most text you put on the web will be legible. And no matter what someone will say it's illegible to them and just raw unstyled html defaults are the most legible. Or the raw html defaults are unreadable and anything else is an improvement. etc etc.
It's got technical foundations so it's easy to pretend otherwise but it's still aesthetic choices. Math won't really help you here. In fact building fonts off of "mathematically ideal proportions" was a popular thing for a while and is now mostly considered a regrettable dead-end. The things that came out of it don't look better and aren't overall more readable.
That seems like a bad analogy, given that this web site is explicitly aims to teach a method.
It doesn't explain the "why" of anything, except in broad strokes (a big fat heading is more punchy and so on), it only prescribes a specific, extremely narrow set of choices.
Methods are based on principles. If nothing rigorous underpins the choices we make in design, how can it be taught?
It is also just following the current trends. The biggest problem in design is subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.
To be honest, I kind of like the plain Times New Roman example, the only thing it needs is reduction of the width of the paragraph. Ideally should be around 50-70 characters and this is not subjective. It is pretty much the reason for the dimensions of a book and how NYT is typeset; everything in between. Easy to prove it to yourself by runnning a small experiment, too.
For one, I would make it possible to go forward with the "wrong" (according to the author) choice, and of course backwards to make changes. By only steering the user towards the author's ideal, you have no way to experiment.
But a lot of this is just too subjective. The advice about spacing and so on seems to be based on "just so" feelings about what looks right, not any actual evidence. I'd like to see something that's grounded in research about legibility, readability, and mathematically ideal proportions.
Using a clichéd "sci-fi font" for a sci-fi book feels like an old trope that needs to die already. I get the point, but the author leaves no room for error here.