Maybe the original design had the even padding but facebook A/B tested it and found that people are more likely to read the comments below if there is less padding on the bottom?<p>While I agree that is visually looks more balanced, it takes more than my opinion to decide that facebook made a design mistake.
He has a point that many interface designers will appreciate and others rankle at as nit-picking.<p>But I was struck by the irony of this particular observation being made via a blog that uses a body typeface with ever-so-slightly but definitely too-narrow tracking (letter spacing). Or maybe the kerning data is off. I would have it loosening by about 1/200em overall, with the most noticeable improvement becoming apparent on adjacent vertical strokes.<p>EDIT: the samples of this face, "Oxygen", that I see at the creator's site (Vernon Adams) don't suffer from the same issue so perhaps something has gone awry in the conversion to WOFF.
A reminder that the imbalance of 3px may be intentional:<p>It means that the post is closer to the comments are closer than to the user, and it pulls your eye more naturally to the comments than if they were perfectly equal.<p>Sometimes asymmetry is a useful design element, too.<p>Edit: I noticed that lukeholder has said the same thing.
For me, the current version is better. And in general, I don't get the obsession of designers to have text padded as much as possible. I like low padding and small fonts (unless it is put to extreme; but on good sites it never happens, whereas "overpadding" is more than common).<p>Perhaps it is about density of information.<p>Perhaps it is that I like to have a very different spacing between two lines of the same paragraphs and two lines with a paragraph break. (So my brain can effortlessly divide it into parts.)<p>Perhaps... it is just a matter of taste. But I guess I am not the only one.
A lot of people (have and will) scoff at the idea 3 whole pixels? And I agree it does seem trivial, and will those 3 pixels really change the way users interact and make users happier? Who knows. I know as a designer it does indeed look better when it's visually balanced, but all that aside, I am a huge fan of craftsmanship and attention to detail in ones craft. More so with crafts made by hand (wood, metal, glass) but also it translates over into design and programming.<p>As a designer I want to put love and attention into all my designs and I want each one to be better than the last as to always be improving. Those three pixels may not mean much to you, or most, but it's those types of things that when you pull out the magnifying glass or really admire a piece of art, that really matter. A lot of times I fail personally at making sure each detail is right, but I would hope that someone could one day look at my work and say he really paid attention to the details and he wasn't just rushing or not caring about the projects he did.<p>So I think it's less of wow is this really worth all the fuss over 3 pixels but more of a testament to how Facebook values the details in design. Sure Facebook has design that's decently pleasing to the eyes, but you have to wonder why this went unnoticed. If it was me coding the feed, I would've caught it and fixed but I wonder whoever was doing the coding actually stopped to think about it or tried to fix it and got shot down or whatever reason it could have been. It could've been an honest mistake, or a purposeful one, or just someone trying to meet a deadline.<p>To send a note out to everyone for a thought to think about, really try to put some sort of personal attention to the details when you're working. Whether it's programing or designing, you may not think opening up your code editor and finding the right line in the CSS to fix those 3 pixels is worth it, but someone one day might see that and have to wonder why and if you care about the quality of your work and the image your putting on your brand, I would take it personally to make sure it was perfect. I think this goes a long way with moving up and getting noticed. Anyone could skip it and it's not the end of the world, but finding people that care enough to put such attention and detail in their work to make sure everything is perfect are the kinds of people that are worth having on your team.
I've noticed Facebook has been doing a <i>lot</i> of AB testing on me lately. [Example: My Graph Search bar is now White-on-Blue instead of Blue-on-Blue. Also, the sidebar with birthday notifications used to display Friend Requests that told you who Friend Requested you; now it's gone.]<p>This spacing behavior is likely also a part of that. It just happened to me very, very recently, and there used to be sufficient padding in that UI location.
Somebody should fix his OCD.<p>It's not a bug -- by any stretch of the imagination.<p>Unequal padding is a legitimate design decision as any other other.<p>But I see how it can annoy the hell out of compulsives.
<satire><p>yeah, but over 1.8 billion page views.. thats 3px is a _lot_ of extra bandwidth.<p>Not to mention all those screen pixels gone to waste.. thats 3 times the screen width every time.. say 50x3x1280 px per page view.. jesus thats enough to power a small village in the third world.<p>Not to mention the Carbon footprint...<p></satire>
> Can you see how much more crowded the text is in the unfixed version, and how much more balanced it could be?<p>No. I had to open the two images in separate tabs and rapidly toggle to even see the difference.
Garry is wrong. What looks visually pleasing is not necessarily the right layout.
Historically, typesetters only had paragraphs to set in doing a book layout. Now in the age of post DTP, layout can be more expressive. That is exactly what the lesser margin of 8px does. In this case, it means that you are liking the status message only 8px away, and not liking the author.
It's always tricky to adjust the padding/margin values because you need to take into account each case in which these 3 added pixels will have an impact. Maybe the style applied to this particular box is shared with other elements or maybe this box is used in other contexts where 3 pixels more will look odd. And I guess that for a website as dense as Facebook, it's easy to try to adjust something while breaking something else.<p>On a side note, whenever I set the margins of adjacent elements, I take some time to wonder if I'll put a margin-bottom on the 1st element or a margin-top on the 2nd one, or put both margin-top and bottom on the middle element and none on the 1st and 3rd. My rule of thumb ends up being the following one: use only one margin (top or bottom) on all adjacent elements, because some of them might disappear on some pages, so I need to provide some kind of flexibility in order to maintain a decent spacing for each and every scenario.
This is beginning to remind me of the colorists in Hollywood who color-time feature film. They will obsess day in and day out about the subtleties of a particular hue of some background out-of-focus trinket. Complete and utter minutiae.<p>I'm sorry, but as an average reader with decent visual tastes, I can safely say that those 3 pixels are not relevant to me.
I don't see how this is annoying and adding 3px is going to "make the difference in the world" Look at the authors blog. see how much space between the header and the "<Back to blog" and the content. Fix yours first. Its actually annoying than this
Padding is not always supposed to be "balanced". It makes we we for some sections to be closer or further to other sections. In this case, he extra padding probably looks very slightly better. But I don't think it's the way it is from lack of love.
This is the same obsessive minor attention to detail that turned Apple into a multi BILLION dollar company.<p>... and well deserved at that.<p>I say good on you Gary, its people like you who push the world forward, continually looking for ways to improve things no matter how minor.
Two things -<p>First: Where on Facebook is this style? In my current layout (which is the current "stable" layout - pre-graph-search), I don't see this anywhere. Not on my feed, not on my timeline. It looks like a timeline post (feed posts don't have a border around them like this does).<p>Second: What bugs me way more about the screenshots posted is that the left side of all the info doesn't line up. The large profile picture and the body text are (!) 3px more padded than the action bar, the "Like" list and the comment area. But! It should be noted that, again, I don't see this anywhere on FB, just the screens that Garry posted.
> Can you see how much more crowded the text is in the unfixed version, and how much more balanced it could be?<p>No way I would have seen that without it having been pointed out. I would have been looking at the actual content.
This guy is clearly a moron! That spacing needs 5 extra pixels, not 3!<p>Seriously though, great blog post. He is exactly right about the need for more spacing. I feel like he buries the lead... the last change he makes to the bottom comment section is a night and day difference. Not only does the last change produce an more significant improvement, it appears to make up at least the number of pixels lost in the extra padding. That should take away any possible objection someone might raise concerning a reduction in amount of content that fits on the screen.
WTF is "rageskitching"? I Have searched google far and wide for both "Rageskitch" and "Skitch" and as far as I can tell, it is hanging on to the bumper of a car while skating.
In a time of display resolution variances between 96 and 250+ ppi (slowly coming to big screen too), why are we still talking about fixed pixels instead of relative units?
Seems fine to me. The content is all closely spaced and the header is set off with a larger spacing. This helps keep the header separate from the content, which in turn helps people skim past content they don't like. If they did this change, next he'd be demanding each piece of content have the same large spacing between it, they end up having a lot more spacing, showing less content above the fold, and having reduced engagement metrics.
If your really hate someone, teach them to recognize bad spacing and bad kerning:
<a href="http://xkcd.com/1015/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/1015/</a>
I actually like the one more densely packed version. One of the core difference in design of Hacker News and other sites is just density of information. I prefer Hacker News densly packed layout a lot more than other sparse. So I guess it's all matter of opinion rather than absolute truth or one right way.
Isn't it possible that this is simply a bug? If you happen to have a location when you post a status, it goes under the comment with a padding of 8px above and below. If the location is missing then a default of 8px appear below the status text.<p>I don't think it makes a difference
Facebook has since updated its design, and the padding is better balanced. My account got upgraded to the new design a month or so back. I assume they are rolling it out slowly.
Love the irony in this sentence:
A site that fixes these problems is a site is being taken care of with the loving attention to detail of someone who can see the difference.