Show HN: Making Tumblr Work vs. Medium & Svbtle

You probably can't buy Minion Pro and use it via @font-face; most professional fonts are sold with licenses that forbid that, because it makes a perfect-fidelity instantly-usable copy of the font available to anyone who visits your site.<p>For a similar reason, most of the HF+J fonts either require sIFR or image replacement, or for you to be cool enough (like Kottke) to get to use their beta web font service.

I'm down with the exhaustion with the startup cool kids too. Creating a Svbtle alternative isn't all that hard so I don't have much to say about that but I just want to say I like the sentiment and I agree that someone will come out of nowhere to win the post-Tumblr era.<p>Also, I'm one of your first few paragraphs you called Georgia a sans-serif font. That's wrong. Georgia is a serif. Serif fonts have the little stylized decoration dealies on the ends of the lines (man that is a really inarticulate but you know what I mean) kind of like, well, Georgia and Times New Roman and such. The sans-serifs are the ones like Helvetica and Arial. You seem to be a bright guy but among a lot of web savvy people, especially designers and developers, a rookie mistake like that can tota Ly discredit you. Just edit that real quick and you're good to go.

There is something extremely tasteless about ripping off another site's design, right down to meaningless stylistic choices like the color of anchor links, and the use of circular avatars beside post titles. Instead of approaching the design from the perspective of wanting to look like one of the "startup-cool kids" (which is beyond me why that would matter), why not create something original that suits your needs?<p>To put it another way, if all Svbtle and Medium end up being is "minimalist" blog templates, they'll be abject failures. Why take inspiration from their least meaningful aspect?

Sorry, there's something blinking in the top-left corner, annoying enough that I won't finish reading the post.

I totally disagree with the "never go black" sentiment. For non-Retina iOS devices, legibility is going to be directly harmed by non-black characters.<p>With Retina, you can go with whatever you want for decorative reasons, but devices with poor DPI suffer for it.

FTA: "Try not to make the column too wide on desktop or it will be too hard to read because your eyes have to travel too far horizontally."<p>Personally I found this page incredibly annoying to read. I have to scan down with my eyes constantly due to the crazy font size, the large spacing between lines, and the limited width.<p>I actually feel my eyes moving, processing every word as a result of the large size limiting my ability to process the content. The outcome is mental breaks between reading words which destroys the fluidity of the content.<p>In short: terrible typography in my opinion. Granted its a single opinion and I may be an outlier but between the flashing gifs and the typesetting I would never have read all the way through this unless I had the intention of commenting about it's poorness.

My blog (<a href="http://rmenez.es" rel="nofollow">http://rmenez.es</a>) uses a variant of Syte (<a href="https://github.com/rigoneri/syte" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rigoneri/syte</a>) hosted on Heroku. It looks great and uses Tumblr as a CMS. I highly recommend it.

So are there any similar alternatives ? I really like this one but apparently the author deleted it.

vnknown.com