The Dominant Anti-Pattern in Text UX's Online
When I see a screen with tiny wittle black text in a squiggly artistic font on a vast hyper-white background I'm like--
NO
JUST NO
NO NO NO NO OH HELL NO AND YOU CAN GO FARK OFF **RIGHT NOW** WITH YOUR REEKINGLY NEWB & LIKELY AMATEUR BUT OBVIOUSLY-IGNORANT-OF-HISTORICAL-BEST-PRACTICES, DYSTOPIC CIRCUS UX CLOWNSHOW
kids, repeat after me:
* white text on black
* BUT ALWAYS LET USER OVERRIDE ALL COLORS TO TASTE
* WITH NO EXCEPTIONS
* THIS MEANS YOU, KEVIN, MR. KNOW-IT-ALL "GUI ARTISTE"
* simple common free font -- not artsy
* BUT ALWAYS LET USER OVERIDE -- (REDACTED THE REST FOR CLUEFUL)
* medium sized font
* BUT ALWAYS LET -- (DITTO)
* English
* BUT MAKE AUTO-TRANSLATE EZ -- LIKE A BUTTON CLICK OR TOGGLEABLE DEFAULT
* make artificial speech generation & peformance of your text easy too, or at least make otherwise easily adaptable into various other downstream UX forms and channels
and now, kids, get off my damn metaphorical lawn. because over on my plate of TODOs I have Real Problems to solve. not self-created ones. and Real Work to do
thank you all for coming to my TED Talk (TM) today...
WHILE I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION…
*cough*
Slartboz is a sci-fi post-apoc adventure game set in the dystopic comedy future of Normerika 2100 CE. It is also an old skool Rogue-like game -- played in a Terminal! -- with one important twist: a *real-time* engine!
We have an exciting video up too, of actual gameplay in the working prototype -- which itself is under active & rapid dev. Check it out at: