SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | WORLDWIDE

Hi, I am a UI/UX designer and CSS developer seeking freelance work.

∙ typography, simple design ∙ apps for researchers, chat interfaces, etc. ∙ timeliness, or other similar visualisations ∙ precision, diligence, care ∙ tailwind css, elixir, rails

## Some of My Projects (ping me for more)

alphaXiv concept: https://www.figma.com/proto/LpD6tCVSCwtSKWDsOsFvFb/alphaXiv-...

I have been assisting Matt with Emergent Mind for the past few years. (It's not fully implemented on the live website.) One example: https://x.com/webpraktikos/status/1762561638228475965

Prior to that, I worked with Matt on Preceden for several years. (It's not fully implemented on the live website.) One example of a timeline design: https://x.com/mhmazur/status/1983250479087001719

Universal Resume Template — minimal and formal résumé (CV) website template for print, mobile, and desktop: https://github.com/WebPraktikos/universal-resume

Website Demo 12 (it's not optimized): https://eff739.netlify.app/

## Contact

You can contact me at hi [at] webpraktikos [dot] com.

Emergent Mind’s UI designer here. Thanks, and I already asked it here: what do you guys think about something like this design as a Hacker News redesign?

If I recall, HN intentionally avoids appealing to modern aesthetics and user conveniences to reduce popularity among a non-technical audience that could harm the average quality of participants. Whether that approach is effective, I don't know. Web design started off more technical on average, then later became more artistic. In that sense maybe the more artistic sensibility infused into a site design the more up to date and relevant people perceive it to be especially with the visual appeal marketing pushed by the big tech companies through hardware or software.

It is very easy to ruin a good thing by following every impulse with disregard or ignorance for what factors contribute fundamentally to its goodness. It happens regularly to companies, products and services around the world all the time.

That said, I also don't particularly care for the Emergent Mind main list page design. The importance of optimizing for the consumption of the information on the page seems to have taken a back seat to keeping up appearances. The scaling on a PC monitor feels oriented more towards children, like oversized at least to me. I don't understand what the icons are trying to communicate in relation to the posted link either, despite having a sense for what each of the icons are. The spacing feels like a table or grid was given a margin and let the elements land as they may instead of trying to place the elements on the page with intent to maximize the communication of their relationships, context and readability.

Hey there, I didn’t know that about HN.

I have a similar view about design honesty and products being overly focused on modern aesthetics compared to basics, elegance, simplicity, and care.

Here is how I would tweak HN: line length of fewer than 90 characters to make it more legible; line-height around 1.45% of the font size so you can read blocks of text more smoothly; optimized font sizes; use better-made typefaces so you can have better “between-the-lines” experience and overall character; make elements better click/touch targets; less busy interface, etc. I don’t want people to notice the design much. What I want is to make the product more useful and understandable; and users to feel relaxed and joyful :)

I’ll share this observation I found in physiology: the better the function, the better the structure, and aesthetics on top of it. However, there are many kinds of “aesthetics” in the human world.

The icons are there so that one can, at a glance, recognize a post type – video, link to an article, tweet, code project, or tool.

As I mentioned previously: in the past, there were many two-line post names (prompt examples were more common), so we increased the row height. As I can see it now, there are very few two-line posts, and I’ll review the row height amount next.

You could also appreciate that nature has examples of animals that are ugly or masquerade as something worse than they are, intentionally to fend off other animals that are evolutionarily disadvantageous to survival.

Digital products are largely detached from the burdens of physical effort excepting execution efficiency beyond a threshold, so unsound structures survive all the time and have to be tested in other ways. Whatever horrors exist underneath, so long as the intended audience doesn't care it may survive.

I was a dotcom boom designer, so design isn't alien to me and it's clear that many improvements could be made to HN. It's just that HN isn't a canvas. Many people try, by making their own self-hosted front-ends to HN. They pop up all the time as people inevitably see improvements that could be made and have to express it in their own way, because making things look better can be an addiction especially when the gap between what is and what could be is large. It's just not the point here. :)

Ah sorry, for my tastes the excessive spacing between lines looks like it should be accompanied with children's book pictures. Is the CSS broken on Firefox?

In the past, there were many two-line post names (prompt examples were more common), so we increased the row height. As I can see it now, there are very few two-line posts, and I’ll review the row height amount next.

Testing it on Firefox – Twitter embeds don’t show on my computer (we’ll investigate); everything else looks fine.

Emergent Mind’s UI designer here. Thanks, and what do you guys think about something like this design as a Hacker News redesign?

EM’s UI designer here. Simple and basic are some of the most common words when I explain my designs. And Hacker News’ UI was an inspiration.

The Precedent’s designer here. When I wrote my “for hire” ads, my bullet points were these:

· Typography-based design system with Figma · Robust CSS with Tailwind CSS · Straightforward JavaScript with Alpine.js or Stimulus

I also noted that my preferred back-end language and framework were Ruby and Rails (on which Preceden is built).

So being clear, specific, and knowing some solid technologies and design/code tactics helped me find someone like Matt, who has been a very good collaborator these past few years.

It was posted on Haker News (Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?), Reddit (r/forhire r/DesignJobs r/freelance_forhire), and Tailwind Discord.

Thanks for sharing.

I am curious to hear how you start with new clients like this. Do you identify one task to do together with a very well defined scope and a fixed cost? Do you just get started on an hourly basis and whether it's working well together?

We’ll usually start with a task based on an hourly rate, not a fixed cost.

*Preceden’s (not PrecedenT’s) :D

Text is a bit fatter in Firefox — that is, takes up more space. Please remember to choose A4 or Letter size by navigating to Properties → Advanced → Paper Size.

Tailwind CSS generates CSS from JS config file containing a design system. For example, several custom sizes are generated to multiple utility classes for specifying margins and paddings.

Also, Universal Resume Template is better for print and pdf.

What makes it better for print and pdf?

Of course it has → https://i.imgur.com/pUPiQjn.gifv

You probably didn’t set up page format properly. In Chrome, by expanding More Settings, change Page Size to A4 or Letter. More info at https://github.com/WebPraktikos/universal-resume#printing.