Notes

10 essays by Christopher Genberg · founder of Norrly

Short, personal writing about web design — each one grounded in the measured data behind the Norrly library. Less "trends," more "here is a number that changed how I design."

I Measured 358 of the Best Websites. Here Is What Surprised Me.A year of capturing award-level sites, turned into numbers — and the numbers disagreed with almost everything I assumed about "modern" design. · 7 min read Everyone Thinks Great Design Is Bold. The Data Says the Opposite.Across the sites I measured, more headlines are set light or regular than bold. Here is why scale beats weight — and how to use it. · 6 min read The Color Nobody Expects: Why Warm Accents Quietly Beat BlueTech trained us to reach for blue. When I measured the accent color of hundreds of top sites, warmth was winning. · 6 min read Pure Black and Pure White Are LiesAlmost no great site uses #000000 or #ffffff. The small offsets are where "premium" actually lives. · 5 min read The 10px Consensus, and Why Pill Buttons Are Rarer Than You ThinkCorner radius has quietly converged. The data on geometry says a lot about where design is right now. · 5 min read Negative Letter-Spacing Is the Most Reliable Tell of a Designed Page85% of the headlines I measured use it. Almost no beginner does. It is the smallest change with the biggest payoff. · 5 min read Eight Sections, 1140 Pixels: The Invisible Skeleton of a HomepageUnder the visual variety, the best homepages share a structure. The measurements gave it away. · 6 min read Inter Won. But That Is Not the Whole Story.One typeface shows up more than any other in the library. What the runners-up reveal is more interesting. · 6 min read Why AI-Generated Sites All Look the Same — and What the Good Ones DoI have measured the average of the web, and I have watched AI tools reproduce it perfectly. Here is how to escape it. · 7 min read What Building Norrly Taught Me About TasteI thought taste was innate. Measuring a few hundred websites convinced me it is mostly vocabulary. · 7 min read

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