Hopefully in the future this post will make no sense, then: because right now, this blog is published in a single column of text that is 90-110 characters wide at a quick guess. Okay I checked, a random ragged left line is 104 characters.
If you're reading it laid out like this, you're going to get tired of it sooner than if it was properly typeset. No, that's not an opinion. Sit down.
This is one of the basic things that I have to explain to people again and again:
When setting text online, the relationship between x height, line height (let's not call it leading) and physical column width is making your websites unreadable. Monitors were not designed to display reading material originally, but cleverer people than I have based handset display sizes - as they have based reader and tablet screen sizes - around the notion of legibility. The iPhone reader - hell the Nokia N9 reader - understands the legibility of text in columns because one newspaper-ish column of extremely readable text held at arm's length is a comfortable thing to read.
And here I am, complaining about it, in a shitty 105 characters a line HTML blog. Ah, the irony. Hopefully by the time you read this, you'll have no clue what I'm talking about as your eyes glide over my perfectly measured columns of crisp text.
But I'll say it again: to everyone who has made apocalyptic proclamations in development meetings with me about what "people" will and won't read:
Time spent reading text online, or on mobile devices is (sigh) simply a matter of how well you present it and how it's written. I know this is a revolutionary concept, but bear with me for a moment:
It's not that people aren't clever or cool enough to read the information you're publishing: it's that people have five second attention spans on material that only warrants 5 seconds of attention. It's as simple as that. Almost as many people who pronounce that "print is dead" or "nobody reads online", are people who have asked me to make their dull copy and poor photography 'look sexy' .
Dullness is not attractive to anyone. Dullness isn't even attractive to the dull. It does not make your business run and it actively makes you harder to understand and to approach as a business. And it does shine through any number of designer trickery and nice logos - your crashing dullness, the dullness that will disengage your customers and flatline your income.
People don't especially *see* where this dullness is coming from, because it's seeping imperceptably from every piece of your published material. It's in the lack of thought about legibility. The occasional typo. The use of stock images. Make them as pretty as you like, but they are not worth the money if you need to make a connection with your customer.
Text held at arms length - in the style of a newspaper - should be in columns, in certain proportions. This is not difficult, people. This is purely about the shape of peoples' eyes and the way the muscles work that allow you to read: make your text easier to read.
And while you're at it, consult your local UI / UX expert about type. We can make you money and save your customers a headache.
And while you're at it, consult your local UI / UX expert about type. We can make you money and save your customers a headache.
