iGeeks

October 24th, 2003

Creatures of Design

We’re all creatures of design. And the first step to getting your message across on the Web is making sure that it is clear and easy to read. That involves a few things:
Line Length: Those columns of text in the newspaper are there for a reason: Short lines of text are easier to read than long ones. Ask a dozen designers how many words should fit on a line, and you’ll get 13 answers. There really is no magic number, but if your text is going from one edge of the browser to the other, chances are it’s too wide. Try instead using tables to make narrow columns of text.
Character Size: We have little control over HTML text on the Web. Fonts are smaller on a Mac than on a PC (the page you’re reading right now is barely legible on my G3 system), and you never know what fonts users have installed on their system.
The remedy is to design flexibly so that anyone will be able to read what you have to say, which means that setting body type in size=2> is generally a bad idea. If you must use size=2, try adding “Geneva” to your first font-face attribute. Geneva was designed specifically for the Mac - it’s much easier to read at small sizes than other Mac fonts. Like so: The HTML code: FONT FACE=”geneva,arial” SIZE=2produces this effect:
The Mac folks will see Geneva, and the PC folks will see whatever you list after it (in this case, Arial).
Leading: Back in the days when type was made of little metal pieces, typesetters put rows of lead in between the lines of type. Nowadays, the only metal used is the copper in the phone line. Nevertheless, leading is still important.
In general, giving readers a little extra leading in between lines of type increases readability. You can do this on the Web using cascading style sheets. Style sheets are still inconsistently supported by the major browsers, but you can write them so that they degrade gracefully (if a user’s browser doesn’t understand CSS, it will revert to the default leading).

Hemant