Testy text
Do newspapers have a problem? Most assuredly they do!
Look at the way people struggle to read what we journalists produce. I caught this gentleman reading a Chinese language newspaper in Singapore with a magnifying glass which he fished out of his pocket.
Obviously the type size used in the paper is way too small for him.
Yes, he is an elderly person whose eyesight has dimmed…. but the same can be said of many young people who are completely put off by the dense grey that is plastered all over news pages.
Whatever has happened to good design?
What about websites? What is the optimum width for text?
Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton have written a very comprehensive style guide to the web. You can find it at http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/contents.html
[…] Printing considerations aside, might there be historical and cultural reasons behind it? Both papers come out only in the evening when readers are returning home after work so there is probably no need for the convenience that a tabloid size provides for papers like my paper and TODAY. The other possible reason might be that its readers tend to be older, thus text size has to be big enough and a broadsheet format is more cost-efficient as more stories can be fitted into less pages. But even so, some readers struggle to read the papers, see here. […]