On Tuesday, 22 April 2014 at 11:36:37 UTC, Lars T. Kyllingstad
wrote:
It annoys me that tried-and-true typographic best practices are
constantly and blatantly ignored by web designers.
Yeah, well, but the truth is that there is no solid truths
because there are many variables: line height, font, display
acuity, distance to display, reading patterns, age, words etc.
I remember when I was teaching at web design course and was
trying to find solid research (it was for m.sc. students) for
design guidelines for screens in general and finding something
solid was very difficult.
For instance, people don't read web pages inititally. They scan
them. So making the page easily scannable for interesting phrases
might be more important than actual reading speed.
For users who are skilled at speed reading you want narrow
columns so you have vertical movement (as in scientific papers
and newspapers). For older people you want large fonts and high
contrast. For high acuity displays you want serifs. It is a big
problem that too many web-designers are young and don't take
older and handicapped people into consideration.
Btw, I think the single word per frame app Spritz pretty much
describes how difficult it is to put down absolute guidlines. I
have no problem to follow it at 700wps:
http://www.spritzinc.com/
