Designing blogs for readers
Matt Gemmell on making the right design decisions for a blog.
I pretty much nail his list, and I agree wholeheartedly with his point of view.
If I may, I’d like to add a few practical concerns I’m sure Matt could do with. They were originally sent to Jonas Rask, a great amateur photographer and doctor from Denmark. Here’s a gist of what I wrote to Jonas:
However, there are a few principles that give a website very clear legibility (here, white on black):
- dark but not black background color: that’s what you got!
- light but not white text color: that’s what you got, but it’s a tad too dark. #ccc might be better.
- large font size: that’s controversial and depends on how good the reader’s sight is. You may want to read this post by Mikey Anderson to make up your own mind. I’ll zoom in anyway if I find the font size too small, so a larger-than-currently, yet-still-not-as-large-as-I-like “16px” might be a good start.
- the rhythm (that is the height of a single line and the space between paragraphs) should be sufficiently large to allow for the eye to track the new line correctly, but not too large to make it weird. 1.5 times bigger than the font size is a good guideline.
- sufficiently narrow text column: if the column is as wide as the monitor, it may look great on a iPad but shitty on a 27-inch display. In your case, your widest photographs are 880px wide. If you want the paragraphs to align with the text, make them 880px wide and centered on the page.
- whatever your mind on font sizes, a good baseline for legible paragraphs is going for ~66 characters per line. That’s nearly 11 to 13 words per line. You may shoot for less (cramped) or more (airy). For instance, in my example, the line “The reason for buying this lens was one thing, and one thing only: The swirley bokeh effect!” has 76 characters and 17 words. It fits on one line when the font size is 20px and the paragraph width is 880px: that’s rather good.
Anyway, those are guidelines and shouldn’t be treated as the Holy Bible of web typography.
Last comment on his piece:
I think that blogs are for their authors first, and their readership second.
I couldn’t agree more. Geekeries has a tiny readership, and what has kept me going for this long is my own desire to write.