Readability

A page should be readable. People argue about what makes a page readable back and forth but what always seems to come out of the debate are a number of things you need to consider:

• Font
• Font size
• Colors (contrast)
• Content

Font
Choose a font that’s made to be read on the medium you’re targeting. Arial, Helvetica and Verdana are all good fonts to be read on a display. However, there are studies that suggest content typeset with italic, bold and/or serif fonts (such as Times) are better for making people remember what they’ve just read.
I like to target different mediums with different fonts. @media means you can have a nice screen-readable font for screens and a nice paper-font for printouts. It's not that much more work anyway so why not do it? Makes for a nice extra feature anyway when somebody decides to print what you've written.

Font size
Small fonts are hard to read. You have to squint and it generally makes for painful reading. Choose a font size that's easily readable from 50-60 cm away from the screen. Something like 13px or 12pt. Large amounts of text will require scrolling but we’ll get to that later.

Colors (contrast)
The most easily read text is set in black, on white. Argue with me if you like.
That doesn't mean you have to do black and white designs but you should think about it when choosing your colors. Choose them wisely.

Content
Less text is better. With the exception of articles, you can’t really write an article in bullet form. You can summarize it though and that might be a good idea.

So to summarize readability

• Sans-serif on screen, serif on paper.
• Readable font sizes, 13px/12pt, something like that.
• High contrast! At lest for articles and text meant to be read and not merely scanned.
• Keep it short! People can’t remember that much anyway.

That’s all for this post, the next will cover adaptability.

Feedback is welcome!