The Future of Reading
Bill Hill’s Blog
Adaptive Layout:
It seems that designers are still battling to try to achieve the kind of control on the Web which they’ve always had when designing documents for paper. You know: the ability to place every piece of text and graphics exactly where they want it, to the nearest 1/1000th of an inch.
It’s clear they’re still “living in Flatland”, desperately trying to hold onto the kinds of design approach that have worked great for the past 35,000 years or so, but are really holding back the Web from becoming all it can be.
Humans have been designing the display of information for about 35,000 years – the earliest cave paintings. For all that time, the First Law of Design has always been to ask the question: “What is the size of space I’m filling?” That applied whether you were painting on a cave wall, carving letters into Trajan’s column in Ancient Rome, or deciding to publish People magazine on pages 8 ½ x 11 inches in size.
Once the size of the area to be filled was fixed, then design could proceed.
550 Years of Evolution
Over a period of about 550 years, since mass printing first appeared, a Darwinian evolution took place. Lots of experiments were tried (and failed) until we settled on a size for body text that’s about 11 points, and a column width of between 55 and 65 characters, for material to be read at normal reading distance of about 50cm.
No-one scientifically planned it. What happened was that text quickly settled down at the sizes which were optimal for the human visual system. We read with an area of our retinas called the fovea, which is only 0.2mm in diameter. For more details on the psychology and physiology of reading, see some of the earlier archived articles in this blog.
People often position their screen a little further away than they’d hold a piece of paper. So they should be able to adjust the text to a size that’s comfortable for them. It won’t need to change much – perhaps only a point or two in size – unless they’re reading on their living-room tele-
vision from ten feet away.
What many designers would like to do is create the same kinds of Fixed Layout they’ve been able to use in print. Their argument is, the reader can then use Zoom in his or her browser to scale those layouts to the size of their own screen.
They just don’t get it. They’re “Flat Earthers”, trying desperately to hold on to a world view that no longer makes sense.
There’s a new First Law of Design:
The range of possibilities is huge, from cellphone to laptop to desktop to living-room TV to cinema-sized screen.
At this point, any designer reading this page is probably throwing up their hands in horror and screaming “I can’t create one design that works for all of these scenarios!”
And that’s exactly my point. You can’t. Not with the Fixed Layout approach of the past. We need a new and robust Adaptive Layout technology to take Web design forward.
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