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On small print
Aug 6, 2007
For years I've railed against tiny light gray type on a white background, which seems to be the visual style of choice for young Web designers everywhere.
The economics of poor visual design, though, are changing. As the New York Times reports today in As the Vision Fades, the Indignities Grow, aging baby boomers, flush with lots of late-career cash, are beginning to look for, and buy, products and services that are legible to people older than 20.
One professor gives a thought as to why designers are user-hostile in cell phones, small-print labels and menus, and so forth:
“My guess is they’re thinking about teenagers who buy these things and use them a lot more than we do,” said Paul Nini, a professor of visual communication design at Ohio State University who studies typefaces. “Marketing considerations tend to outweigh user considerations.”
... Small print is not a new problem, Professor Bigelow, 62, pointed out. "The shapes of the letters in fonts such as Times Roman all derive from a set of complaints lodged by 14th-century scholars who wanted to read late in life," he said. "It is reasonable to say the failing vision of the great Renaissance writers Petrarch and Boccaccio, and their followers, are what led to the shapes of our modern typefaces," said Professor Bigelow...
A Motorola spokesperson reassures the Times that “We take the usability of our products very seriously ... We are always looking for ways to improve the user experience.”
Hmm... there's certainly room for improvement. Motorola should read Uncle Mark to get some pointers. Creative Good could give you some real pointers about how to improve those phones.
The problem with all this type has been exacerbated by the advent of computers and the web and the amount of reading we do online. Back in the 80s I was doing newsletters and got complaints from my boss about the type being too small: it wasn't. It was the same size, or slightly bigger than, as what was being printed in the daily papers.
The problem he was reading A LOT more online. And to complicate it further Microsoft, for unknown reasons that continue to have bad repercussions today, moved to 96 pixel per inch instead of Apple's 72 which matched the 72 points per inch of print and on which all standards for typography are based! Thus, people are reading much bigger type on Windows platforms.
But back to menus and such: as I've gotten older and not seeing as well (just got my first, fortunately gentle, set of bifocals) I get so annoyed at small print, especially restaurant menus. There ought to be a law that restaurants have to field test with appropriate audiences in the restaurant's lighting the readability of their menu!
And financial companies and credit card companies should be required to have minimum typesize standards similar to the nutrition labeling rules so that people might actually take time to read the information. (It would also help if they were required to make all financial --and legal--documents 8.5x11 so that average person can handle and file them with ease.
I apologize for a bit of rant but we need to be able to read with ease. So here's to larger type.
Pixels ≠ Points.
Pixels per inch is an actual physical measurement of a display device. There is a correct number; all others are incorrect numbers: 96ppi is far closer to the normal monitor than 72ppi. Take a graphics program, draw a 720 pixel line. Measure it. I bet it comes closer to 7.2 inches (100ppi) than 10 inches (72ppi).
If you tell your computer that your 100ppi display is a 72ppi display, then it'll display 10pt type as 10×72÷100 = 7.2pt type. Hence, you'll be seeing the type too small.
On sane display systems, like X11, we actually set the correct ppi. Assuming 96ppi is probably the best that can be expected from Microsoft….
With any luck, some enterprising company or soon-to-be new company is developing products for the ready niche of aging baby-boomers. Surely someone sees the business potential there? (Consider how many ads there are on TV for Cialis and Levitra, or Life Alert "I've fallen and I can't get up" systems.)