9. Designing for readers

Dominance

Also: dominant element

One element on a page or spread clearly leads, usually by size, and everything else gives way to it. The eye needs one place to land; when two or three things are equally loud, it has none.

Swimming · Holm

The cold water club

Every morning from October to April, a dozen people walk down the slipway at seven and into a sea at nine degrees.

‘By February it isn’t brave any more. It’s just Tuesday.’

LowtideWinter 45

The photograph is clearly the biggest thing, so the eye lands there first and moves on to the headline. Everything else steps back.

The route the eye takes through a page: from the dominant element to the headline, the standfirst and the first line of text. A good path keeps moving the way the reader reads, left to right and top to bottom, and never sends them back.

Islands

The last ferry to Holm

For forty years one boat has carried the island’s post, its doctor and its children. Next spring a bridge opens.

R

LowtideWinter 21

Picture, headline, standfirst, first line: each step goes right or down, the way the reader is already moving.

Entry points

Also: points of entry, access points

Places on a page where a reader can start: a headline, a sub-head, a picture and its caption, a quote. Magazine readers browse, so a long article needs a way in on every spread, not just the first.

Winter crossings

‘In a gale you don’t cancel. You wait for a gap between the waves, and you go.’

Low water at Sandvoe. At spring tides the island’s north beach doubles in width.

The bridge

26 LowtideWinter 27

A sub-head, a quote, a picture with its caption: someone flicking past can start at any of them, read a little, and be drawn into the article.

Contrast

A clear difference between two things on a page: big and small, heavy and light, serif and sans, dark and pale. It only works when the difference is obvious. Two things nearly alike look like a mistake.

headline 3.7 × text

Shoreline

What the storm left

After the January gales the beach at Sandvoe was a different shape. The dune path had gone, the stream had found a new way to the sea, and a hundred metres of shingle had moved north overnight.

Then people started finding things. A ship’s bell, green with age. A child’s boot from a wreck nobody remembers. And on the third morning, the ribs of a boat that had been under the sand for two hundred years.

Several times bigger, in a different face. Nobody could take the headline for text, so the difference reads as meant.

Balance

Also: symmetry and asymmetry, visual weight

How evenly the visual weight of a spread is spread either side of its centre. Big, dark and colourful things weigh more. A symmetrical spread mirrors itself; an asymmetrical one balances a big element with smaller ones further out.

Painted in a row

Sixty huts, one promenade, and the families who have kept them.

LowtideWinter 63

The big picture sits near the spine; a small one far out on the right page balances it, like a child at the end of a seesaw.

Restraint

Using few typefaces, colours and effects, and using each one the same way every time. Two typefaces and one accent colour can do everything a magazine needs; each extra one makes the others count for less.

Field notes

Five things the tide brought in

1

A message in a bottle. Written by a class of ten-year-olds in Bergen. It took five years to cross the North Sea.

2

Sea glass. Green from old lemonade bottles, frosted by forty winters in the shingle.

3

A ship’s fender. Rope, knotted by hand, and much heavier than it looks.

One serif, one sans, and Lowtide blue used only for the label and the numbers. Each element is told apart by size and weight.

Consistency

Also: repetition

The same kind of thing looks the same and sits in the same place every time it appears. After a few pages the reader stops looking for things and simply finds them.

Walks · Alfama

Alfama

2.4 km · 1 h 20

Getting there

Tram 28 to Largo das Portas do Sol

23

Walks · Baixa

Baixa

1.8 km · 50 min

Getting there

Metro to Baixa-Chiado

41

Walks · Belém

Belém

3.1 km · 1 h 40

Getting there

Tram 15 from Praça da Figueira

67

Three walks, three chapters apart, and every part is where the last one was. By the second walk the reader’s thumb goes straight to the box.

Pacing

Also: flow (of an issue)

How the feel of a magazine or book changes from one spread to the next: busy then calm, words then pictures. Designers plan it on a flatplan, a chart of every page in the issue, in thumbnails.

2–3

4–5

6–7

Cold water

8–9

10–11

12–13

14–15

‘We go in because it is there.’

16–17

Holm

18–19

20–21

22–23

‘We go in because it is there.’

24–25

red bar: how full the spread is

Busy news pages, then a photograph to stop on, long reads, a quiet page to breathe. The bars rise and fall, and so does the reader’s attention.

Scanning

Also: scannable text

Looking over a page for one thing, an amount or a time or a name, without reading the rest. Lists, numbers, columns and bold words make a page scannable; paragraphs hide what is in them.

find: how much water?

Breads · Makes one loaf

Rye and caraway loaf

Mix 400 g of dark rye flour with 100 g of strong white flour, 10 g of salt and two teaspoons of caraway seeds. Dissolve 7 g of dried yeast in 380 ml of warm water, pour it in and stir to a thick, sticky paste. Cover and leave it for two hours, until it has risen by half, then scrape it into a greased 900 g tin, smooth the top with a wet spoon and bake at 220°C for 50 minutes.

400 g	dark rye flour
100 g	strong white flour
10 g	salt
2 tsp	caraway seeds
7 g	dried yeast
380 ml	warm water

1Mix the flours, salt and caraway in a large bowl.
2Stir in the yeast and water to a thick, sticky paste.
3Cover and leave for 2 hours, until risen by half.
4Bake in a greased 900 g tin at 220°C for 50 minutes.

Amounts in a column of their own, steps numbered, times in bold. A cook with floury hands finds the water in a second, and finds their place again after every step.

Legibility and readability

Legibility is how easily single letters and words can be told apart; it belongs to the typeface and its size. Readability is how easily a whole text can be read at length; it depends on the setting: case, line length, spacing.

A Winter of Small Hours · Chapter 3

The ferry was late, as it always was in December, and the harbour lights came on one by one while we waited. My aunt read the timetable twice, as if it might change its mind. Nobody else was on the quay. The gulls had gone in for the night, and the only sound was the water knocking under the boards, patient, like someone who knew we would answer in the end.

Lower case, a book face, a line of about 60 characters and room between lines. Just as legible, and now easy to read for an hour.

Typographic colour

Also: type colour, texture

The overall tone of a block of text seen from a distance: an even mid-grey when the setting is good, blotchy when words are too far apart or a heavy word stands out. It has nothing to do with ink colour.

In the small hours the house made its own weather. The boiler knocked, the stairs settled, and somewhere above the kitchen a window that would not quite shut let in a thin, insistent draught. I lay awake and listened to all of it. My father had said the house would never feel like ours, and for a year I believed him. Across the road the sign in the guest house window still said VACANCIES, though nobody had stayed there since the summer. Then, one February night, I heard my mother laughing in the hall, at nothing, at the cold, and I understood that he had been wrong about that as well.

Italic for the stressed word, the sign in smaller spaced capitals, hyphenation on so the word spaces stay close. Squint, and the column is one even grey.