28 okt 2011 kl. 01.51 skrev Don Norman:
> I was just complaining about a
> complete lack of thoughtfulness.
> making type tiny to increase white space is:
>
> 1. silly.
>
I do not want to justify tiny type, but I recall another usability expert who once told me that white space always is a waste of space.
Contrary to this opinion, I believe that white space helps readers to understand the proximity of texts and other elements that are intended to be understood as related on screens, paper etc. Therefore this visual grouping of elements supports reading and understanding.
I believe that this is related to line length, which I myself find as the most troublesome issue in the site that Don started out with. Experts in typography recommend that normally the number of characters (incl. blanks) should not exceed 70 per line. (This is if the line height is at least 1.2 times the character height (with common concepts).
On the http://design.ucdavis.edu/index.html there are over 100 characters on each line, and the line height is small.
BTW this number is greatly exceeded on some of the pages on other sites mentioned in this discussion, like
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/
:-)
Cheers,
Bosse
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