Typography and Imagery – Design for Reading Blog Post

I’m in the Fear of Coding project and our major elements are text and images. We’re using ACSII images to enhance the story of our character learning to code. Part of the design is having a horizontal scrolling webpage.

One of Digital Oxford’s suggestions on visual hierarchy was to determine the size and position of each element on the webpage, as size and position help decide importance. As one of our major elements are images, it would be good to place them in a highly visible matter. Another principle they discuss is about F-pattern design, and one of their suggestions stood out to me:

“Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content.” – Oxford Digital

It makes a lot of sense, especially when using their example images of the F-pattern. Breaking text up with variety, including images, will help readers keep interest and understand the text more. I think it will be important for my group to do so; we might not need to use bullet points, but keeping enough variety in subheadings, paragraph spacing, and imagery will certainly help.

The last thing we should focus on is of course the typography of our work. In Typography in Ten Minutes, the last suggestion is to use professional fonts or otherwise be particular about which fonts to use. I completely agree with this suggestion, though I’d argue that you don’t necessarily need professional fonts to make text look nice. Either way, taking the time to carefully choose a few fonts for our project will really help it go a long way. We might choose a sans-serif font, or perhaps something similar to Courier New.

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