I’m not a designer and my taste in typography might be unusual, but I can try to pin down what makes reading it uncomfortable for me personally:
(1) Arial (the default font) is much less readable than other fonts. At least one informal survey suggest users prefer Verdana over Arial 2 to 1. I agree completely. Readability uses Georgia, which also seems more readable to me.
(2) “Justified” text (where each word lines up on the rightmost edge of the paragraph) is harder for me to read than unjustified text. According to Wikipedia, it noticeably impairs comprehension for people with dyslexia, too.
(3) There are too many characters per line. My understanding is that in web typography, the “standard rule” (not universally accepted) is 55-75 characters per line. On its default setting, Readability averages around 70, which feels comfortable to me. Less Wrong has ~115 characters per line, which feels too wide. With a more readable font, this might not be an issue, but I definitely notice it with the current design.
(4) Text is too small. This is a minor complaint, since you can adjust it in the browser. But by default, the text feels uncomfortably small to me.
Absolutely. Non-justified text died when we stopped using monospaced fonts with double spaces strewn between every second word to fill up a line. Flush left text just looks terrible now.
A nice thing about Verdana compared to most sans-serif typefaces is that Verdana’s uppercase letter “I” has serifs, so it doesn’t look like a lowercase letter “l” (or, when italicized, a slash).
What in particular do you find unreadable about the site’s text?
I’m not a designer and my taste in typography might be unusual, but I can try to pin down what makes reading it uncomfortable for me personally:
(1) Arial (the default font) is much less readable than other fonts. At least one informal survey suggest users prefer Verdana over Arial 2 to 1. I agree completely. Readability uses Georgia, which also seems more readable to me.
(2) “Justified” text (where each word lines up on the rightmost edge of the paragraph) is harder for me to read than unjustified text. According to Wikipedia, it noticeably impairs comprehension for people with dyslexia, too.
(3) There are too many characters per line. My understanding is that in web typography, the “standard rule” (not universally accepted) is 55-75 characters per line. On its default setting, Readability averages around 70, which feels comfortable to me. Less Wrong has ~115 characters per line, which feels too wide. With a more readable font, this might not be an issue, but I definitely notice it with the current design.
(4) Text is too small. This is a minor complaint, since you can adjust it in the browser. But by default, the text feels uncomfortably small to me.
I have a very strong preference for justified text. It makes the shape of paragraphs regular and less distracting.
Absolutely. Non-justified text died when we stopped using monospaced fonts with double spaces strewn between every second word to fill up a line. Flush left text just looks terrible now.
I prefer sans-serif fonts for reading on any kind of screen. Why not try specifying no font face or font size at all and use the browser default?
I do not normally notice this, since I have set an absolute minimum font size on my browser. I agree it looks awful under the default settings.
A nice thing about Verdana compared to most sans-serif typefaces is that Verdana’s uppercase letter “
I” has serifs, so it doesn’t look like a lowercase letter “l” (or, when italicized, a slash).Make that all sans-serit typefaces. By definition. ;)