Narrow Columns & Wide Text

Do you write Eifel Tower with a lowercase or uppercase 'T' in 'Tower'? Apparently yes. Uppercase. That is how you write it. Meaning it must be the Eifel Tower and not the Eifel tower. Just something I've been wondering about...

Moving on: I just made some drastic changes in the site stylesheet! I read an inspiring article on the perfect paragraph while whimfully tweaking the layout today, and with some trial and error turned this previously very blocky and justified body of text into something hopefully much easier to read.

You may notice text sizes are suddenly incredulously large, paragraphs are stylistically narrow, previously regular-length paragraphs now look huge, and a bunch of layout elements are inadvertently messed up.

But it is easier to read... right? Not just because the text is bigger, but because there are fewer words in each line, because the lines are shorter not just in word length but in actual width - so you don't need to move your eyes so much from side to side to read, and because the spacing between words is even and the previously pro-longed white spaces don't become like 'boundless gaps' for certain autistic (I think it was?) individuals. There's no justification for justifying text!

And this is the optimal character amount per line, a balanced 50-70, even if it is mostly going towards and maybe over that high end 70. But it used to be 129. For newcomers, this is how it used to look:

I'm still not entirely sure this is the perfect format. I find myself suddenly writing shorter paragraphs to better suit the layout. Blank space fills up incredibly fast. I wonder if posts in the archives are still readable with this style, or if I'll have to revise them and shorten random segments of text so they don't take up an entire page. But then again, the practice of writing less is a good practice, and one it wouldn't hurt to start using!

What do you think? I think I'll leave it like this for a while. See if it sinks in. See if - once I've found and fixed all the odd quirks such layout changes inevitably cause - I do like this formatting better after all. After not daring to move higher than 13.4px in textual size over the span of the last decade, this is a sizable change.

posted by Cyber on Wednesday, November 12th, 2014 (12:35 AM) in Code.
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► S3C
Friday Nov/14/2014

Eifel's a name, hence it's capitalized...
tower's an everyday object, so it's not capitalized...
Unless Eifel's last name is Tower (and he/she is ironically a tower lol)

sick new logo dude!! The new format looks more appropriate for blogs but I've always been a fan of wider paragraphs (as long as they don't make me have to scroll horizontally...there should be laws against that) as it's good workout for my ocular rectus muscles...Also it seems it would make more logical sense for the text to shrink as you condense lines. IMO, the less scrolling the better- it's good when text can fit in one 'frame' which of course entails more characters per line. But on the other hand longer sentences can be a bit of strain, with this new format the brain has more 'breaks' before reading the next line. Good point about autism, this format would probably be more suitable for ADD/ADHD users too (which I was diagnosed with too btw lol). I think the NG blog system has an ideal layout. Btw, no comment form appears when I try to leave comments on movie reviews on this site...
► Cyber
Friday Nov/14/2014

So it defies the laws of grammar completely! Or wait, I just spelled that wrong haha... goes to show that revising is a pretty pointless process when you don't know the mistakes you make. :P Speaking about Eiffel Towers btw: http://torrentfreak.com/night-time-eiffel-tower-photos-are-a-copyright-violation-141108/

Thanks for the feedback! And I'm glad you like the logo man. :) Wasn't planning to make so many changes, but one thing led to another... yeah, horizontal scrolling's pretty annoying, don't like how they're starting to add it to sites just because tablets use horizontal scrolling on certain interfaces. I'm slowly making this site fully responsive, so the smaller the window gets the smaller the text gets, the thinner columns get etc, but I've always hardcoded my widths so that'll take some time. I always visit this place on my regular computer too so it probably doesn't feel like a big priority yet...

The current layout is designed with the 'new standard' 920px width from a few years back btw, when 1024x768px or larger was the norm but some people still used 800x600px. So it'll adapt nicely to any larger resolutions, and with smaller resolutions the main content and menu is still what you'll see by default, but getting to the side menu will take some of that horrible horizontal scrolling. Though the side menu isn't particularly important for that reason.

The NG blog format's not bad, but after this change I'm starting to think the text overall is a bit too small over there. :) Characters per line is around a hundred though, so that's manageable. It's only if people write blocks of text that it starts getting a bit challenging to read. I've thought so before too, but now I know why, the breaks really do ease things up! I'm liking this all the more the more I see of it!

Oh man, good catch!! There's definitely supposed to be a comment box on those posts too. I'll see what I can do...
► Cyber
Friday Nov/14/2014

Aaand it's fixed!