An ode to Readability
5 April 2009 — Comments (View)
I linked to the little joyous wonder that is the Readability bookmarklet a while back. Dorothea Salo’s blog post on this little gift to us all, highlighted something that has been bothering me as well.
With all this tsuris about the web removing our ability to read and comprehend long texts, I wonder: is it us, or is it abysmal web typography? No wonder print seems easier; we’ve had centuries to polish print design canons to a high sheen. The infrastructure of the web… started off clueless about design and has only gotten worse.
In my experience as a person responsible for websites ranging from the atrocious1 to the tolerable, support for typography in the web browser is fine.
It’s more than fine. On web browsers with good CSS support and decent use of native platform text rendering APIs, a web page is capable of a surprising level of typographic beauty. Even the sub-standard browsers are capable of reaching, at the very least, the level of a mass market paperback set by a competent, but not inspired, designer.
Which isn’t to contradict Dorothea’s point. If anything, it emphasises it. There’s no reason why typography should suck on the web, except for a rampant disregard for aesthetics that exists throughout the web value chain. The web infrastructure in terms of social capital, design culture and enterprise server software is almost completely devoid of anything that is beautiful.
The only thing we can hope for is a bit of simpering glossiness and a splash of garish colours2, if we’re lucky.
Even the sites which are lauded for their “coolness” are just the online equivalent of a slob with halitosis who thinks he’s cool because he’s wearing a bright green faux Armani suit.3
But even if the culture wasn’t dominated by eighteen year olds who think anything looks good with shine and a twitch, it would still be largely unreadable. Design on the web is about services and sales.
Services on the institutional or enterprise level rarely hire a designer of any sort. Even if one is hired, and if the situations are anything like the ones I’ve been in, they are mute and powerless in affecting the final product. The cultural environments of the organisations in question always favour either MBAs or engineers.
Or both, in the case of Google, if Doug Bowman’s post is anything to go by.
Sales are the other driving force of the web, ultimately the motive power behind everything from product pages to advertising, and beauty, unfortunately, has precious little sales value.
Copy, placement, context and sleazy use of cognitive psychology are the modern tools for driving sales and they do so while providing the MBAs and the engineers with the numbers they so love. It’s a mechanical process, devoid of human emotion or sympathy with the victim.
The web is owned by people who aren’t artists. Those of us who are artists are silenced by virtue of the roles we play in the commercial web and our place in the social hierarchy.
Those who run the web have chosen the broad highway of toxic sales mechanics4 and, as the dominant culture, they offer those of us who care for something more, for something more human, few opportunities for wandering the narrow pathways of aesthetics and compassion.
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When I say atrocious, I mean it. I’m responsible for quite a few stinkers. ↩
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The web 2.0 design culture is possibly the most hideous cultural fashion since the eighties. ↩
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Doubly cool, really, because it’s ironic. Trendy online wankers like their narcissistic display with a twist of irony. ↩
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Veering, sometimes, into using blatant Skinneristic behavioural modification and toxic game mechanics to promote mindless, and socially destructive, overuse of the service or product in question. ↩
