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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4822 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do people feel about white space in web design?

There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.

I'm also trying to find professional web design blogs or posts that point out how annoying this trend is. Instead all designers seem to have nothing but nice things to say about white space. Rather than making me think I'm wrong for going against all designers I instead just think the whole profession is wrong.

Quoting works published in years 1996 and 1929, Wikipedia says:

Traditional line-length research, limited to print-based text, gave a variety of results, but generally for printed text it is widely accepted that line lengths fall between 45 and 75 characters per line (cpl), though the ideal is 66 cpl (including letters and spaces). For conventional books, line lengths tend to be 30 times the size of the type, but between 20 and 40 times is considered acceptable (e. g., 30 characters × 10-pt font = 300-pt line). Early studies considered line lengths of 59–97 mm (about 57 cpl) optimum for 10-point font. For printed works with multiple columns, 40–50 cpl is often better. For justified, English-language text, the minimum number of characters per line is 40; anything less than 38–40 characters often results in splotches of white spaces (or rivers) or too many hyphenations in the block of text. Longer lines (85–90 cpl) may be acceptable for discontinuous text such as in bibliographies or footnotes, but for continuous text lines with more than 80 characters may be too long. Short text, such as ragged marginal notes, may be as little as 12–15 characters per line.

Desktop browsers generally set the default text size at 16 pixels, leading to a "widely accepted" line length of 720–1200 pixels, or around half of the width of a standard 1920×1080 screen. Presumably, web designers think that more people would be annoyed by extremely long lines of text than by large expanses of empty space.

On my own desktop computer, I typically browse the Internet using a half-width 960×1080 window rather than a full-width 1920×1080 window. Alternatively, you can buy a monitor that can be rotated into 1080×1920 portrait orientation.

This problem was solved at least three hundred years ago by newspaper publishers when they started printing multiple columns on a single page.

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