- Law 15: Break up large blocks of text.
Assuming you're creating a document
that is meant to be read,
it's important that you make the text
look inviting and legible.
It's the author and the editor's job
to make sure that the text is interesing,
that it's age-appropriate, and all of those
other really important things.
But as a designer, it's your job
to visually invite the reader into the page,
and then keep their interest throughout the document.
Single color text on a single color background,
repeated page after page, is a sure-fire way
to create a boring looking document.
No matter how well written the text is,
many people won't even give content a chance
if the document looks boring
and if the amount of text appears to be overwhelming.
Here's a page that's full of black text
on a white background.
Imagine reading a 25-page document that looked like this,
page after page.
The black text and the white background
start to blur together and they create
a big, gray, heavy, uninviting block on this page.
Here's the same text, and this time,
it's been broken up with some typographic embellishments.
The dull grayness of this page is gone.
The page is much more inviting.
It's also much more aesthetically pleasing.
Our first example over here looks like
a bunch of text was just dumped on the page
without a whole lot of thought.
But in our second example, it looks like some thought
actually went into making this document look inviting.
This page looks like it was designed.
There are a lot of different ways that you can
break up large blocks of text,
so let's talk about a few of them.
Drop caps or large initial caps.
A drop cap is a large capital letter
that drops down into the body of the text.
A large initial cap is an initial character
that's been set at a much larger size
than the rest of the body text or the text on the page.
This initial cap shares the same baseline
as the rest of the text.
Rules.
Rules can be professional, really simple ways
to enhance a page.
Try adding rules to headers and footers,
or even to some of the headings and titles on your page
to help break up that text.
Pull quotes.
Pull quotes are short passages that have been
pulled out of the document's text and highlighted.
Pull quotes work really well if there's a sentence
or a quote that really sums up
the point of the text on a page.
White space.
Adding larger margins to your pages
is going to give the body text, or the text on the page,
extra breathing room.
And that's going to help lighten up the feel of the page
and get rid of that heavy, blocky feeling.
Graphics.
Photos, illustrations, maybe charts, graphs,
are a great way to break up text on a page.
Images can be a wonderful way
to add some pizzazz to a layout.
But keep in mind that they're not required.
If you don't have access to any great images
that work with your content,
or maybe if your content doesn't lend itself
to any of these types of graphics, that's okay.
Keep in mind that all the examples we've looked at so far
have achieved our objective of breaking up the page
and making our documents more aesthetically pleasing.
They've achieved that objective without the use of
any photos or any illustrations.
These graphics are great; they're a great thing to use.
But they're not required.
The point is to add enough enhancements
to break up the text in your documents
and then stop.
Don't add any more than what's needed.
You don't want to create a document
that is full of page junk.
Here's an example where that's exactly what happened.
This page is over-embellished.
The page has become crowded.
It feels amateurish.
There's so much going on, it's hard to know
where to look first.
It's hard for our reader to know
where to devote their attention, where to start on the page.
Overall, the result is disjointed and pretty frantic.
Knowing when to stop is a really important part
of typography and page design.
Let's summarize.
If you're working on a text-heavy
multi-page document, it's especially important
to break up the text and make the document more inviting
and less intimidating.
This also makes your documents more visually pleasing
and less boring.
That's law 15: Break up large blocks of text.