Of late I have been seeking out more personal blogs, yearning to return to the groovy days of a more personal internet, circa 1999-2005 (the latter being the year this very blog started). It’s great to see sites that are very obviously non-corporate and are not the result of some mildly-tweaked cookie cutter template. Even Pika recently announced the addition of background images to their blogging platform. Is this taking retro too far? Perhaps. But it’s fine, and I’ll explain why.
Sometimes a site doesn’t quite do it for me, visually. Taste is personal, and I admit I may not have the most refined sense of aesthetics out there. I’m no Steve Jobs. Then again, I also wouldn’t have thought a round mouse was a good idea, either.
The blogs that tend to miss for me usually do something like the following:
- Text is too big. As I get older, I have become more tolerant of larger text, for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean I think body text on a website should be 30px (see below for example). There is something unpleasant about reading a paragraph that is set to the size of a headline.
- Text is too small. Are you 21 and have the vision of a bald eagle? Good for you! But I am not you, and your teeny text makes me squint and sigh.
- Text is too thin or light. This just makes the words harder to read.
- Poor contrast ratio of background colour to text. This one is relatively rare, and even platforms like WordPress will warn you when you are combining colours that will make your words more challenging to read.
This is 30px text. Do not use this size for writing paragraphs about how fluffy and great cats are.
This is 11px text. Don’t do this, either.
And obviously don’t do this. (WordPress did indeed warn about this colour combo.)
For the most part, though, I am content to let people let their freak flags fly, and it’s because of Reader View. This is Firefox’s version of a feature most browsers have, letting you take the text of a page and giving you control over its appearance. I generally have it set to a monospace font (Consolas) against a light gray background. It gives the text a very neutral appearance, making it easy to read and focus on. It looks like this (snipped from one of the posts on this blog):
I’m not sure what makes Consolas work so well for me, but it does.
The test, then, is how quickly will I flip to Reader View on a blog? Will I start reading, then flip? Will I do it instantly? Will I actually not flip at all? My experience so far has been to flip about 70% of the time right away, maybe about 5% of the time I will flip part-way through, and the rest I will read the blog in its original styling. People like weird styling, it seems. Or maybe I’m just old. Either way, it’s ok, because of Reader View.
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