BAD DESIGN HERE IS AN EXAMPLE of bad page design. Painful right? You · · · · · · GOOD DESIGN · · · · · · probably don't even want to read it. Power through it for a mo- ment and right off the bat you'll notice a few things: BAD TYPOGRAPHY Here is an example of good page design. Right off the bat you’ notie soe ipotant diffeenes -Poor font choices (Cambria and Arial). Cambria (one of Word's default fonts) actually isn't that bad for the screen, but GOOD TYPOGRAPHY suffers in print. Arial is ubiquitous because it was a system font • Professional Typefaces dobe ason €o and Brandon Text‚ in Windows for so long, but is effectively just worse Helvetica. ason is onsideed a ƒey “safe” pi† and a popua hoie aong boo† designes fo good eason: it eads ƒey o‡ -Sloppy hyphenation/justification. Professional layout soft- fotaby and suits a ˆide ƒaiety of ontent. ware like Adobe InDesign uses powerful, customizable algo- rithms to help produce a natural text flow. Others, not so much. • Natural-looking Justification & Careful Hyphenation Thee aen’t any huge gaps betˆeen ˆods o “addes” of -The little things. ALL CAPS, underlined text, "dumb quotes" hyphens unning doˆn the side of a paagaph. and double dashes--there are hundreds of nuances that add up to text looking either professional, or like it came straight out of • The Little Things Make a Big Difference Word (and in this case it did--that's how this page was created). Small CapsŒ “uy ŽuotesŒ” e dashes—and no undeines. That ast one is neˆs to ost peopeŒ but apat fo in†sŒ BAD USE OF SPACE Pretty much everywhere--the margins are too small, the space undeining is osty a ei of the anua typeˆite. ‘oday between lines is too tight, and space after each sentence is too ˆe an shoˆ emphasis in betterŒ oe professional ˆays. big. It's a subtle thing but makes a huge difference in readability. GOOD USE OF SPACE The te”t on this page has oo to beatheŒ is set on a baseine BAD STRUCTURE gidŒ and has singe spaes afte puntuation doube‡spaing Most writing apps include a defined hierarchy for organizing in- is ˆongŒ foget ˆhat you •ngish teahe said‚. –ieŒ isn’t it— formation--Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.--and most writers com- pletely ignore it right out of the gate. Instead they opt for arbi- GOOD STRUCTURE trary or inconsistent headings that make it difficult for the The infoation is eay and onsistenty ogani˜ed. ™uh reader to skim text quickly or understand how it is prioritized easie fo the eade to fooˆŒ absobŒ efeene and s†i. ("is this a new topic, or just a subsection?"). For example, alt- hough the three headings on this page all reference the same "level" of information, they are each styled differently. GOOD DESIGN · 19 18 - BAD DESIGN 294 · ThE SCriBE METhOD
The Scribe Method by Tucker Max Page 293 Page 295