Having chosen a base font, how do you best lay out your text? I’m not talking here about producing text (writing), I’m talking about laying out the text you’ve already written.
There are two things that you have to bear in mind.
- Your site visitors will scan your page first, before they actually read any of it (if they ever do).
- Text is another graphic element on the page. It needs to be placed and shaped and coloured in the same way as a photograph or a button. Each paragraph, in particular, needs to be shaped as a block.
So, you need to look at each piece of text as a shape—like a jigsaw piece that has the right shape to fit where it is put. Where should this header go, to have the clearest impact? Should it be broken into a two-line header? Should this paragraph go to the right of the accompanying image, or to its left? Should this line be in a smaller font? How big should the margin here be? Should the text here march in its own column, or flow round the images? And so on. Once you get to thinking of text as a graphic element, your visual sense will guide you to the look you need on each page.
Three final tips. 1: get the line spacing right. 2: give text blocks breathing room. (My first graphic design teacher used to say, “You can never have too much white space.â€) 3: almost never allow text lines to run right across the screen. (Create columns and blocks.)
