Digital Text

I've been thinking quite a bit about the text I've been using in my digital writing. While I know about design principles from my experience teaching publications, it's worth remembering and reflecting on the criteria that make text accessible to a digital reader.

In The electronic word: democracy, technology, and the arts, Richard A. Lantham answers the question, “What happens when text moves from page to screen? First, the digital text becomes unfixed and interactive. The reader can change it, become writer. The center of Western culture since the Renaissance—really since the great Alexandrian editors of Homer—the fixed, authoritative, canonical text, simply explodes into the ether.” (Lantham 31).

He continues by reviewing reader expectations for traditional text, as described by Marinetti: “No pictures; no color; strict order of left to right then down one line; no type changes; no interaction; no revision,” (Lantham 34). In attacking this convention, Marinetti attacks the printed codex book and its typographical conventions.

However, one cannot completely disregard these conventions. While digital text opens up the possibilities for color, visuals, movement, interaction, etc., readers (at least for the present) still expect a certain amount of predictability. When (western) children learn to read, the still learn to read from top to bottom, left to right. To totally disregard these expectations would be to the reader's and writer's disadvantage, since, as design and visual literacy text Picturing Texts points out that " readers typically follow a predictable path, starting at the beginning and reading to the end" (53). Even when observing webpages, people still tend to read the same way, unless, that is, if something breaks that pattern:

What we see depends on what gets our attention, on what details we observe, and on our own experience and memory. Usually the more important, extreme, unexpected, or disturbing something is, the quicker it catches our eye and also the more memorable it is. (55)

Therefore, while I had fun creating cool effects in Flash, as I reread, I keep in mind whether breaking the patterns in text type and appearance is worthwhile (or simply an exercise in "Look what I can do"). I've likewise found a helpful resource in the online version of Web Style Guide. Chapter 8 is all about typography. It too talks about pattern, and how breaking that pattern without purpose can be distracting, confusing and creating "doubts" in the reader:

As in traditional print publishing, high-quality web sites adhere to established type style settings consistently throughout the site. Consistency gives polish to a site and encourages visitors to stay by creating an expectation about the structure of a text. If sloppy, inconsistent formatting confounds this expectation you will decrease your readers’ confidence in your words, and they may not return. ("Consistency")

To this end, I decided that while each thread of the story would have its own set of patterns, the patterns within those paths would be consistent; in other words, dialogue would use one font (although it might vary in size depending on emphasis), description another, and electronic "voices" would mimic the fonts associated with them everyday.

This brings up the need to think rhetorically about type and the ways in which the typography itself can be part of the message, expressing a tone, style, or feeling. In discussing the ways in which desktop publishing software such as Quark can affect the way text is presented and interpreted, Lantham points out, “Typography becomes allegorical, a writer-controlled expressive parameter, just as it does on an electronic screen,” (36). In essence, words become images, and images function as icons, as meaningful and symbolic. In Picturing Texts, the point is made that "Our choice of typeface depends on the TONE we intend-whether we want our text to look serious, playful, traditional, trendy, or so on" (441). The Purdue OWL's page on Visual Rhetoric: Text Elements illustrates this well with the following example:


The first example is a serif font (it has "little feet") while the second is sans serif. Both are used commonly for large amounts of text because they are extremely easy to read, though serif fonts generally have a more formal, traditional tone than more modern sans serif fonts. The third and fourth examples, however, call on our cultural consciousness:

The "Medieval History" text looks like our cultural conception of Medieval script. That is, the font looks almost like it was hand-written. Likewise, we've all seen tabloid papers in the checkout lanes of the supermarket, announcing in bold, loud text all sorts of incredible news.

Thus, when I chose to represent email text in my piece, I picked the Verdana font common to html email, and when I chose to represent TV closed captioning, I picked a more mechanical looking typeface.

Another point I took into account was increasing "legibility" through contrast.

Good typography depends on the visual contrast between one font and another, as well as among text blocks, headlines, and the surrounding white space. Nothing attracts the eye and brain of the reader like strong contrast and distinctive patterns, and you can achieve those attributes only by carefully designing contrast and pattern into your pages. If you cram every page with dense text, readers see a wall of gray and will instinctively reject the lack of visual contrast. Just making things uniformly bigger doesn’t help.

Nearly all of the text in my piece is either black on white or bold white on black, providing maximum contrast, setting the mood for the passages, and providing the option to colorize some words for additional emphasis.

The chapter also discusses line length, something I hadn't considered initially writing the story in word, but something I had to take into great account when composing on the "small screen" of Flash frames.

Text on the computer screen is hard to read not only because of the low resolution of computer screens but also because the layout of most web pages violates a fundamental rule of book and magazine typography: the lines of text on most web pages are far too long for ideal reading. Magazine and book columns are narrow for physiological reasons: at normal reading distances, the eye’s span of acute focus is only about three to four inches wide, so designers try to keep dense passages of text in columns not much wider than that comfortable eye span. Wider lines of text require readers to move their heads slightly or use their eye muscles to track over the long lines of text. Readability suffers because on the long trip back to the left margin the reader may lose track of the next line. ("Legibility")

Given that shorter lines seem to work better in digital texts, I began reworking my piece, looking for good places for line breaks, much as I would a poem, trying to choose the proper opening and closing words for emphasis. Given my choice to use centered text for much of the piece, this made the line breaks especially visual, allowing in many cases one word or phrase to dominate an entire line in the center of focus.

All of these elements are specific to text, but influence how text can work as image. Given that, design elements such as balance, point of view, emphasis, description, and other elements of visual and verbal texts will continue to be of primary importance during my composition and revision.