Christopher Wolfe's blog
December 1, 2014
On Scrolling?
Scrolling on a screen seems uncomfortable. The reading experience on a computer screen can be improved.
At some point you must have struggled through a long passage of text on a webpage. It was unadorned, set in long lines of unjustified Times New Roman. As you approach the last few visible paragraphs on your screen you flick your trackpad. The page moves upwards in a blur. When it stops you search for where you’d just finished off. Was it this paragraph? Or this one? You scroll slightly upwards, looking for a familiar sentence. Ah yes! There I was.
You could use your arrows to avoid this confusion but they only nudge the page up by a couple of lines. The spacebar moves the page too much.
Some designers help the reader from loosing his position by providing visual anchors. These often take the form of dropcaps or pull quotes or some irregular feature. These visual anchors provide a reference point when scrolling down a wall of text. But these ornamental techniques tend to be distracting, more appropriate for magazine articles than long and serious texts.
Composing content for the web is complicated because the designer has no control over the dimensions of the screen on which the content will be viewed. So he defines relationships between bits of content — this image will follow this paragraph and this caption sits beneath it. And sometimes if he is especially bold he sets constraints — this paragraph should be no greater than 400 pixels wide.
The web typographer therefore is faced with a difficult task. To define stylistic rules which ensure the content is readable on screens which vary from the size of a business card to a coffee table.
I don’t like looking through photo essays which force me to stop my scroll wheel at one point, then I nudge the page up so that the photo I want to see fits sort of neatly within my browser’s window. Scrolling forces the user to make decisions about composition with every flick of the scrollwheel. And the user has no time for good composition.
And scrolling is uncomfortable for long
The space bar shifts the entire page down by its height. Too much. It will cut paragraphs in two and