Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Newspaper Size and Web Readability
if:book: incredible shrinking newspaper
if:book's Ben Vershbow posts on the move of some newspapers from broadsheet to tabloid format--cost savings, and also easier to read when sitting on a crowded airplane.
He points to this International Herald Tribune story on the subject.
But his key observation is:
...the IHT is noteworthy as one of the few online newspapers to eschew vertical scrolling for the layout of articles. Instead, they have simple, attractive (and I would argue, much more readable) horizontal scrolling across fixed, three-column plates. With its long vertical fields, you might say that web news, too, is stuck in the broadsheet model. The problem is that, unlike a print newspaper, a computer screen can't be folded to improve readability, or to isolate a desired area of the page.
The IHT's web layout seems much more readable to me as well.
Comments
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if:book's Ben Vershbow posts on the move of some newspapers from broadsheet to tabloid format--cost savings, and also easier to read when sitting on a crowded airplane.
He points to this International Herald Tribune story on the subject.
But his key observation is:
...the IHT is noteworthy as one of the few online newspapers to eschew vertical scrolling for the layout of articles. Instead, they have simple, attractive (and I would argue, much more readable) horizontal scrolling across fixed, three-column plates. With its long vertical fields, you might say that web news, too, is stuck in the broadsheet model. The problem is that, unlike a print newspaper, a computer screen can't be folded to improve readability, or to isolate a desired area of the page.
The IHT's web layout seems much more readable to me as well.
