I’m starting a new copy heavy design and thought I’d put a little more thought into the typography than I have in the past. I usually just eyeball what appears to be a readable and attractive paragraph width, but I thought I’d read up on the topic and see what people have to say.
When doing a single news story/press release/single column page, how do you determine your max-width on paragraphs? Does anyone have any good articles bookmarked they could point me to?
Thanks in advance!
The ideal length is supposed to be about 12 words which will be around 25 - 35 em.
A search for “ideal paragraph width” should bring up lots of references.
I would normally go for about 15–20 words per line (which typically fits to about 30–35em), but to some extent it depends how much else you need to fit on the page. If you are able to go for a fairly sparse design without a lot of other features, you can choose your line length as you want. But sometimes your design will be constrained by needing to including left and right sidebars and other features, so if you are making a design that will work for people with 3-figure window widths, you might not have the luxury of allowing that much space.
Another good tip for making your text more readable is to increase the line-spacing a little bit; this creates a more ‘open’ feel to the text and looks less like an impenetrable solid block.
Your text must contain lots of short words if you can fit that many in that space.
With lines of text over 30em long you would need to increase the line spacing to make it readable. As the lines get longer it gets easier to lose track of which line you are on as you are reading.
I just checked a couple of books and they seem to average about 12 words per line with lines of about 30em length. As it is easier to read something on paper than it is on the screen you might want to go slightly shorter or increase line spacing on the screen in order to maintain readability.
about 20 words. And an other aspect: a line-height shoud by 1+1/2 from font-size: if font-size is 1.2em, your line height shoud be 1.8 em
What is the logic behind that figure which differs so greatly from what has been used for the past few hundred years?
If I may quote from Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style,
§2.1.2 Choose a comfortable measure
Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal. For multiple-column work, a better average is 40 to 50 characters.
It is my experience that while serifed font faces tend to hold the line together, allowing the eye to track better, the low resolution of the computer monitor “smudges” the serifs, making the sans-serif font a better choice. The sans-serif font does not enable tracking as well as serifed, requiring in my opinion a slightly shorter line length, say 60 characters rather than 66.
A useful rule of thumb is 2 characters per em; thus, 60 characters roughly equal 30 ems.
cheers,
gary
For those fans of footy, or as I call it, watching the grass grow, go oranje.
Gary, surely you can watch it on Galavision : )
With a nominal 5 letters plus space per word (that publishers used to use for estimating word counts) that gives you approximately 10 words per line. That matches in to what I said about text on the screen being slightly harder to read than on the printed page and so needing a slightly shorter line length.
[ot]
Why would I want to watch the grass grow in a former Dutch territory when I can watch my own from my back deck? With the rain we’ve had for the last week or so, watching the grass grow here is wa-ay more exciting than watching 22 players doing their best to bore everyone to death with required flops to incite the crowd before again trying to euthanize them. 
[/ot]
cheers,
gary
I would say the ideal paragraph width shouldn’t be dependant on a specific number of words but the size and breadth of the text, how it’s displayed and how much whitespace surrounds it. Giving content more breathing room immediately helps break down blocks of content into easier to work through sections therefore the readability dynamic may change as a result. Personally I’ve never been one to apply the rules of print to the web as it simply isn’t an equal playing field. 