Legibility

Two posts this evening have touched upon some­thing that has been lin­ger­ing in the in the back of my mind for some time:

“The first step on the road from thought to web­site is text. Text is the most fun­da­men­tal kind of web con­tent. When web­sites have images, audio, or video, respon­si­ble authors will make sure these things have tex­tual equiv­a­lents. How­ever pale such alter­nate text may be com­pared to the media it rep­re­sents, it’s a base­line. Text is the com­mon denom­i­na­tor of web com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” — Tim Brown, of Nice Web Type, on his new tum­blelog, Mak­ing Nice Web Type.

And,

In the last year, this web­site has been pow­ered by Expres­sion Engine, Dru­pal and later, once I found the appro­pri­ate fit, Word­Press. It has been skinned with a hand­ful of pub­licly avail­able free themes — present one included. I will say, I have a great respect for any indi­vid­ual will­ing to put their code out there for free — how­ever, of the themes I have per­son­ally tried, none have focused on what I value most: legibility.

Leg­i­bil­ity is very dear to me because, well, I have dif­fi­culty with that which is near to me.

Sec­ond, though we have all embraced short-​​form com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I’m afraid, gen­er­ally speak­ing, we’re col­lec­tively ignor­ing the value of long-​​form articles.

That said, I felt it was time to do some­thing. I have been work­ing on a Word­Press theme that puts the reader first — if its worth it, I’ll even try and make it pub­lic. My hope is that, once in place, it will allow me to focus on writ­ing longer posts and have them pre­sented in a man­ner that encour­ages you, the viewer, to read them.