Poynter just launched the results of their recent study EyeTrack07 about the nature and comparison of reading a newspaper in print versus online. Some of the main findings appear surprising at first:

A larger percentage of story text was read online (77%) than in print (62%).

63% of online readers read their selected stories to completion compared with 40% in print.

Alternative story forms – like Q&A’s, timelines, short sidebars and lists – help readers understand.

When you consider these findings in the context of the general explosion and prevalence of the weblog in all its forms, and the sharp increase in ‘community’ related content in the last couple of years, perhaps they are not so surprising after all.

I recently attended the Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference in London and almost every speaker referred to their audience not as readers, but predictably as users, and more interestingly as members. Bearing this in mind, when I read about the EyeTrack07 study, it makes sense that readers on screen want to interact with the text and the stories they are reading, and how this interactivity provides a spur on to further or deeper reading. In terms of the typographic design and layout of text on screen, it is clear that designers need to engage in stronger critical analysis of textual matter, in conjunction with editors and writers, in order to determine what interactive strategies can be best employed to create both an engaging and easy to use reading experience. Perhaps these concerns are just as important for designers of screen texts as tradition formal design decisions relating to typographic expression and hierarchy.

The other interesting aspect of this study is in the empirical methods it employs. Here is the beginning of some hard data providing key information about the nature of how we read on screen, which is a relatively new experience when compared to centuries of a culture of print reading. Although this is still a relatively new field of research, Poynter and other key researchers such as Mary Dyson and Kevin Larson are making significant contributions which will help designers and content creators working with on screen textual material in the same way that ground breaking research from the likes of Miles Tinker and Herbert Spencer influenced design for print.

With all of the recent web typography developments: new Vista fonts, CT coming into its own with the launch of Vista and Microsoft licensing its TrueType rasterizer to Ascender; David Berlow’s announcement that he has a better solution to anything that the big players have come up with, sounded like a bit of shocker! Roger Black’s interview with Berlow, titled ‘Opening Shots in the Second Type War’, steps through Berlow’s idea to create multiple master outlines for each type size to avoid having to use crude anti-aliasing technologies. This is a crude summary of his argument, read the full interview for details.

But Berlow’s concept is refreshingly simple, so naturally one has to ask, why hasn’t anyone proposed this as a solution for web typography? Having been to Bruno Maag’s talk in Dublin on Thursday night, it sounds like it might be too expensive to get a type designer to draw separate outlines for each size? But then again, according to Maag, hinting is also a laborious and tiresome process. Perhaps licensing and file size are the main issues?

I also wondered if Berlow was suggesting that as web designers and publishers we should propose the use of just three type sizes? From a graphic design perspective, this made me think of typographic exercises, designed to teach traditional principles in the early stages when one starts to study typography. There are many examples of classic typography manuals with exercises based around the restraint of using three type sizes. It would be nice from a design ‘control’ perspective if this became general good practice.

Let’s see if any of the big guns take up Berlow’s gauntlet.