While we do our best to make designs flexible, sometimes there are cases where the space available for text is limited. Maybe it's a widget, or maybe it's text inside a Flash piece, or maybe things just need to line up properly. But for whatever reason, we have to ask people to fall back to old print design skills and write content to fill the space.This involves writing the content, checking to see if it will fit, editing it again, checking to see if that fits…
At some point we get this reasonable but impossible request: "Tell us how many characters we have to use." This would be perfect if it worked. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Proportional vs. Monospaced typefaces.
First of all, not all characters are created equally. At the right is an example of the same word in two different typefaces. Most typefaces used on the web are like the example at the top. It is a "proportional typeface," which means the letters are different widths. Notice that the letter "i" is much skinnier than the letter "C." In fact, the "C" takes up almost as much space as the "i" and "l" together.
Compare that to the mono-spaced typeface at the bottom, where every letter is the same width. Equal widths makes for easier calculation of character limits, but it comes at the expense of reading speed and comfort.
Even if we switch to a monospaced typeface to simplify character counting, we won't have solve the problem. There's another behavior that makes character limits almost impossible to calculate: word wrapping.
Line breaks break character limits.
Take a look at the example on the right. At the top is a short passage in a proportional font. It spans about three and one-half lines and is seventy characters long, counting spaces. This sentence has short words and fills up the available space from left margin to right margin very nicely.
Below that is a sentence of sixty-one characters. It is nine characters less, but it still spans four lines and even takes up more of the fourth line than the example on the top. You might blame this on the fact that there are a lot more capital letters in this text and they take up a lot of room. That certainly contributes. But the larger reason is the text itself. Look at the long words: "Armistice," "Veterans," and "renamed." That many long words close together forces a lot of line breaks in a narrow column of text like this one.
Looking at the top line of text, you might think you have a character limit of around 80 or 85; the bottom looks like a character limit of 65 to 70, a difference of ten to twenty characters. That's a big difference when you're working in a small space. You just can't make a solid character limit and have any faith in it.
Of course I've tried. And invariably someone says they've met the character limit but there's still too much space left over. Or worse, they say they're under the character limit but the text won't fit. So now I just don't do character limits at all.
It's an unsatisfying answer, but it's just like buying new clothes. There's no way to be sure if the contents will fit in the available space without trying it on first.
Right on. When I first started out writing in the print advertising world, I was told that I needed to wait for an art director to complete an optimal layout with greeked text and then write my copy based on the resulting length and character count.
This always seemed stupid to me, but at the time, I didn’t know any better. My other favorite was when I was given a word count to follow.
“Lorem Ipsum Dolar…” is a lot different than, “When you buy…”
This is a great point, John. I’m sure there’ve been times even recently when I’ve asked for character counts. But I hope not. The only way to do it is to write and revise until the message is effectively communicated in the allowable space.
Posted by Dave Perks on 11/24/08 at 4:31AM
Susan, structure is vital to communication. It’s structure that helps guide us (and our audience) through our work.
The Blues are no less creative for being generally limited to the pentatonic scale; short stories are not robbed of their creativity by having word-count limits.
The goal of good design is to provide an effective framework for the message. If you do not respect the framework, then the design cannot do its job.
That said, arbitrary limits aren’t particularly useful. Some development decisions are made simply to make a technical issue (like “how many letters can fit in this space”) easier to handle. We try to respect the message and intent over technical convenience.
But unfortunately we cannot remove all boundaries.
Posted by John Williams on 11/24/08 at 5:35AM
Creativity shouldn’t be bound, but sometimes, for the audience’s sake, a limit should be enforced. Users frequently skim a page looking for a particular piece of information. If that information is part of a short sentence slightly segregated from the rest of the page, it is much easier for them to pick out their desired keywords. For widgets especially there is only a finite amount of space available for a piece of information. If one were to exceed the space, the design would lose its shape and the overall experience would be affected. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should always have your audience and canvas in mind when writing.
Something else to consider is retrieval speed and disk space required on any generic storage engine. In the programming world there is, frequently but not always, a big difference in both once you exceed 255 characters. In small applications these factors are usually negligible but can be huge problems in larger-scale databases. Being an efficiency-nut these two factors are always on my mind.
Posted by Mike Bernat on 11/24/08 at 6:13AM
I’m a big believer in words. I believe they’re among the most effective tools in our arsenal. Sometimes, it takes 500 pages of words to communicate an idea (Atlas Shrugged) and sometimes it only takes 10 words (It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.).
Moving forward in this digital world of ours, I think one of the great challenges we will face will be effective communication. But this is not a new problem, there have always been gaps in people’s ability to communicate.
Structure as John and Mike both describe it can be a good thing. It shouldn’t handcuff a writer, it should encourage focus.
Posted by Dave Perks on 11/24/08 at 6:33AM
I’m a technical guy so I’ll chime in with technical problems as well.
Browsers and Operating systems render text differently. If you own windows download the safari browser and load a page with a bunch of text. Then open IE 7 to the same page and look at the different text and readability. Huge difference.
The other thing is that some browsers also intelligently word wrap by hyphenating the word. Others … well aren’t so smart.
I hope I am not restating something someone has already said; but that font is so freaking small for the comments it makes my eyes hurt. It makes the broca part of my brain say: “This is the size of legal jargon, pass.”
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Posted by Nick on 11/24/08 at 9:03AM