Styling Clarity

Having talked about some of my perceived issues with the up-coming Word 2007 over the last couple of days, today I am going to address a topic I nearly covered back in October last year.

It’s a core feature of Word. It will make your life better. It will free you up to write more clearly. It will save you time, it will save a designer’s life. It will save your company’s brand image. What am I talking about? Templates of course, and the Styles that are embedded in them.

Do you remember websites that looked something like this:

Text with silly colours and fonts

Eye catching? Oh Yes! Readable? Not really.

Do you remember the ‘Desktop Publishing’ boom and people (probably, mostly, unemployed typographers) complaining about the number of fonts people used on a single page?

It seems to me that the issue was that people, when given a choice, do not know what to choose. And, as they don’t know, and having a choice may even seem fun (“Look at those letters change shape. Wow!”) they can be relied on to be inconsistent. I believe that the human brain is fairly flexible in its ability to recognise letter forms (and therefore words) very quickly, when it has an opportunity to settle into a pattern that can only happen with consistent, ‘tasteful’ use of fonts etc.

Are serif or sans-serif fonts more readable? As usual, the answer is ‘it depends’. Screen resolutions are relatively low, so sans-serif tend to be more readable on web-pages etc (less space is taken up on-screen with the the serifs). But, for print, the resolutions are higher and serif fonts tend to be selected for the body text, with serif typefaces being chosen for headlines; the serifs actually assisting in the readability of the text.

In reality, the prevalence of sans-serif fonts these days has little to do with readability as outlined above; it is because for as long as typesetters have had a choice between serif and sans-serif font, they have bitterly fought over it. As ‘fighting over it’ generally meant throwing the lead type itself at the opponent, the headline writers tended to win at a distance, as their chunks of lead type were substantially larger than their rivals’.

OK, just in case you don’t know the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts, check out wikipedia.

Intermission (…and we didn’t even get started yet)

The typeface I am currently seeing (Verdana I think) has an interesting oddity; the capital ‘I’ is what my design teacher used to call a ‘Bastard I’. It has serifs, even though the typeface is sans serif. You see it with J’s too sometimes, and oh yes look there it is. Another little bastard. It’s very helpful, actually, just in case I need to use the phrase ’11 Ill llamas’. In case the font you are seeing is different, a screen shot follows (click for full size):

A sans-serif font with Bastard I's

Right-ho. Let’s get back to it. Choice. Bad Thing. Especially for amateurs. String em all up! Templates, that’s what you want, give them constraints. Teach them about Styles “Styles – we Salute you!”

Now, maybe a lot of people only do ‘styling’ in Word. I don’t, I write in it. When I do not have some basic structure in place, the template and the styles, I feel lost. I get to feel a sort of safety in the headings and other styles I have set up. Jason at 37 Signals said there is “A World of Difference between Writing and Word Processing“; their product WriteBoard is a bare bones, text-only interface to allow you to get the words right before and ‘word-processing’. I see the logic here, and WriteBoard is a product I am considering experimenting with (or perhaps, a reversion to my favourite plain-text-editor TextPad) to see how removing the ability to emphasise or embolden my words will help the flow.

However, I am not too down on Word in this respect, when I have my stylesheet. If I am typing using my stylesheet and suddenly have an urge to type a CSS or code extract, then the best way I know to do that is to type the relevant text on it’s own paragraph, highlight the paragraphs (probably use Shift+Home, Shift + Up Arrow one or more times) and then change the style of the paragraphs with Ctrl + Shift + S (for STYLE) and type ‘CodeP’ – the name of my paragraph style and Return. Here’s what the result will look a little bit like:

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 12px;
}

Not only will I have changed the appearance, in moments, but I will also have turned off spell-checking and a few other ‘behind the scenes’ settings. I now have two benefits:

  1. Writing that will need formatting has got it already. I just did it all;
  2. The styling of the text gives me a visual bookmark to look for other things in the text. If I’m looking for stuff about the detail of the code, I know that I typically place it after the code, and so on.

And that’s the problem with Word without the styles you like. Which Font shall I use? Which Font Size? Should I use a style? These questions haunt me as soon as I think of something that I might like to give a different kind of emphasis. Of course, templates and styles give you so much more! If you have a template that you like, type a heading, give it the appropriate level of heading style and it already looks like you want it to look. If you do not have a style sheet that you like loaded up, give the same text a heading of an appropriate level and you may well ask yourself if that looks right.

“No! I want a Blue Heading!”

You already use Styles

Yes, even if you do not use Word, HTML / CSS or whatever, you already use styles. I’m talking about your clothing. Perhaps you have several styles that you prefer. Smart or smart-casual for work, casual for home, something else for the gym, and maybe you go all shiny when you go out for a night-on-the-town. Or maybe you always wear a buttoned shirt and chinos.

Styles are clothing for your documents… but the great thing about them is that when you use them properly, it will take seconds to try a different ‘look’ rather than minutes. When you use them poorly, and you try switching styles, you’ll find yourself in your best black suit but you still have your white gym socks on. And they’re sweaty.

For the business environment, templates and styles take silly ‘how wide shall I make my margins’ issues and dispenses with them. Well, it should, but it doesn’t because we can’t lock-down certain aspects of document formatting. How would it be if we could create templates and styles that were locked? One could imagine certain ‘thorough’ templates being created where the only thing you could change was the style of the text you were writing. Or looser templates because the author / designer acknowledged that they’d only styled heading 1-4, and that no-one had decided on a default style for tables – so they just locked the margins and the styles that had been set.

Perhaps we could have templates and styles that, like CSS files, were held separate from the main document. There are certainly times when we could use this separation, and also times where it is advantageous to have a ‘start with this, but build on it and change it attitude’.

For example, say you are writing a multi-part manual. You want the styling for all the chapters to be exactly the same. But by chapter 3, you realise that you missed out certain styles that are needed, perhaps special table styles. It would be nice in this circumstance if you could just update one stylesheet or template and see those additions propogate throughout your collection of chapters. The opposite situation is that for one-off documents, you may want the style to be based on a house template, but you probably don’t want to have that same linkage in place. Otherwise, two years from now someone will update a template to reflect the new company logo and boom – thousands of documents get changed that you never intended to be, and they don’t look anything like the actual document that was sent to the customer any more. This would be A Bad Thing.

Look at Word’s Structure

Toolbar from Word 2003The image, right, is from Word 2003’s main toolbar. Notice how, subtly, the Style option tools (displaying ‘Normal’) are higher priority than the fonts? Yes, simply being to the left of something else means higher priority. If you’ve used Word 2003, you will also know that (within certain constraints) the name of the style gets as much priority as its appearance. That’s good. It is the name of the style that is meant to imply it’s use, and whilst we probably can’t expect the average Word user to know what p, h1, h2 etc mean, it should not take too long for them to understand, conceptually, what Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on are.

Now look again at the Word 2007 Ribbon we saw yesterday (click for full size version): The Home Ribbon in Word 2007

Notice how the ribbon prioritises Font and Paragraph settings over Style? And notice too that the appearance of the Style has taken priority over the name / intended use? Perhaps people will intuitively use the styles correctly, based on their appearance, but I doubt it.

Contrasts

I did not try to produce the wild and wacky text at the start of this document with WordPress that I am currently using. It constrains me to using a limited feature set of html, and even use of CSS (e.g. to center images) can be a bit of a pain.

I could have created the text in Dreamweaver or similar, littering the html with deprecated font tags and more spans than you can shake a stick at.

I could have created a mad style sheet in CSS which individually named a whole raft of styles and id’s. But that would have been too much work.

But, I used Word, because it is too easy to override all the good things that offer you more normal levels of restraint.

Implications

I am back to arguing for a prioritisation of Styles. I realise it is not likely that MS will ever get rid of the Font-drop-down from their default toolbar or ribbon; but I think it would be reasonable to push it’s availability right down. I would argue that the priority should be:

  1. Styles;
  2. A Themes / Template button (as a compromise);
  3. Fonts.

Have You Ever Noticed?

I implied earlier that styles could be used to change the look and feel of a document easily. This just is not (to my mind) something for the workplace; it could be useful at home, though. However, even the home-user should be careful with this power too. Although I said that your choice of Clothing was like using Styles, you might be like me in that your language changes with the intended audience, as well. And if you write in a particular way, then no amount of styling will make up for what the words say, if they are inappropriate.

2 thoughts on “Styling Clarity

  1. Well said, Nigel. I’m looking forword to the rest of your site (I just came across it by virtue of a comment that you posted on Stevey’s blog.)

    One matter of style, and this concerns Word: It’s hard to believe that in v.2007, Word still uses broken character sets.

    How is one supposed to quote you without having Word?s notion of ?quote? marks and apostrophes corrupt your apparent wisdom?

  2. Thanks for visiting bj!
    Regarding your comment about quotes, I had never noticed that before! I note that if I copy a Word 2003 quote into Notepad the quote marks do get copied correctly… however if I copy them to TextPad they do not (and textpad is definitely able to handle extended character sets). Hmm. On the other hand, a paste into Dreamweaver gets it right too, so I wonder what is going on! And I’ll try and paste into here too, see what happens:
    “here is something I said”.

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