Some small tweaks to the design of this blog

I just made a couple of minor adjustments to the design of this blog.

This semester, I am taking NM3217 Design for Strategic Communications, and we learned about typography during one of the lectures. And true to the spirit of my major, Communications and New Media, this is my attempt at applying the lessons to the real world.

Our lecturer said that body text, which forms the bulk of the content on a page, should use typefaces with serif. A serif is the little line at the ends of strokes in, for example, Times New Roman. Look at this character N. See the short horizontal lines at the bottom of the stroke on the left and at the top of the stroke on the right? Those are serifs.

In contrast, Arial does not have serif. Such typefaces are referred to as sans serif. They are usually used for display text, such as headlines and titles.

The reason for using serif typefaces for body text is because body text involves chunks of words arranged in paragraphs. The serifs form guiding lines, sort of like rulers, that help the reader's eyes keep track of where they are on the page. Without the serifs, the reader's eyes might stray into neighbouring lines and the reader will have to expend mental energy to figure out where they got lost.

As communicators striving to make our writing reader-friendly, that is something we want to avoid.

So here are the changes I made to this blog.

1. The typeface for the body text of posts, i.e., what you are looking at right now, used to be sans serif. It is now good old Times New Roman, a serif font. This change was applied retroactively so posts from the very beginning of this blog are also affected.
2. I increased the font size from 12 points to 14 points. This should make it more comfortable on your eyes.
3. The font size of post titles was increased from 22 points to 24 points so that it contrasts better with the body text.
4. I decreased the width of the blog. You should be able to see more of the legal pad paper-like background picture now. Previously, the total width of the blog display area from the left edge to the right edge was 1500 pixels, with the right sidebar containing the blog archive, email subscription box, and my tweet feed taking up 300 of these pixels. With the main display area having a width of 1200 pixels, my blog entry text had a stringy look, as long lines of characters stretched across the page like the cheese oozing between slices of pizza. Long lines are no good for readability because the eyes tend to lose their way somewhere in the middle. So I reduced the overall width to 1000 pixels. The right sidebar is still 300 and the main area is now 700 pixels. You should see shorter lines and blockier paragraphs as a result.

Hopefully these changes improve your experience as a reader of my blog!