Bob Pritchett recently blogged about visual text formatting: one example is LiveInk. I’ve wondered for some time how we might improve reading now that we don’t really need to have one-fontsize-fits-all, linear textual arrangements (for example, sizing text by prominence).
Apropos of this, i’m reading Robin Williams’ Non-Designers Design Book (hat tip to Coding Horror), a good starting point for people who aren’t professional designers but still have to do some kind of design (pretty much all of us these days). Two of the basic principles are Alignment and Proximity: elements that are close or aligned will seem related (whether they really are or not!).
Back to LiveInk: here’s one of their demo examples.
While breaking the sentence up definitely makes it more scannable, i have some trouble parsing the result, and i think Williams’ principle of Alignment helps explain it. For example, the alignment of “means” and “among adults” makes me think they’re somehow related. But they’re not: “among adults” modifies “physical activity”, and the linguist in me thinks it ought to therefore be moved farther to the right. Of course, you can only push right so far before running out of room, and maybe that’s the practical explanation for the alignment here (LiveInk’s site suggests they have solid research behind what they do).