Keep your type simple
Anyone who edits or updates a website will have the joy of working with text styles and formatting. Although the web is now full of images and vidoes, text is still the majority of content on the web. This being the case its the area of website design and upkeep I feel is most misused and misunderstood.
Everyone has had a coupon or an advertisement for something placed on the car windshield while in the grocery store or at a concert. They often contain a mix of fonts, colors, text sizes, and italics and bold. It is rare to see a xerox copy of an advertisement with good design applied to it. This is also often the case with websites.
For those of us who have to “design” text on web pages it is easy to get carried away with using multiple colors, fonts, and sizes to try and make our document somehow better. This is even more true when we are not designers by trade. With no formal design skills it is easy to make a gigantic mess of our documents and in the process make them harder to understand.
This doesn’t just apply to websites, but also emails. I can not count the number of emails I have received at one time or another that was full of terrible colors that were unreadable against the dark colored background. Myspace seems to be a great example of what happens when non-designers try to make things look nice by adding new colors and backgrounds to the web. The result can be a real mess and a headache for anyone who eventually needs the information given on these pages.
Lets look at two examples of well designed content to see how things should be done.
Newspapers
Convention with readable documents begins with looking at your morning paper. Because newspapers are some of the most read documents in the world the designers of newspapers follow a set of conventions to make things easy to understand for everyone. For instance the caption always belongs below an image. This is not because it is somehow easier to read, but because everyone has done it for so long your eyes will dart to the bottom of an image expecting a caption to be there. If you placed that same caption at the top or to the right of an image people would get confused.
If you look at the type used in newspapers you will always see some simple conventions followed. The title of the article always belongs at the top right hand corner. This will be a larger darker style than the body of the article. The article itself will then be black text on white (or off white) paper with enough spacing between letters and lines to create an easy to read document.
The next thing you will notice is that all of the articles in the entire paper will be formatted the exact same way. You will not find an article with blue and green text in it. You will also not find an article with the title centered. Each part of the whole must be consistent.
Web pages should be written the same way. This is why the idea of using style sheets first came to the web with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Book layout experts, magazine editors, and newspaper people all use a style sheet to define everything they do. When they show some “quoted text” it is always shown the same way (or at least using the same principles).
A website needs a stylesheet that is easy for people to read, and every page and article on the site should use the same styles to keep the look consistent.
Less is more
The principle you should take home after reading this, is that less is more. Your pages and emails do not need to have five or six or twently differenly styled text areas in them. You should be able to create a readable document with one (two at most) colors of text, one font (unless used in a logo or image), and font sizes that only change when the type of text changes. Thus your largest heading should be your title. Your sub headings should be smaller in relationship to each other, and your text should be a uniform size.
Keep it simple and your readers will love you for it.
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Aaron Mills is a Project Manager for Jailbreak Creative. He has many years of experience working in the web industry and regularly works with local and national clients on a variety of web projects.
Aaron has extensive experience working in both PHP and Ruby on Rails Projects. Aaron also does work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and web marketing. 
