A Few Words About Thin Spaces, or Why Text May Seem Boring to You

Now that's an argument, yes.

I don't want to offend anyone

If you feel comfortable like this, you are welcome, do as you feel comfortable. If you understood me, give me a like. Let's hug in the comments.

Google and Yandex vote for Tschichold!

Why do you think copywriters are required to provide subheadings up to H3, lists, illustrations, and sometimes even limit the length of a paragraph and the volume of a separate block?

You will be surprised, but these are the requirements of search engines. To which good engineers have sewn into the algorithms the signs of readable text. And they are – you will not believe it – based precisely on the rules of harmonic layout, which were developed in time immemorial.

People simply find it convenient to read texts marked with visual markers, filled with spaces, broken into pieces that are easy to chew and digest. This convenience can be formalized, turned into a set of requirements and checked against a checklist when analyzing a site. And reduce the rating for poor layout and sheets of text without a single space.

And the fact that SEOs have turned this set of requirements into a set of meaningless voodoo spells – who is to blame? No one. It's already good that they exist and are observed.

Disclaimer (isn't it a bit late?)

In reality, the page proportions, line length, and font size are much more complicated. Even the spaces – look above, how many. And there are quite a few studies on which font and font size are best for learning and searching for information, and some of them contradict each other.

Here you can read an interesting discussion in the comments, and in the text there are references to various studies.

PS1 This is an official document!™

This is a completely subjective observation, but it seems to me that a terribly formatted text automatically acquires a sign of formality and seriousness of the message. Who prepares documents in the tax office, courts, and other serious institutions? People who have been shown how to turn on a computer and open Word.

It never occurred to them that you could customize something in Word. Oh, I've seen those documents created from bits of tables just to space out blocks with different font sizes or to implement what you can do by pressing the Tab key and adjusting the tab stops (can you do that?).

As a result, serious messages from serious companies come to us in such a wonderful form. Times New Roman, size 12, line spacing 14, alignment to the page width. And the layout style is automatically linked to the nature of the message. This is not just correct, it is beautiful and convenient (no).

PS2 Test yourself

Take the text and lay it out in different ways. See which option seems beautiful to you — completely subjectively. This is your style, it can be set by default in Word or Google Docs (how? Well, ask me, I have a video about it).

Last but not least

Let me return to my original thesis. It seems to me that we, as acute- and obtuse-endians, can now be divided into two camps. Fans of TimesNewRomanJustified and supporters of harmonious typography. The rest intuitively join one of the camps depending on the first contact.

I don't want to say that one camp is much better than the other. I can only give numerous arguments in favor of the typography of a healthy person. And find some justification for the TimesNewRomanJustified group.

And considering that I have to edit other people's texts, it would be better for them not to be laid out by the Times at full width. But this, I repeat, is subjective.