Embrace the ubiquitous ‘Layer Cake Layout’
Layer Cake Layout—rows spanning the width of the browser, stacked on top of each other and distinguished by background color, line separator or space—arose from the demands of …
Use personality-type content structure for promotional pages
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator™ is the world’s most popular tool for evaluating personality type. Does it have anything to say to us about digital content structure? We humans …
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Don’t bother with all those title case exceptions
Early printing shops stored letters in wooden cases. The upper case contained capital, or majuscule letters; the lower case, smaller, or minuscule letters. Hence uppercase & lowercase letters, …
Prefer narrative structure to the inverted pyramid
Journalists began structuring news stories with the inverted pyramid around the middle of the 19th-century, when the telegraph rewarded brevity and newspaper style morphed from point-of-view asserting to factual …
Gutenberg the entrepreneur
On the left is a page from a Gutenberg Bible, c 1460; on the right, the same passage in an earlier, hand-copied, illuminated medieval manuscript. “If you could meet …
In the year 200: no chunking, no cueing
Behold Papyrus 46—or P46 as the experts call it—a Greek manuscript penned around 200 AD containing a portion of the New Testament with almost no chunking or cueing. Actually, …
Use assertion-evidence web slides for persuasion
Looking to build a case on your web page? To persuade an audience to take an action? Take a cue from some fascinating research about assertion-evidence presentation slide …
Avoid periods in title abbreviations
The screenshot shows a conversation about title abbreviations in the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange. Style rules are less agreed upon than we usually imagine. Dr Ulysses Everett …