Skip to content

Digital Style Matters

Exploring the world of documents on a screen

  • Matters from history
  • Matters of digital layout
  • Matters of digital content
  • Matters of digital text
 

Embrace the ubiquitous ‘Layer Cake Layout’

Penn St World Campus screenshot

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 …

Read moreEmbrace the ubiquitous ‘Layer Cake Layout’

Use personality-type content structure for promotional pages

Myers-Briggs illustration cropped

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 …

Read moreUse personality-type content structure for promotional pages

Don’t bother with all those title case exceptions

Image of upper & lower cases

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, …

Read moreDon’t bother with all those title case exceptions

Prefer narrative structure to the inverted pyramid

Image: F Luis Mora's NYC subway riders reading 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 …

Read morePrefer narrative structure to the inverted pyramid

Gutenberg the entrepreneur

Image Gutenberg page beside illuminated page

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 …

Read moreGutenberg the entrepreneur

In the year 200: no chunking, no cueing

Image Papyrus 46

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, …

Read moreIn the year 200: no chunking, no cueing

Use assertion-evidence web slides for persuasion

Screenshot assertion-evidence website

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 …

Read moreUse assertion-evidence web slides for persuasion

Avoid periods in title abbreviations

Screen shot of discussion about 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 …

Read moreAvoid periods in title abbreviations

Inside

  • Don’t bother with all those title case exceptions
  • Prefer narrative structure to the inverted pyramid
  • Embrace the ubiquitous ‘Layer Cake Layout’

Outside

Who

Kyle HendersonKyle Henderson has been making digital documents for more than 20 years. He serves a dual appointment at University of Wisconsin-Madison: creative services manager at the university’s Division of Information Technology and lecturer in communication topics at the Division of Continuing Studies. Kyle is a regular conference and seminar speaker on digital communication style and method.

© 2021 Kyle Henderson | Site made with GeneratePress on WordPress