Thoughts — the Silverfen blog
As an idea, that has a good measure of wisdom. It’s led many organisations to invite people to sign up for newsletters, or to do more ingenious things to get email addresses — more-or-less with consent for them to be used. It is also possible for larger organisations to hold information on people, and send out quite targeted newsletters.
There are some delicacies about how this relates to data protection legislation, and I suspect that people sometimes sail close to the wind.
Entirely unsolicited email — spam — is a major nuisiance, and most email newsletters try to avoid falling into that category, not least by providing a means to opt out of future mailings.
But I am not alone in receiving vast quantities of email. Much of it is from organisations where I have bought something in the past, and from whom I might buy things in the future. The snag is that overly frequent email newsletters can cause real annoyance. It’s hard to measure the commercial consequences of this. If an organisation sends out a newsletter and a flurry of people buy things, there is an apparent success, but it’s not immediately clear how many people then start thinking ill of the organisation for bombarding them with unwanted email — or (as I tend to do) have a filter on their email whch sends the most frequent newsletters into a “bulk” folder that is then largely ignored.
But email newsletters can still work. The crucial thing seems for their recipients to see them as interesting. It’s easy for the sender of a newsletter to be so focussed on what they want to communicate, that they loose sight of how that communication will be received.
The trick seems to be to use email newsletters very sparingly, so that they recipient’s first reaction is “I’ve not heard from them in a while” rather than “not them again”, and brief, so the whole newsletter can be read in a moment. In practice that typically means small amounts of text which entices people to read further on a web site.
There’s also an interesting mental trick. If the sense is that a web site is at the heart of an organisation, then communication via the web site is natural, which is likely to lead to a web site which people re-visit often. That minimises the need for a newsletter, and makes the ideal newsletter one that is a short reminder of the organisation’s existence. That is also the type of newsletter that is least likely to be counterproductive.
If, instead, the sense is “we’ve got to get them to buy our products”, although the feeling can be upbeat and entrepreneurial, the message communicated easily alienates the very people on the edge of an organisation’s circle of influence who a good marketer will want to reach.
Life’s a little different in designing web sites because the designer specifies the font to use in the site’s style sheets, but that font is only used if it is on the machine of the person viewing the site. In principle it is possible to design a page where the browser, on finding that it hasn’t got the right font, downloads the missing font from a web site, but this effectively means a font being given away for free, so it usually represents a breach of the copyright license for the font.
What most designers do is to specify a list of fonts, starting with what they actually want, and working down a series of alternatives, ending up with “sanserif” or “sanserif”. This is an elegant solution, but presents problems because the number given as the size of a font actually refers to the size of the block of metal on which it would have been cut in the days of movable type: to make life worse, the ratio of the height lower case letters like “x” to the capitals (x-height to cap height) varies from font to font, so that using a different font at the same specified font size can produce text looking markedly smaller. One solution to this is font-size-adjust, which is a very helpful variable specifing the ratio of cap height to x-height, so that the browser can make subtle changes to font sizes if it has to start substituting: it was a little frustrating to upgrade Firefox a while back and find the processing of this had been broken, so I had rapidly to comment out uses of this in my web sites. Sadly I’ll have to wait a while before uncommenting those so I can be reasonably confident that people will have upgraded.
Different font families are available on different machines, so it is sometimes necessary to be quite imaginative and not so much to use the closest available face on one platform (which may not be very similar), as one that will have a similar emotional response in the viewer.
One of the querks of this is that one has surprisingly little control over how many letters will appear in a block of text of a specified width: it can be really surprising to see how much variation there is in the same web page viewed on different machines, so I often end up designing pages thinking about abstract ideas of how the text should flow, rather than trying to use what I think I know about how it will behave so that it behaves as well as it can under all circumstances, rather than falling over if it hits a machine where the fonts are significantly different from what I expect.
There are lots of benefits in the change, as the new monitors are lighter, less bulky and less heavy. From the web designer’s perspective the other major change is that they are bigger. On my last trip to PC world, the smallest I could see was 19”, offering a resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels.
People don’t automatically buy new monitors — or new computers — simply because they are available, but this does mean that that the size of screen that people can be assumed to have is going up. There’s an old text-setter’s rule-of-thumb that justified text looks best on 60 characters per line. There was a time when this meant web sites had to assume that there was not much spare space besides and perhaps some navigation to one side. Now that the proportion of people with wider screens is rising, there’s scope to let this influence web design. I’ve always designed sites so that they work if viewed on a wider window than I expect, and I am pleased that sites designed a while back work well on the wider monitors, but as these become more normal, some interesting possibilities are opened up.