5   Page and Screen Design

Good page and screen design not only enhances the visual appeal of your manual, but improves its legibility—readers will be able to locate information on the page faster using skimming and scanning techniques, and once they start to read, will read the text faster.

Many of the page design and typographic traditions that we see in manuals today evolved because of the limitations imposed by typewriters. One example is the use of Courier, a non-proportional typeface. With Courier, every letter and character on the keyboard uses the same amount of space, whether it’s an “l” or an “m.” While it made the typewriter easier to design, it’s considered slower to read because of the uncharacteristic word lengths that result. Now that we use word processors and laser printers, we can drop some of these typewriter conventions and go back to standard typographic conventions.

This chapter looks at the design and layout of both print and online manuals, including:

• templates
• page and screen layout
• headers and footers
• heading attributes
• typefaces and type sizes
• typographic conventions
• line spacing and justification
• page breaks