What Happened to Readability? the New Age of Funky Designs

Sometimes a website design trend comes around that just makes you want to pull your hair out. This is one of those trends – beautiful and funky designs with practically unreadable text. (Why would you put text there if you can’t be expected to read it?)

Now that may be a bit of an exaggeration because in most instances you can figure out what the text is supposed to say. But it’s not easy. And the user has to think. Will people stick around to figure out the design?

Let’s take a look at a few different examples of ways designs are “forgetting” about readability.

Example 1: Obscured Text Elements

One of the most common readability vs. design techniques is obscuring the text with other elements, such as photos or animated objects.

When done well, you can create layers without any delay in reading the words on the screen. Often this is true because the obstruction is minimal. But more designs are encroaching more and more on text elements to the point where you can figure out the words, but it takes a few extra seconds to think and comprehend.

With people having the attention spans of goldfish, is this a wise design choice?

The other challenge here is responsiveness. On different screen sizes even more of the lettering can be obscured, creating more difficulty for readability.

In the example above, the text is obscured in two locations: The head of the surfer hides a chunk of the A in “track,” while the App Store logo creeps into the bottom line of the text.

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