Wow! Thanks for the incredible response, Mike.

We’re probably the same vintage so I know what you mean about readability. I use the zoom function on the browser to help, esp at night.

Off to learn more about Segoe – may help in a side project I’m working on 🙂

Thanks again.

Ivan

His corresponding serif face is Georgia. It’s an interesting experiment to take a paragraph of text in the same font size in Georgia and Times New Roman and look at them side by side on the screen. I just not did this with Georgia, Times New Roman, and Garamond (per what’s been suggested to you), and I’d have to say that Garamond looked the scrawniest of the three.

The issue of the typeface being “dated” is orthogonal with its readability; that’s a statement about fashion and taste, not about utility As such, there’s no real response to it. But I’d say that the “user-friendliness” of Verdana is evident from how widely it’s used for screen-based text.

As an aside, the Windows Phone uses a unifying typeface (I believe it’s Segoe, but I can’t confirm that at the moment) that works surprisingly well in incredibly small (4-point?) sizes. Talk about a challenge, yikes. It’s a sans-serif face, which I think is significant to this discussion.

While the choice of a typeface is something to contemplate, I think your points about other ways to enhance readability (especially size) are _at least_ as important. Those, and other design choices like colors, margins, and line height, are much more of a factor for me. I use Readability, which takes a page you’re reading and reflows it by using rational (ahem) choices in layout, color, and type. I find I need to use Readability way more as a result of crappy layout (e.g., no margins) or unreadable colors (I’m old, so I can’t read white-on-black very well) than as a result of what typeface the page designer has selected.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I don’t really have any expertise, just opinions. 🙂

I’m a bit of a night owl so can stay up real late, but there is a catch…

even though I’m up, I dont really get much done. Most of the time is spent reading my RSS feeds or reading business books.

I’ve started to go to bed earlier and do some running before my day starts. This really seems to help and… helps me sleep better in the evening 😉

Eight hours is just about perfect although my body clock sometimes wakes me up after 7.5. I try to go to bed at the same time – my body clock is quite forceful! My eyes start to droop around 9.45pm – I can’t do much about it! I usually manage up to another 30 minutes of wake time, then I’m in dreamland, until 6.15am 🙂

I completely agree that writers must also be active readers. It seems that, outside of the writing, revision, and feedback process, reading is the best way to improve my work. Three authors I like are Jhumpa Lahiri, Malcolm Gladwell, and Alice Walker. But honestly, there are too many to list! Groundswell is on my list, though.

Thanks for posting this!

Saying that, there is a section in Duma Key where he describes the accident where the central character gets maimed. It's incredible. You're in the truck as he gets slowly crushed; it’s an incredible passage not in a gory way but the way he captures the terror & helplessness of the man but then it wanders for 200 pages…

The Shining is also worth reading. It’s not a horror book as most people think rather the portrait of a man at a crossroads and how he struggles to make things work, only to see them disintegrate.

As the saying goes, “the road to hell is full of people with good intentions.”