In this article, I’d like to reacquaint you with the humble workhorse of communication that is the paragraph. Paragraphs are everywhere. In fact, at the high risk of stating the obvious, you are reading one now. Despite their ubiquity, we frequently neglect their presentation. This is a mistake. Here, we’ll refer to some time-honored typesetting conventions, with an emphasis on readability, and offer guidance on adapting them effectively for devices and screens. We’ll see that the ability to embed fonts with @font-face is not by itself a solution to all of our typographic challenges.

A Web Of Words

In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee circulated a document titled “HTML Tags,” which outlined just 20 tags, many of which are now obsolete or have taken other forms. The first surviving tag to be defined in the document, after the crucial anchor tag, is the paragraph tag. It wasn’t until 1993 that a discussion emerged on the proposed image tag.

Bursting with imagery, motion, interaction and distraction though it is, today’s World Wide Web is still primarily a conduit for textual information.

What Is Perfect Paragraph ?

As designers, we are frequently and incorrectly reminded that our job is to “make things pretty.” We are indeed designers — not artists — and there is no place for formalism in good design. Web design has a function, and that function is to communicate the message for which the Web page was conceived. The medium is not the message.

Never is this principle more pertinent than when dealing with type, the bread and butter of Web-borne communication. A well-set paragraph of text is not supposed to wow the reader; the wowing should be left to the idea or observation for which the paragraph is a vehicle. In fact, the perfect paragraph is unassuming to the point of near invisibility. That is not to say that the appearance of your text should have no appeal at all. On the contrary: well-balanced, comfortably read typography is a thing of beauty; it’s just not the arresting sort of beauty that might distract you from reading.

As designers, we are frequently and incorrectly reminded that our job is to “make things pretty.” We are indeed designers — not artists — and there is no place for formalism in good design. Web design has a function, and that function is to communicate the message for which the Web page was conceived. The medium is not the message.

As designers, we are frequently and incorrectly reminded that our job is to “make things pretty.” We are indeed designers — not artists — and there is no place for formalism in good design.