Line Length & Comfortable Reading

Eye strain tends to be common in blue light reading sessions, yet something I have not considered until recently is the importance of line length. Referring to the number of characters per line read, exceeding 70 characters per line can lead to eye strain and, in extreme cases, cause the reader to skip a page. Creating a comfortable reading experience is pivotal, especially in books and magazines, where the consumption of words is the driving force. I have noticed this strain throughout my own book consumption, where large books with smaller, stockier texts on a page sound great at first, reading more with each page... yet your eyes start to lose themselves after a while.

As shown above, observe how much easier the text is to read on the top than on the bottom, where it is a chore to get through and takes the eyes longer to scan across.

Typography is very much about the mundane, as I explore it further, where even the simplest of changes result in the alteration of the experience you are trying to give the viewer, and are centered on completely one aspect: text.

And the ways in which we use this text prove to be pivotal in line length, as the use of slim line length is seen throughout poetry, tracing back to ancient times, and may as well be the reason why poetry is easier to read, the condensed line length leading to a more pleasant immersion into the text. This manner of how our eyes scan the page can be seen as rhythm, often brought up in poetry spaces as the way in which we read the text out loud, creating its own tune of sorts.