This document aims to furnish the reader with practical advice on how to make written information more effective and understandable through typography. It is primarily geared towards Product Managers and other knowledge workers who frequently produce and review written documents.
In many modern workplaces, information and knowledge is the primary capital, but this information is only as good as our ability to communicate it effectively. Especially when working across distributed offices, time zones, and teams, much of this communication happens in writing: be it documents, presentations, spreadsheets, messages, emails, or posts. A handful of the tools we use for these communications give us tools to format our writing, but to the uninitiated, these formatting options can worsen the effectiveness of our communication.
This guide is broken into two main sections:
Feel free to skip to the second section for the most practical and ready-to-use advice, but the first section is helpful for understanding why certain pieces of advice are worth following.
Typography is principally about balancing several properties at once:
All of these properties interact with each other to ultimately determine how readable a page of text is. Your job as an author of a document is to optimise these properties to make your work as easy to read as possible.
One of the first things that people tend to do in word processors when given the opportunity is change the typeface—or font1—of the document; but the selection process is often relatively random, scrolling through a list of options until you see something appealing.
This often results in authors thinking too much about their choice of font, and not enough about the content of their writing. The same is also true for readers. A poorly-chosen typeface can hurt the readability, or even the credibility, of a document. One notable example occurred in 2012, when CERN presented their discovery of the Higgs boson: there might have been more headlines about their choice of font than the finding itself2.
There are a few things to look for in a “good” typeface for long-form or content-heavy documents:
Based on the above criteria, here are a few recommended typefaces available in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides:
Some of these typefaces are not displayed in Google Docs by default, and can be added by opening the font picker, choosing “More Fonts”, and searching for them in the window that appears.
As mentioned above, font size is just one of a handful of intertwined properties that impact the readability of a document, but it’s a good place to start. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to avoid setting a font size lower than 12pt.
I recommend starting with a font size of 14–16pt and adjusting the size according to the chosen typeface and line length, which is discussed below.
Line length (or “measure”) controls the amount of text that shows on a single line before wrapping to the next line. You want your line length to be long enough to prevent the reader’s eyes having to jump around too frequently, but not so long that readers lose track of which line they are reading.
Generally speaking, your line length should be set so that you can fit 1.5–3 alphabets—or more realistically, about 60–70 characters—per line.
In apps such as Google Docs, you might not adjust the line length manually, but instead your choice of font and font size will have an influence.
The line height (or “leading”3) controls the spacing between lines of text. You want to aim for a line height large enough to give each line room for easy reading, but not so large that the reader’s eye has to travel long distances between lines.
Generally speaking, aiming for a line height between 1.3–1.6 times the font size is a good rule of thumb. However, line height should also be kept somewhat proportional to line length: as line lengths increase, so too should line height.
The more words you write, the more potential there is that your ideas are diluted. Try to keep your documents and presentations short, to-the-point, and unambiguously clear.
Since so many of us work on landscape-oriented screens, in landscape-oriented web browsers, it can be tempting to produce documents matching this format, particularly in the interest of fitting more text on a page.
However, landscape-oriented documents are poorly suited for communicating information, particularly in apps like Google Docs, for two reasons:
You should avoid creating landscape-oriented documents. Where you need to insert landscape-oriented elements, such as tables, consider linking to external documents or presenting information in vertical lists instead.
Particularly with Google Sheets’ flexible formatting options for spreadsheets, it’s not uncommon for people to fill spreadsheets with non-tabular data, such as paragraphs of text. This kind of information is better suited for documents rather than spreadsheets. Reserve using spreadsheets for data that is numeric, comparable, and terse.
The typographic basics outlined in part one of this guide also apply for presentations. Consequently, setting a short line length will naturally mean presentation slides end up with large font sizes, meaning less information fits onto a single slide. This is normal.
Slide presentations are most effective when each slide communicates only 1–3 key ideas. If you present a slide full of text, people will try to read it instead of listening to what you’re saying, meaning you have two problems: people can’t listen to you while they’re reading, and they can’t read while they’re listening to you. No one will remember what you said or wrote.
New slides are cheap: the attention of your audience is not. Prefer creating a sequence of slides that communicates complex information rather than trying to fit all relevant content onto a single slide.
Strictly speaking, what most people mean when they say “font” is “typeface”. A font is a specific style of a typeface: for example, Arial is a typeface, and Arial Bold Italic is a font. Throughout this guide, the terms may be used interchangeably. ↩︎
While Comic Sans might seem like an unusual choice for a groundbreaking scientific announcement, there is some research that suggests that Comic Sans’ design actually lends itself to enhanced legibility, especially for dyslexic learners ↩︎
The term “leading” is a relic from when printing and typesetting was done using “movable type”—pieces of lead metal moulded into letterforms. Thin strips of lead were placed between lines of text to adjust the spacing between lines. ↩︎