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Design Web Typography Laying Out Type for the Web Responsive Typography

40-50 words?

Hi. When talking about multi-column layouts, you say that a good measure would be 40-50 words per column.

I take it you mean 40-50 characters?

4 Answers

Hani Shawa
Hani Shawa
10,008 Points

Hi Pedro,

Yes, it's meant to be 40-50 characters.

The guideline measure for single columns was 45-75 characters. The guideline measure for multi-column or single-columns on smaller devices was 40-50 characters.

Hi Pedro! Columns in web design are meant to hold significant blocks of text, so yes I do believe it is correct in saying 40-50 words. After all a tweet is only 140 characters, so 40-50 wouldn't be that much text.

Hi Joshua

If you actually count 50 words, you'll find that you'll have trouble fitting them into a one-column layout in most screen resolutions, let alone in a multi-column layout....

This "question" isn't really a question (it's obvious that he meant "characters", which is even confirmed by the quiz, as I saw after I had posted this), is more of a comment to the teacher of the course. After all, we wouldn't want them to think that they can get away with mistakes, would we? ;)

Michael Pashkov
Michael Pashkov
22,024 Points

This question emerged from

6:23 responsive typography by keeping a measure of 40 to 50 words per column.

and it could be misleading