Designing for slow reading
Line length, spacing, quiet and small signposts: how to design pages people read from the first word to the last.
Tomás Reyes
4 min read
Most of the web is designed to be scanned. Headlines are short, paragraphs are shorter and everything is built to hold your attention for a few seconds before you move on. But some writing deserves more than a few seconds. This essay is about designing for slow reading: the long, focused kind, where you forget you are looking at a screen at all.
Why slow reading matters
When we redesigned the Oxide Books website, we noticed something surprising. The pages with the longest extracts, some over three thousand words, kept readers on the page for twenty minutes or more. Readers were not scanning. They were reading, properly, from the first word to the last.
That made us wonder how many websites are designed for readers like these, and the honest answer is: very few. Most reading on screens happens despite the design, not because of it.
The goal of good reading design is to disappear. The moment a reader notices the design, they have stopped reading.
Tomás Reyes
