After some dialogue on a recent submission made by another artist, I felt it a good idea to share some tips on readability. I'm a Graphic Design major, and my professor's tell me that Typography seems to be my strong suit. These tips can help you in stories or pieces with writing on them.

Firstly, let's start with your typeface. try to avoid unusual or script typefaces that have abnormal letterforms, as that alone can be difficult enough to read. Aim for a typeface with a normal X-height (the height of most lower case letters) as high X-height typefaces can confuse with the capitals and reduce readability. The same goes for small-caps typefaces. Generally speaking typefaces that have both Upper case and normal lower case letters are the easiest to read. Some good typefaces to use are Times new Roman, Georgia, Helvetica, Courier, and other such typefaces. Do not use Justified type, as it can create rivers and runs in your body type that's visually distracting and lowers reading comprehension. Flush Left is probably the best justification for you. Normal body copy is somewhere between 9 to 12 points in size, but on the internet where screen resolutions can vary, it's safer to go a little higher than that. If you can't find a way to make everything you want to say fit in that point size, try to find a way to compress your point into fewer words, or cut out unnecessary extra. for example. "It seemed that he may have been messing around with the wrong part of the machine." could be compressed into "He may have meddled with the wrong machine part."without losing your point.

Many people put type on images, particularly character sheets. If you must put the type over top of something, try to make it as faded as possible, close to white, no bright vibrant colors, no images or full opacity logos beneath the words, as they can distract from the text. If you must have a logo, set it to low opacity, I'd say no more than 20%. Color gradients are a bad idea because then you have varying contrasts with your text, having it range from readable to completely unreadable. The same goes for your body text: try to keep it a solid flat color, and avoid colors that are shared in your background. if you're background is shades of white and light gray, go black. if your background is a darker color, go white. Just as you should avoid having a busy background, resist the impulse to apply photoshop filters to your type. drop shadow, outer and inner glow, bevel, emboss, gradient, etc only make the type more difficult to read, especially overtop of an already busy background. While those filters when used intelligently can work really well for logotype, it's never good for body text.

Finally, and ironically the most overlooked method of improving readability, is simply to proof read it before submitting it. Many people don't proof read their work before submission, and because of that misspelled words and grammatical errors can appear, confusing the reader and further reducing readability. It doesn't take that long to proof read, especially since so many programs come with proofreading software built in. If after proofreading it yourself, or running it through a proofreading program you aren't confident that all the errors have been caught, always feel free to show it to a friend or family member and ask them to proof read it as well. They may find something that you missed.

Keep these tips in mind and you'll find your writing to be easier to understand, and more widely enjoyed by others.