Blog Design Question. (about typography and so on)

I am currently trying to build a site about buddhism culture.
And in my blog I am considering including these catagories :

  1. The original literatures
  2. Other famous monk’s summary and notes
  3. Notes. My own reading notes
  4. Contact. Tell others how to contact me

Here are the different purpose of those content. Hopefully I explained myself clear enough so you guys can understand.

  1. Fairly long. Nobody is actually gonna read through the whole thing. How do I make it interestingly enough style wise to let people pleasently scan through the whole thing.
  2. This has two main function :
    a. Provides a way to collect all the notes from other famous monk. So people don’t have to google/baidu everything.
    b. Provides download link.
  3. This is the main focus of this blog, to write down my own “thoughts and notes” about buddhist scriptures/literatures and such.
  4. Simple contact QR code so people can find me and know who I am.

So my question is this, when dealing with long paragraph of text (you know nowadays most of the site try to avoid this cos most of the reader’s attention span is really short) how do I make it design wise interestingly enough , for readers just to scan through. If you are given the task of “make large paragraph of text looks enjoyable (design wise) to scan through without making it stands out too much”.

My usual approach is to increase the line-height + letter spacing of the text to make it look more enjoyable to read, but other than that, I don’t know how to make them look pleasent. I have stumble upon this site, http://www.amandabraga.com/ maybe I can make the text looks like that??

Thanks in advance.

There are two factors here:

  1. Cultural - you want your font and vibes to be “inline” with the subject
  2. Efficiency - things like how readable your text (line height and font style)

I’m really not sure that increasing letter spacing improves readability, but line height is a must. I’m not a specialist in this, but from what I’ve noticed and experienced myself I would do:

  1. Break paragraph into parts
  2. Create headings for the parts
  3. Every couple of such parts should have “break” element, like illustration, quote of divider

I find the design on the site you linked to fairly annoying, I can’t even get my self to read any of the text. I don’t see how that design is going to work for large amounts of text.

I agree with everything @snigo said.

  • A good font, good font size, and line-height.

  • Break up the text in paragraphs and sections that do not run for too long.

  • Keep the line length down, I’d say below 120 characters (the recommended line length varies a lot).

  • Try using drop caps for the start of sections to add some interest. Other graphical elements can be used to break up the text as well.

  • If the text is very long having a table of content may be appropriate, or even sticky side navigation to jump to sections may work.

  • Adding a scroll progress indicator (example) may help guide the user.

You can get creative just make sure it doesn’t lower the legibility.

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