Screen Design Basics

  1. The three fundamental principles of screen design are layout, typography, and color.

  2. The still-valid wisdom of the ancients makes the rule of three or the ruler of four probably the best foundation for a good design.

  3. The lack of kerning and a limited number of pixels make sans serif fonts usually the best bet for screen reading.

  4. Responsive design enables one to design variant displays for different media – desktop, ipad, cell phone – by using cascading sets of rules for different screen widths. 5. Bonus thing: the chromatically challenged can get help from a few websites that indicate what the best complementary shades to one’s selected tone will be.

Bob Scott

Author: Bob Scott

Now Columbia’s Digital Humanities Librarian and formerly Head of the its Electronic Text Service, I am excited by the potential of a new wave of tools and techniques for finally realizing the promise of the digital format for humanities scholarship. My own academic interests lie in the history and culture of Eastern Europe, particularly in the Middle Ages, but I look forward to applying my desire for better tools to share and analyze historical sources in that field to the more immediate focus of the history of Morningside Heights. For the Morningside project, I bringing together sources illustrating the history of the Bloomingdale Asylum, which occupied the land that is now the main campus of Columbia from 1821 to 1894.