Making a book more readable - improving the user experience
Chapter content of ‘How Fit Is Your Face’.
I remember as a child, choosing books from the library based on how they looked. Not only the cover design, but the interior layout, too. I wanted to see how readable the book would be. I’d take a book down from the shelf and flick through the pages. As my reading age got higher, the fonts got smaller, the illustrations got fewer, and I read less and less. I realise now, I was looking for the perfect combination of paper colour, font style, print size and layout to find a book that was readable enough to tempt me.
Accessibility of information continues to fascinate me, and as I found out as a kid, visual appearances can be the first barrier to gaining more knowledge. I eventually found out what was driving my childhood book choices: In my twenties, I was assessed as Dyslexic, despite being a professional writer. I then started learning about different learning styles and related needs. Therefore, when I published my first book, it was important to design it to be as accessible to as many potential readers as possible. From a background of Product Design, I designed my book to be literally, easy on the eye.
To achieve this, I chose to print on cream paper rather than white, to avoid the glare experienced by people with a visual processing issue, common with dyslexics and other learning differences. Reading black print on white paper can be like having a torch shined in your eyes as you try to read. At best uncomfortable, at worst actually painful. Printing non-fiction on cream paper breaks the publishing norm and has cost me about an extra penny per printed book. I think this is money well spent.
I followed the guide from the British Dyslexia Association (BDA), which advises that sans-serif fonts (the ones without the little kicks) improve readability. So I chose the sans-serif font, Century Gothic. The BDA also advises to avoid the common forced-justify layout. You know the one, which neatly butts the beginning of the first word to the left hand margin, and the last letter of the last word to the right hand margin. It looks very neat and orderly, but it achieves this layout by increasing the spacing between the words, to stretch the sentence to fit the space. For some people, these larger spaces can be more dominant than the text, and create the illusion of trickling rivers of white, running downwards through paragraphs. This produces an enchanting effect, great for daydreaming, but not conducive to concentrating on the meaning of the text.
So my book is laid out with left-justified text and so doesn’t have those crisp wide margins down the right-hand side, making it look a little different to normal. Using off-white paper also helps keep these rivers at bay, which is what coloured overlays, used by some children in schools, are trying to achieve. I also used slightly wider spacing between lines, as recommended. Wider line spacing assists your eyes to track across one line, return to the left-hand side of the page, and accurately track across the next line. You may take this for granted, but for some readers, when they return to the start of the next line, they inadvertently jump up a line or jump down a line due to weak eye-tracking muscles. This causes a lot of re-reading and makes it incredibly hard to understand and absorb what is being read. Coincidentally, it is easy to strengthen weak eye-tracking muscles with specific exercises, but this is still a relatively unidentified problem.
Regardless of my target audience’s reading abilities, there are additional comprehension needs: My book is aimed at people struggling with the stress of day-to-day living, who are stuck, but seeking a way forward. These people are likely to be feeling exhausted, stressed out, overwhelmed. These feelings create added challenges of impaired concentration levels, difficulty making decisions and quitting easily.
Given the complexity of my audience, the user experience of my book, as well as the information within it, was always going to be key. I therefore wrote ‘How To Love and Be Loved’ with a friendly, chatty, storytelling style and interspersed with small, interactive exercises to keep the reader engaged, and to break the process of loving and being loved, into manageable steps. Hence the subtitle ‘Tiny steps to connecting with love and life’.
However, having read plenty of books and articles on various aspects of wellbeing, mental health and psychology, my mind had got stuck in the norm of the self-help/ personal development genre, of words on pages. My book had become the average of the five books it hung out most with. I’d become a bit of average grown up and had lost touch with that free-spirited kid in the library.
It took a friend to point out that I should be using the copious supply of drawing I have to illustrate my book. And I have to credit Charlie Macksey, for elevating the value in my mind of ink drawings, and my friend for seeing value in my own. So I planned in an illustration for every chapter. These would encourage a natural break and slow down the pace of the book to prevent the reader from becoming overwhelmed and quitting. The illustrations would also act as placeholders, so a reader without the best concentration would be able to remember where they’d read up to, and what they’d read about, based on the drawing last seen.
The illustrations give the reader permission to stop reading, and actually they encourage a break. Suggested stopping places, like service stations on the motorway, facilitate the journey being broken down into manageable chunks. Reading information in small bursts enables the new information to be reviewed, reconciled with prior knowledge, then absorbed, creating a new level to move on from. This gentle pacing would prevent overwhelm. Additionally, the discovery of a thing of beauty would create a moment of meditation, a focus to muse on. A soothing of the mind.
As I began printing out book mock-ups with the illustrations, I came to realise how powerful the role of the illustrations was. So instead of stopping at pictures for the eight chapter headings, I started illustrating the sub-headings too. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Once I got a layout artist involved to see what they could add to the appearances of my interactive exercises, I suddenly realised the balance was all wrong. My childhood self whispered in my ear, ‘why are there so many words, Mikyla? Why aren’t there more pictures?’
It suddenly seemed obvious that, as I think in pictures, which then as a writer I transform into printed words on a page, the original thought-pictures should also be transformed into printed illustrations. So, with that encouragement, the ink was duly dipped and scrawled until a pile of over 100 drawings existed. As the designer dropped these into the book, they so improved the readability, that any page without drawings now looked a poor relation and I was off again, getting inky. The book is now finished and if I do say so myself, I have made a beautiful, very readable book.
Mikyla is open for work as a Writer of articles, blogs, speeches. She has extensive experience of people, training, social enterprise, community involvement, regeneration, community education, special educational needs.
‘How To Love and Be Loved’ by Mikyla Limpkin is available from bookshops and online retailers.
The British Dyslexia Association Style Guide can be found at:
https://cdn.bdadyslexia.org.uk/uploads/documents/BDA-Style-Guide-2022.pdf?v=1666017053