Legibility is a requirement
Very frequently during a creative review for a new digital piece — particularly banner ads, but it can be anything — I'll point out that a certain text element is likely to be too small to read for most users. We're talking, anything that's 10 pixels (at 72 dpi) or smaller.
The art director's response is often something like:
"No one's going to read this part," or, "We don't care if people read that."
And so I always say:
"Ah, great, then let's just remove it."
Their response is, of course:
"Oh, we can't remove it; we're required to include this."
And so:
If we're required to include it, then we're also required to make it readable for everyone.
Right?
If our client's legal team and/or the FDA require us to include certain language in a piece, and we fail to make it large enough for all users to read, are we meeting our legal and ethical responsibilities?
What if we make it so small it's just unreadable pixels? The text is theoretically still there — so are we meeting our requirement?
Of course not.
What if we make the text a normal size, but it's super light gray on white, and basically invisible? The text is still there — are we meeting our requirement?
Of course not.
What if, in a banner ad, we make a required block of text stay on screen for just half a second? We're showing the text — are we meeting our requirement?
Of course not.
This is one circumstance where we have to consider the philosophy part of digital philosophy. We simply have to act in good faith, for our own sake and on behalf of our clients. We must appear to be acting ethically with the work that we do — and not just appear to act ethically; we must believe in it, we must insist on it, we must hold ourselves to that standard, always.
I may be risking sounding dramatic with all of this. I'm fine with that. The last thing we want is for our work to look like we're hiding something, or trying to get away with something. This is why most of our clients in pharma, for example, require that font size for their Important Safety Information (ISI) text is always at least as large as the font size of their main body copy. That's just one example. We should extend this thinking to everything that we do. We must show that we're acting in good faith and producing marketing materials in a way that's ethical. Our client's reputation depends on it.
Let's embrace legibility, accessibility, and ease of engagement for all of our content in all of the work we do. Not just the sexy stuff, not just the bits where we're bragging. Everything.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.