Crafting Reader-Friendly (and Beautiful!) Text
Making a comfortable, easily read text that is pleasant to look at is much like developing reliable pastry dough. The amount of water, flour, egg, and milk and the working temperature all need to work together or the dough will be too tough, too flaky, and so on. Similarly, a good text setting is one in which a constellation of variables achieves a harmonic balance.
Text that is legible in size, encourages sequential reading, shows decisive (and consistent) rags and spacing, clearly separates paragraphs, and exhibits a minimum of hyphens, widows, and orphans—this often becomes the foundation of a strong layout.
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