When designing your layout, think and work type first using style, size, color, and weight to create Unity and Variety. The heading or headings, lead paragraph, and any pull quotes should function as entry points with those different typographic levels offering a variety of visual flavors for your readers to feast on.
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Unity and Variety
To understand unity and variety, let’s consider a layout that has no variety and no entry points. If you arrived at a site like the example below, would you want to dig into the content?
Not only is it unadventurous, it also lacks structure. You can’t discern the title from the byline, the running text from the pull quote. There’s a lot of unity, that’s for certain, but there’s no variety and as a result, no hierarchy.
The revised example below makes some progress.
We’ve used size to create a title as a heading element. The byline and date are a minor heading . The running text follows as a paragraph element.
Breaking up the single and lengthy paragraph makes the reading experience look more welcoming.
Comparing the revised design to the initial layout, we have more structure than we did at the start with size changes creating variety.
