Don’t worry, you don’t have to like poetry. You don’t even have to know who or what Carol Ann Duffy or a poet laureate is. This is about valuing content in the way that you present it on your web site so that your readers will value it too.
Here’s what happened. Carol Ann Duffy is a talented British poet. She wrote a topical and smart little verse about David Beckham being ruled out of the World Cup because of an Achilles’ injury. The Mirror, one of the UK’s tabloid newspapers, published it exclusively on its web site last week.
And that’s where it went Goldenballs up:
Can you even see where it begins and ends at first glance? The problems with this layout are:
- The title is not distinct enough. It is the same font size as the rest of the copy, and the italics make it look less, rather than more important than other elements.
- The body font for the poem is not distinctive either.
- The layout does not frame the verse in any way, with white space or indentation for example.
- There’s a BLOODY GREAT BIG ANIMATED ADVERT right in the middle of it, breaking up a line.
- There is a typo in the line afterward, ‘aspecial’, as well as a missing line break, still uncorrected 6 days after publication.
If you want people to value your content, present it in a fitting way
With poetry, these transgressions are magnified, because poetry is language arranged in such a way that it invites you to take a closer look: to enjoy, to be moved, to think. The frame is vital – from the title, the line and verse breaks through to the layout and choice of fonts and paper if the poem is published in print.
Shouldn’t as much care be taken online?
I’m not talking about fancy ornamentation. Just enough care to honour the material, draw attention to it and even enhance its meaning, because most poetry is written for the eye as well as the ear.
Would you be happy with a professional painting stuck on the gallery wall with no mount or frame? Or a meal at a decent restaurant slapped in a sloppy pile on paper plates?
Bad presentation says that you don’t value your content. And if you don’t value it then your customers certainly won’t.
Poetry suffers on the web
Although no other poetry site is as brazen as the stanza-splitting advert-loving Mirror, I am yet to find one that does poetry justice. Many of them put small font sizes in dense array for an overall dull effect. The Poetry Society are one example, who also use a low contrast font (being a lighter grey) that reminds me of financial small print.
Perhaps the Mirror needs a poetry style guide (because that’s going to happen). Perhaps it’s okay if they present their own copy as worthless, but for goodness’ sake when they’ve got the poet laureate submitting an exclusive verse they could display it in such a way to make readers take it seriously – or even read it in the first place.
The best example I’ve seen for laying out poetry online is Verbatim Poetry. I would say that, because I did it. It’s not perfect, but even as a fun little hobby on the side it puts whoever was paid to publish the David Beckham poem in The Mirror to shame.
How poems are laid out on Verbatim Poetry
What do you reckon?
Don’t know if you’ve seen this article – http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/ about formless vs definite content.
So.. poetry is definite content by nature?
At the extremes prose poems, where there are no line breaks, would be formless, and concrete poems, where the visual layout is part of the meaning, would be definite.
Most poems are somewhere in between, working on both the ear and the page. They have some fixed elements, such as the line and stanza breaks and indentations, which should not be lost however else the typography changes.
I don’t know whether or not The Mirror has observed Duffy’s layout (I suspect not – those short second lines could use an indent) but the problem is more in using a standard article boiler plate instead of considering how that might mangle a short poem.
Even formless content has to be presented somehow.
I’d be curious to know what you think of the presentation of the poems on the Poetry Translation Centre‘s website, as my company was responsible for the design.
We wanted to give the poem as much breathing space as possible, allowing the reader to focus on the poem without being distracted by the secondary content on the page. A couple important decision we made which helped us achieve this were: choosing a serif font for the poem but setting the rest of the page content in a sans-serif; and by presenting the poem in a dark type against a white background, where the rest of the page content is light on dark backgrounds.
One of the other challenges we faced were how to design the custom CMS to allow for the administrators to format the poems appropriately, in particular dealing with indentations at the beginning of lines. Another problem was how to style the enjambments that could result from a line of poetry being longer than the column width allocated to display the poem.
While we were designing a template specifically for displaying poems on screen, it is another challenge altogether to be presenting poetry within an article template, but not an insurmountable one. I imagine though it might be some time before these newspaper websites give this the attention it deserves.
Thanks Emily – for sharing your design and the decisions behind it. The poems are clear, uncluttered, easy to read.
It’s great to read of some care being taken over poetry online. I’m sure that if newspapers cared about it enough they could custom format the odd piece or create a new template for recurring content that requires a different arrangement.
What bothers me most is the lack of planning for any content that might need a non standard presentation. Don’t they assess what kinds of content they publish and their presentation requirements before creating the templates?
Yes, when they print poems in the paper they usually do a good job, so I don’t know why they can’t do the same online. They’ve thought about how embedded adverts, videos and slideshows will sit on the webpage, why not poems too?