TEmelie – web design blog

Web page designers have many methods of attracting attention to certain events that are out of the extraordinary. In this article I’m going to introduce to you a couple of those techniques.
The first and most widely used is changing the font size of headline. Examples of this can be found on CNN.com before and after the Iraq war. They more then doubled their font size in order to present news of significant importance about the war. From a 20px font CNN jumped to 48px so I guess the change was obvious for everybody.

Before you go and try something like that on your Web page there are a couple of aspects you need to be aware of.
First of all you should think really hard before modifying the size of your font. Is the news really that important, or it’s just something that breaks the normal routine of day to day life. A 30% discount on a certain type of products is great news for some customers but others have no interest in it so I see no reason in stressing them with unbearably huge headlines.
Secondly, determine what the standard font size for your page is and then go from there. Don’t make changes that more than double the size of the font, especially if your current size is something like 8px.
Thirdly, put togheter a plan that takes into consideration the kinds of situations that require drastic changes in font size. In this way you can avoid getting ahead of yourself if something suddenly pops-up on your agenda.
Changing the font size is a great and simple way to get attention but you can also play with things like family, color and style or weight. Serif fonts, reds and making a text bold or italic are small changes that make all the difference.
Besides font modification there are other kinds of changes you can make in other to attract attention.
Images are a great tool. The aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words” is very true. Google for instance uses pictures to emphasize different holidays or special events.
Modifying your layout is a big surprise for regular customers so is sure bet in the struggle for attention. Animation is guaranteed to attract attention, especially if placed in a in area where normally you would have flat images.
As attractive as these methods may be careful not to get carried away. Making every single line on your pages red or bold or italic will defeat the original purpose of attracting attention and your customers will come to ignore you or even worse move to other pages.

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