Bold, Italic, Underline, Font Family, Colours, and more. Formatting is a critical and integral part of every Creation. In this Creation, I will be going through why formatting is used, how it works, and the number 1 mistake you make.
First of all, formatting is a very subjective topic, every person has a different "taste" and "style". What I write here is not backed by any industry standard or research; it's my own interpretation of what I feel is the best. You may disagree with it.
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Welcome to Becoming Creator, a weekly series by me, Aditya Agarwal, co-founder at Milyin. Here I share my views, suggestions, recommendations, and tips on how to grow and succeed as a Creator.
What is Formatting?
Historically, formatting and punctuation were built to better communicate the tone and expression in written form. Today, formatting is critical to capture the audience's attention and further make them keep scrolling.
What does formatting include? Well, bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, subscript, superscript, colour, font family, font size, and more. Anything that changes the visual appearance of the content, without changing the actual content, should be considered formatting.
How Formatting Works?
Well, formatting is simple: you create the text you want to publish, and then select it using your mouse, keyboard, touchscreen, or any other preferred input. Thereafter, you simply press the buttons like Bold or Italic or whatever you prefer to make it work.
The No. 1 mistake in Formatting?
Now comes what you have been waiting for - the number 1 mistake in Formatting that most Creators do....
Drumroll please, drumroll!
The mistake is over-formatting. Using too much formatting can do more harm than good. Let's take an example, see the image below:
Glance over the 2 images above. What words did you notice in the images? I bet you noticed the bolded word on the left side, and regular word on the right side. Why is that?
Human eyes are very good at noticing abnormalities and giving them extra attention. We use formatting tools to create such abnormalities to attract the user's attention to certain words. When you bold everything, human brain sees all of it as "normal", therefore formatting every word is the same as formatting no word at all.
That's why when we saw the right image, since everything was bold apart from one specific word, that "normal" word, became the abnormality, and caught the user's attention.
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We must take it into consideration.
So, what did we learnt? Overformatting could be the same as formatting nothing at all, because the human eye is only looking for abnormality.
Too Many Abnormalities
When I tell Creators about this, they often try to rework their Creations. Quite natural, and I appreciate the efforts. In fact, at the Creator Summit, I also pointed this out to 2-3 Creators.
But, what ends up happening is something totally wrong. They start creating too many abnormalities.
Take this image now. Glance it again.
What word did you notice? Which word grabbed your attention?
Quite hard to say. Most of you would have noticed bold words from line 1 or 2. But it's not obvious where the Creator is seeking the user's attention.
Too many abnormalities make things confusing for the users. The human eye notices all these abnormalities and is usually unable to decide where to give attention. Usually, this would mean that most of the formatted words will not get noticed by the audience.
So, what have we learnt? Let me give you a quick TL;DR
We use formatting to seek the user's attention. Formatting is any abnormality that attracts the human eye; over-formatting can leave nothing abnormal, resulting in the user not giving proper attention. Too many abnormalities can make things confusing. The formatting should be natural to ensure that the user doesn't get overwhelmed by the excess formatting on the Creations.
This begs the question - How to format Creations to keep things balanced?
Good question. I'll answer it below
My Recipe For Perfect Formatting
Again, this is my recipe, not an industry standard or a guideline. I am sharing what I do for perfect formatting.
My rule: Use formatting 1-2 times in every 100 words, in each instance format not more than 5 words.
Basically, I can format 2 sets of words in the content with not more than 5 words.
Conclusion
Hope this series has been useful for you. Feel free to reach out and connect with us, in Comment section.
See you next week, again on Monday at 5pm.
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