These days, screens come in many, many varying sizes. From tablets, to T.Vs, to smartphones; a webpage is viewable on so many different sized screens it is almost impossible to accommodate for all of them. Kress (2004) states that this is an issue all publishers must face, as we design for an increasingly screen-dominated world. In this post I will give three tips to publishing for mobile devices.
1. Materiality.
Kress states you must pay attention to the physicality of the medium on which you are publishing. This means that when designing your document, keep in mind that mobile is a smaller screen than a laptop or desktop computer. Text that may seem like a small amount on a desktop can bunch up and be off putting on a mobile device. On mobile, try to have many visuals, which are scroll-friendly to reduce onscreen text.
2. Screen Shape
Mobile devices are usually rectangular. Their shape means that they do not show wide images well. Try including a rotate feature on your website, to change the orientation of the screen as mobiles can be tilted. If you don't like this option, just avoid using wide images, or crop them so that only the most important part is on-screen.
3. Share Your Product
Mobiles have access to apps, and some apps are used for social media. Remember this if you want to get your document out there. Putting a share button on your site that allows readers to send the site to their friend with ease over Facebook is a great way to get publicity. If you make it as easy as you can for the reader, then they are more likely to share your page.
Reference
Kress, G 2004 'Reading images: Multimodality, representation and new media', Information Design Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 110-119.
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