Inside ProPublica’s Article Layout Framework — ProPublica

[rcjordan]

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-propublicas-article-layout-framework#1250914

[ergophobe]

A little less sophisticated, but I built a site for a client last year where on large screens, we optimized line length for readability, but we let images bleed out past the text column so they could have both good readability and high visual impact.

At smaller sizes, obviously, the image shrinks to screen size and, ultimately, the same width as the column.

It wasn't my design idea - client request. I simply refined and implemented the idea and overall, I thought it worked very well. I'm not privy to all their analytics and such, so I don't know how the response has been from readers. I'd be curious to see what Pro Publica found in terms of, above all, scroll depth. Did improving both visual impact and readability result in people actually reading more?