Small is beautiful

Nowadays, Small is beautiful. The smaller and sleeker a gadget is, the more attractive it is. And the exercise we give our eyes in reading the small letter font in these gadgets, nutrition contents on a food can and the umpteen numbers of documents with fine prints, why sometimes I feel if we are really reading or trying to make sense of some cryptic scribbles?

One should walk in an IT department of any firm to see kind of fonts people struggle to read. Configuring a screen on tiny fonts not only gives room for more content to be displayed but also gives us some privacy in reading stuff which we do not want colleagues to glance at.

I used to have a colleague few years back, whose screen was configured in bright green background, yellow foreground and the tiniest fonts I have ever seen. I would struggle to read even if I was just a few inches away from the computer screen. I have seen people who, to save paper and not to read a bulkier document, end up printing the whole document in a font which is close to ant's scribble. But having said all these, I think I should be the one who should take the cake for the ability to read a practically blank document.

When I was in college in India, apart from the curriculum books, we had print outs of the notes of maybe the first student who attended the college. The notes were photo copied so many times that the letters were faded into white. But I could still read all the contents, understand the matter and give exams. With all the training I have given to my eyes, I should be the last one to crib about small fonts.