I decided to depress myself today by looking at a lot of the products up for Ennies consideration. The task combines the incredible insecurity of creative work with the mind's tendency to imagine products as being better than they are, based on marketing blurbs and cover art. One thing I did notice is how much more text is put into each page than I typically use.
My design philosophy is to use 12pt font in two columns, in landscape for screen viewing. I design in layout, not in a word processor, and I feel like this forces me to push hard for brevity because I will tell myself, "ok, this description need to fit in this spot". That makes a big difference, I think.
From my perspective, it is a challenge to get people to read text even at the density I use. How you could read something with a much higher density is beyond me. Now I do have a much more rules-light perspective than a lot of these competitors and that probably doesn't help either. But one of the big criticisms of Synapse was that the game was too dense with content for someone to flip through and make a decision about whether to invest in reading it or not. I just look at all these other games and they look much more dense to me.
Is that my perception? Or am I not putting enough content on the page to satisfy the reader?
Which textual density level do you think is preferred?