Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130201045831/@comment-188432-20130207181521

SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: Right. Okay. I always thought that pictures were preferable no matter what. This is a common mistake, leading to pages being jam-packed with pictures. It's important that our pages, at least in the Wikia skin, obey certain basic rules of layout and design. One of the biggest is that of using pictures to break up text and to move the eye downward, compelling readers to scroll down the page. If you have two graphical elements on parallel to each other, that effectively stops momentum and registers in most people's eyes as "weird".

A good rule of thumb, therefore, is that if the page displays entirely on most desktop browser screens set to the width of 80% of a monitor at standard resolution — that is, roughly 900px wide — you probably only need one graphical element in the body of the text. You can take two only when the body of the text below the bottom of the first graphical element for more than 150% of the height of that first graphical element.

So let's say that the graphical element is 200 px high. You can only add a second graphical element if you've got 300 px of text below the bottom margin of the first graphical element, when your browser is set to at least 900px wide.