: How can I display text results/posts/sections in a user-friendly and intuitive way? I've been exploring design trends that use various ways to lay out text data (i.e. an Email app, Search Results,

@Rivera951

This has its basis in some kind illustration. What I mean is illustration, as not the same thing as design. It could also include purely text based solutions but with a visual sorting based on illustrative principles. Tag-clouds would be an example. To quote the tag here at GD (confess, I wrote it myself):


Illustration is about communicating a specific contextualised message
to an audience. It is rooted in an objective need to fulfil a
particular task. It is often confused with other disciplines most
notably that of graphic design and fine art, perhaps because there is
sometimes an overlap. Illustrators need to have knowledge,
understanding and insight regarding the context within which they
are working, the subject matter, and work within the parameters and
needs of the target audience.


Going outside the classic list and grid, what you are looking at, is ways to browse information and data (note that information and data are two different things.).

Illustrations in its widest sense means the use of visual tools to enhance a message, a piece of communication, complex and massive amounts of data and relationships; and ways of browsing information. Maybe also exploring new connections and relationships between entities. It does not mean "pretty colours" or arty solutions.

Examples of (possibly) helpful, interesting sorting of information that might enhance understanding and curiosity:


Visuwords -
graphical dictionary adding relationships and connections
Gapminder - Hans Roslings
beautiful statistics
Newsmap - highly interactive news,
coded, weighted


Maps, scatters charts, bar charts, columns, geographic metaphors, tag-clouds, treemaps, gauges, bubbles, timelines, drawings, time-space visuals are all examples of visualising. You point out Jquery Masonry, which is an example that is sometimes useful and easily understood. All of these can contain text, and some can contain large amounts with ease. The Stack Exchange itself, with the explore our sites is basically a text-based, weighted browser (with "weighted" I mean variation of size, colour or such that indicates "mass", size, popularity etc.).

Having said that, you will find annoying misuse of visuals that adds nothing to and does not aid the content. There is a reason for the fact that most online newspapers sort of look like paper-newspapers.

For basic information retrieval, there are (very basically) three ways of looking at it:


"Need to know": The guiding, step-by-step information dissemination.
A highly controlled hierarchy of information, basis in presumptions
of what the user wants and needs. In a way, you could say newspapers
do this; with headings, ingress, and main text, and books with
subsequent pages.
The "phonebook". You know what you are looking for, and are very
spesific. Words, sorting by time, place, etc.
Exploration of information, data and content. Some level of
happenstance; the user will dilly-dally around, exploring and
following unexpected paths. Very hard to create, often satisfying to
play with, and always with a more hierarchical alternative.


It is sometimes a question of teaching the audience a new way of seeing. I am all for it, as long as it adds value. This of course gets you into the minefield of information architecture... and that is a massive discipline in itself.

Further reading:
Edward Tufte

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