Jeremey Keith:
I’m genuinely curious to hear the design justification for pull quotes on the web (particularly on mobile), because as a reader, I can give plenty of reasons for their removal.
I mentioned this on Twitter, but pull quotes don’t serve readers, they serve skimmers. What I mean by this is that it is all too common to come to an article and scroll through it before reading — to look at images, to see if the story looks interesting, if it is long. Pull quotes, do two things to help convince a skimmer to read the article:
- They break up the monotony of the text so that things don’t look as dull or long as they otherwise would.
- They try to hook a skimmer with some interesting sentence they might want to know more about.
Either way: I hate them. I have a method to do them on this site, but each time I have done them I shake my head and try to remember to never do them again.