Question, response, and information text is the basis of any interview so it is important that it is easy to read and understand. You will also want to make the interview page look interesting so that respondents are encouraged to continue with the interview. This might be particularly important in surveys aimed at children or teenagers, who may be less inclined to persevere with a survey whose pages look dull and lifeless.

One way of making pages look interesting is to use color: see Colors. Not only can this brighten an otherwise dull looking page, it also enables you to emphasize key words or phrases, or to introduce a company branding concept by using the same color scheme as on your company’s web site or in printed literature. When choosing colors it is worthwhile bearing in mind that “less is more”. Use color sparingly and choose colors that work well together. Also bear in mind that certain colors or color combinations may not suit some people: pale blue text on a white background, for instance, is not always easy to read.

Font changes are another way of highlighting different types of text or applying company standards to your surveys. They also allow you to cater for the needs of your prospective audience, perhaps increasing the text size for surveys aimed at older people or people with sight problems.

There are three sorts of changes you can make with regard to fonts:

You can specify color and font changes in the metadata section or in the routing section. In the metadata section you use labelstyle keywords to specify all the characteristics for text that is defined in the script. You can set any number of color and font characteristics for a single text in one labelstyle specification.

In the routing section anything to do with text defined in the script is controlled by the Label object and anything to do with appearance is controlled by the Style object. Therefore, any statements you write to do with the appearance of text defined in the script will include the notation Label.Style. You will need to write a separate statement for each characteristic you want to set.

You can also specify color and font display characteristics for the answers to numeric, text, and date questions, and to texts entered in Other boxes. However, although the properties and values that you use for this are the same as for text, the interview scripting language treats these “texts” as part of the response section of the question. Consequently, the keywords and objects that you use in specifications are different. You define these characteristics in the metadata section using the style keyword, and in the routing section using the Style object that is a child of the individual question object (Age.Style, where Age is the question name, for example). For more information, see Colors for categorical response lists and Display settings for respondents' answers.