Fine print

Fine print is a treatment rather than a kind of sentence. What makes a line fine print is how it is set and where it sits: a size or two below the body, contrast dropped toward the ground, and a position at the bottom of the block, after the thing it qualifies has already been read and believed. The content is usually the condition the headline leaves out. Three months free, and then the price. Unlimited, up to a limit. Free returns, in the country the order shipped from. None of that is dishonest by itself, and a real condition genuinely has to be stated somewhere, which is why the honest use of the phrase is simply the definition.

The Federal Trade Commission has the most useful vocabulary for arguing about it, because it had to write rules an advertiser could be held to. Its four P’s are prominence, presentation, placement and proximity: is the qualifier big enough and contrasted enough to be noticed, is it worded and formatted so it can be understood, is it somewhere the reader will actually reach, and is it near the claim it modifies. The maxim from its 2014 guidance is the shortest version of the whole subject: what the headline giveth, the footnote cannot taketh away. A qualifier that reverses the claim above it is not a qualifier, whatever size it is set at.

The failure mode is burying a material term, not stating one, and that is where the word starts touching misdirection: a decline sitting under a heading of small print reads as small print, and a cancellation clause set at nine grey pixels below the fold is a claim the design has decided not to make. The two useful moves are the boring ones. Anything that changes what a person is agreeing to travels up next to the claim and gets set at a size a reader can hold, so a form states the condition in the flow rather than leaving it as a rule buried in the small print. Anything that is genuinely reference material can stay at the foot, which is the honest job of the band at the bottom of a pancake stack. What cannot happen is the material term travelling down there to keep the offer looking clean.

Two neighbours are close enough to be worth separating. Helper text also sets a small line under something, but it is preventative: it states a format before anything has gone wrong, and it is the one line of small print near a field that is not qualifying a claim. And microcopy is the wider class of an interface’s short strings, so the edge between the two words is whether the design wants them read. Microcopy is written to be read every time and sized for it; fine print is written to be present. Set it accessibly regardless, because the qualifier is the text most likely to be pinned in place: fixed pixel type that will not survive a reader at two hundred percent zoom fails WCAG 1.4.4 whatever the legal department signed off, and a line set in an image of text is a condition a screen reader never gets to state at all. Small print at the moment of highest attention is a strange trade, which is the objection a floating label runs into from the other direction.