I recently published my first Behind The Scenes article focusing on Obscuring Screenshots for Medium Articles. Its primary objective is how to hide sensitive information, which gives pointers in how to change the text on a web page before taking that screen grab. This is great for security, but what about improving the focus of your readers? Sometimes there is a lot of information to display, and a reader may not always have context on what to look at.

Your audience will understand better if you help them focus

The best part about this is, it doesn’t require any photo editing software like photoshop; all you need is your Chrome browser.

Focusing On What To Focus Out

To get started, let’s launch the Developer Tools menu within Chrome. For a handy shortcut, you can use Cmd+Option + i on macOS to launch it as well.

Once the panel is open, bring your attention to the top left of the developer panel, and you’re going to look for this icon:

This Icon is used to select elements of the webpage. Just like you build a house one step at a time, web browsers render a web page one element at a time. This tool allows you to focus in on a specific element, such as an image, text or the whole page.

Once we know which element to change, we are going to click on the Styles tab of the inspector. This tab allows you to see the CSS of the element, which are the instructions on how it should be displayed. What we are going to do next is add two new style attributes.

Once we paste in these attributes, hit [Enter] and you’ll notice the text matching the element we selected change to a blurry/faded white.

Once you close the Developer Tools, you’ll finally be able to see your newly rendered and blurred webpage. As an example, if I was writing a tutorial focusing on the instance name and pricing fields, I may want to use a screenshot like the one below.

Conclusion

You can read up on the text-shadow attribute specifically at W3 Schools. Feel free to change this around to change the color, or increase the blur radius. Your readers will thank you, and your article content will be much easier to understand.

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