Measuring Label Length

Every museum style sheet has a number it swears by. The one taped above the desk on my last project read:

LABEL WORD LIMITS — rev. 4, do not argue

Object label ............... 50 words
Group caption .............. 75 words
Room panel ................ 150 words
Audio-guide stop ........... 90 seconds
Donor credit line .......... no known upper limit

Those ceilings are useful for keeping peace in project meetings, but word count on a laptop screen is only a rough proxy for what happens in a gallery.

Seventy words printed in high-contrast matte vinyl at eye level beside a single painting read in fifteen seconds. The exact same seventy words laid flat inside a low glass case, competing with ceiling reflections and six neighboring bronze fibulae numbered (a) through (f), feel like an endurance test.

Three better ways to measure a draft

1. Count the shifts in attention. Every time a label asks the visitor to look from the text to a small detail on the object and back again, it costs two or three seconds of refocusing. Two shifts in one caption are plenty.
2. Mock it up at 1:1 scale. Print the draft at its actual point size and line width, tape it to a wall at mounting height, and read it from a meter away while holding a coat. Paragraphs that looked airy across a fifteen-centimeter document column suddenly turn into tall grey bricks on an eight-centimeter label card.
3. Check whether the last sentence is an exit ramp. Often the final sentence of an overlong label is just a summary of the two sentences above it ("Thus, the vessel reflects both local craft and wider trade networks"). Cut the summary and let the last concrete fact ring out on its own.