The web can be a truly ugly place to navigate. As a blogger myself, I understand the difficulty of reading articles with mediocre typography, endless ads, and poor layout (Yes, go ahead and rip this site’s design to shreds. I welcome it). With tools like Readibility and Read Later Fast, there are many options for users to enhance the look and feel of any page they read.

With Readable, all it takes is one click to give your current page a complete makeover, stripped of unimportant elements that can hurt the reading experience. For example, let’s take a look at a blog post on Digital Inspiration:

Clicking the Readable bookmarklet converts the page like so:

Another great feature with Readable is that it lets you customize the style that gets applied to any page. For example, you can customize the fonts, change the background color, and even apply your own custom CSS. Text shadow anyone?

Readable also lets you choose from a set of alternative themes that meet different user’s reading preferences. Any changes you make to your custom style can be previewed in real-time.

One of the things that I admired most about this app is that it doesn’t come with a lot of fluff and just works. One-click, and that size 9 comic sans font web page is gone. One feature that I would love to see in the future is the ability to save pages a la Instapaper style. I currently have both bookmarklets in my browser’s toolbar, so integrating the best of both would be awesome. Screen real estate is expensive. And so is Readability.

You can follow the developer Gabriel Coarna on Twitter.