Sam Brown

Wilson Minor on Relative readability

#340 20th October 2008 at 8am Link 1 Comment

“After years of wondering why browsers defaulted to 16pt text sizes I’m starting to be convinced that long text really is significantly more readable on screen at precisely that size. The problem is that whenever I’ve tried that in a normal layout, it looks clown-sized, like those remote controls for old people. So I started pushing the scale up all around…”

Wilson Minor has written a great article on Relative readability where he dives into why he chose 16pt body text for his current (fantastic) redesign. Notably Wilson talks about how 16pt text on screen is as big as 11pt text in print, something I certainly hadn’t noticed.

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Comments

Darren McPherson 21 October 2008, 00:22 #1

A bit of mixed feelings on this 1. I totally agree that using 16pt makes the content more readable. But people who need the font size to be 16pt generally know their browser can resize the text at will. That doesn’t mean designers can change their text to 8pt or anything unreadable.

I think I prefer to making the font size fit into the clients requirements (as long as it’s readable by the average user) but in the CSS use em’s and allow for the text to resize without breaking the layout.

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Hi, I'm a UI designer developer based in Edinburgh Scotland working as lead web designer at foursquare in NY.

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