And it makes patterns of feedback like this one much easier to spot! I consider it a success when a stakeholder trusts us with their honest reactions instead of couching everything in layers of indirect language. Those descriptors might sound pejorative out of context, but I want to be clear: Our customers are polite, lovely people, and we ask for their candid, unfiltered feedback as often as we can. It’s the form that feedback takes that surprises me, because it’s so specific.Īcross a few different projects with disparate audiences, visual identities and typefaces, the reaction to a larger body font size I hear most often is that it feels a bit “childish,” “child-like” or “like a children’s book.” The fact that push-back exists at all is not surprising: It can take years for new browser features or usability best practices to settle into widespread adoption, and anything unfamiliar is a hard sell. In spite of these arguments, I’ve felt some surprising resistance to larger font sizes. Thanks to features like CSS clamp, our font sizes can be just as fluid as our layouts, growing from a minimum readable value up to a maximum of our choosing at whatever responsive rate we want.If your font is light, condensed or has a low x-height, 16 pixels probably won’t cut it. Some fonts seem smaller at 16 pixels than others.It’s already the trend: Content-heavy sites like Medium, Vox and The Washington Post (to name just a few) go larger than 16 pixels for article bodies, even on small screens.Department of Health and Human Services recommends a font size of at least 19 pixels if your audience includes older adults. Larger type is more accessible to more people.In one 2012 study, the sweet spot for body copy seemed to be 18–22 pixels. Studies have shown that larger type improves reading comprehension.These days, the arguments for a 16-pixel 1 baseline are widely accepted: We have plenty of data supporting its readability, it can prevent unintentional zoom in mobile browsers, and it’s been the default in every major browser for many years.īut there are plenty of reasons to go even larger:
I remember a time when it was commonplace to set body copy to ten pixels (or smaller!) so we could cram as much text as possible into our static 640×480 layouts. We’ve come a long way when it comes to font-size.