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Stop Using Small Font Sizes

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61–70 of 126 posts

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#61

Post by nwh »

signed0 wrote: post #58
jwr wrote: post #56

Also, if you break zooming on my iOS devices, I won't bother to read your website. I find this an exceptionally stupid thing to do. That includes the abomination known as Swype (I think) which breaks websites for iPhone/iPad users presenting them with an interface which does something different than it appears to, breaks zooming, introduces useless and unintuitive "pagination" and generally makes users' lives miserab…

I don't have an IOS device. What do you mean by broken? Does the font size stay constant while the page elements get bigger, or does zooming not work at all?

Zooming just does nothing. It's meant for web apps that would be inconvenienced by accidental zooming, but developers seem to insist on enabling on everything.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#62

Post by shurcooL »

It's a personal preference, not a general direction.

I like small fonts. I like the before pictures better. I bought a 30" monitor so I can fit more content, more windows there, not to look at huge letters and whitespace.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#63

Post by [deleted] »

bradwestness wrote: post #10

12pt Times New Roman is the standard for publishing, so that's become the go-to size for a lot of websites. It was plenty big on 800x600 displays, but I agree that it's generally too small for today's resolutions. However, the solution isn't to pick a new, slightly larger point size and just set everything to that, it's to use media queries to set an appropriate size for whatever medium the content is being displayed…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#64

Post by coldtea »

martinced wrote: post #13
georgemcbay wrote: post #3

I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser. What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible. I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words…

Strong point you're making here. Pantone-calibrated monitors only make sense when you'll be doing actual printing. A webdesigner using Pantone shades for a website is just being a delusional fool.

With the quality of the monitors nowadays, and standard profiles, it's not that far off. We're not in the nineties, monitor technology wise.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#65

Post by Legion »

Everyone is talking about the font size and how zooming can fix small fonts.

That's only half of the discussion. The other half is line spacing. I think that's much more important.

In his examples at the bottom, the Phoronix one really gets a big improvement by not having the lines squished together. If I open up Phoronix in my browser and add the 1.5em line-height CSS rule, the site becomes considerably more comfortable to read, without even touching the 12px font size.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#66

Post by dchest »

bradwestness wrote: post #43
pmb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1pt is a unit of length. One point is 1/72 of an inch. It should be the same height now that it ever was, even on old monitors.

Yeah using pt works too. The problem is that everyone uses 12px in their CSS rather than 12pt.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5268526

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#67

Post by Too »

pmb wrote: post #22
bradwestness wrote: post #10

12pt Times New Roman is the standard for publishing, so that's become the go-to size for a lot of websites. It was plenty big on 800x600 displays, but I agree that it's generally too small for today's resolutions. However, the solution isn't to pick a new, slightly larger point size and just set everything to that, it's to use media queries to set an appropriate size for whatever medium the content is being displayed…

1pt is a unit of length. One point is 1/72 of an inch. It should be the same height now that it ever was, even on old monitors.

Not in CSS, 1pt is always x pixels regardless of how many DPI you have.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#70

Post by Suncho »

I'm now starting to understand why what I consider to be obscenely large text has been proliferating through the web in recent years. My assumption has been that websites should use 12pt sans-serif fonts for standard content. Maybe my assumptions need to be revised. While it's annoying to me to see websites with text at 16pt, maybe that's what people want these days and I'll just have to suck it up and zoom out.
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