16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
smashingmagazine.com
16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
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Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#2Most web sites break down when fonts are upscaled. Sad but true. I configured my mother's firefox to do that, it works, but most of the web doesn't look good.
Which is sad. My eyes aren't very good too and they prefer bigger fonts. In fact, most people have vision problems those days.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#3Personally I'm a fan of bigger font sizes. Interesting though that Facebook actually reduced their body copy down to 11px, and apparently they are doing pretty well ;)
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#4Interesting, but at that size of font used on that webpage I read at half speed and I'm 37. For the hacker news site I can read a full line in 3 focus movements. It's much easier to switch focus to the right than to find the next row in text. Not convinced but YMMV.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#5Interesting, but at that size of font used on that webpage I read at half speed and I'm 37. For the hacker news site I can read a full line in 3 focus movements. It's much easier to switch focus to the right than to find the next row in text. Not convinced but YMMV.
I agree. The font size displayed was simply too large to read comfortably, whereas HN is very easy to read. Nothing to see here...
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#6Most web sites break down when fonts are upscaled. Sad but true. I configured my mother's firefox to do that, it works, but most of the web doesn't look good. Which is sad. My eyes aren't very good too and they prefer bigger fonts. In fact, most people have vision problems those days.
>Most web sites break down when fonts are upscaled.
Funnily enough, the top bar in the article page broke at that scale, pushing "Directory" down.
Personally, I had to downscale it twice (not sure to what %) to be able to read comfortably.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#7Interesting, but at that size of font used on that webpage I read at half speed and I'm 37. For the hacker news site I can read a full line in 3 focus movements. It's much easier to switch focus to the right than to find the next row in text. Not convinced but YMMV.
For what it's wortjh, I used to be able to read small fonts comfortably when I was 37. Not that I'm 44, I can't. I read Hacker News with Ctrl-+, and I'm happy that Chrome remembers my zoom setting between visits, or I probably wouldn't have visited very often.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#8Am I missing something? The physical size of a 16px font will surely vary based on resolution and screen size.
So claims such as '16px is the same as most books' are clearly nonsense.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#9Interesting, but at that size of font used on that webpage I read at half speed and I'm 37. For the hacker news site I can read a full line in 3 focus movements. It's much easier to switch focus to the right than to find the next row in text. Not convinced but YMMV.
I agree. The font size displayed was simply too large to read comfortably, whereas HN is very easy to read. Nothing to see here...
How old are you?
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#10I agree completely with this article. As I've gotten older (now 43) I have had more and more trouble reading web sites. In fact, I've noticed lately that I don't even try on some sites that have "small" fonts, I just close the tab. There are some sites that I really like and I generally depend on my browser to help me out. Chrome has a good habit of remembering my page zoom on a particular site so I don't even notice the font problem on subsequent visits.