I'm all for it. I zoom 70% of websites I visit, and I'm only 20 and don't have particularly bad sight -- I'm able to read unzoomed websites, but it's too wearisome.
16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
11–20 of 146 posts
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#12Working closely with designers and observing client requests over the past decade or so, I've seen another pattern that also leads to the "small type" problem: Client requests to get as much above the fold as possible. Granted, the majority of the projects I've worked on in the past four or five years have been very large organizations. When client committees make decisions, it's much harder to teach them or even steer them in the right direction.
I'm seeing a growing number of comments here that read like "I can..." or "I prefer..." The article clearly states this is a decision arrived at by considering the end-user. It's all relative; all sites don't need to be that way. You should be user-testing every project with your target market anyways, and if you were and it was a problem you'd hear about it. I know I have, many times.
Another great article on this subject is one "Relative Readability" by Wilson Miner:
http://www.wilsonminer.com/posts/2008/oct/20/relative-readab...
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#13Most 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.
You can use NoSquint to upscale entire pages globally (much like Firefox's built-in per-site zoom). It doesn't mess up layout like font-only scaling, though it can do that too, if you want.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#14Am 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.
* for common pixel densities.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#15I'm not ignorant. I really wanted to heard what this guy had to say, and maybe there is some truth to it, but to read this page comfortably I had to zoom out.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#16Does this equate to setting the base font size to 1em in CSS?
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#17On the surface the statements seems to make sense and the arguments are well put across, but unless someone actually A/B tests it and proves that it makes a difference to readership, or conversions (or whatever your goal is) then it's currently just unsubstantiated theory.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#18Interesting, 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.
I love that feature from Chrome too. I zoom about 80% of the sites I visit now, and I love how Chrome remembers that preference for some of my most frequented sites.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#19I agree! Have been doing this on my sites for a while now. Another thing to note is that when the font size is small, the number of words that fit into one line increases. It's easier to read lines with less words (which is why newspapers use columns of short width) and using larger fonts in the same horizontal space achieves that.
Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake
#20I find myself zooming nearly 80% of the sites I visit now, including Google Docs. And I'm always a little bummed that Google's Spreadsheets give me this warning:
"Your browser's current zoom setting is not fully supported. Please reset to default zoom."