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16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

#21

Post by keeperofdakeys »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #2

Most 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.

Then you learn most mobile sites disable user scrolling, because of a bug on iOS that causes non-standard zoom levels to cause text to wrap off the screen when changing orientation. So if you did this and your site isn't readable on someones device, they can't even fix it.

Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

#22

Post by larrik »

Simon_M wrote: post #8

Am 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.

Note that the author means "fonts/sizes that are 16 pixels tall" NOT "16 point fonts" (which is what you get when you pick 16 in MS Word or whatever).

The difference in terminology is subtle to look at, but huge in practice.

Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

#25

Post by Flenser »

sunkencity wrote: post #4

Interesting, 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 can read a full line in 3 focus movements

I doubt it:

The distance the eye moves in each saccade (or short rapid movement) is between 1 and 20 characters with the average being 7–9 characters. Thus, the most impressive fact about fixations (the point at which a saccade jumps to) and saccades is that there is considerable variability not only between readers, but for the same person reading a single passage of text. - [1]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that would put you at the extreme end of the bell curve; it's more likely you're not aware how much your eye is moving.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_in_reading

Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

#27

Post by brandonkshepard »

michaeledge wrote: post #3

Personally 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 ;)

Definitely also just had mentioned the same thing before reading this. But do you think that they should increase their size? I often tend to look closer to read posts and also just followed their font sizes in a similar project =\

Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

#28

Post by km3k »

Maybe I'm just different, but I like smaller font sizes. It makes it easier to take in more text quicker and do it with less scrolling. I am 26 though. I'll probably change that opinion when I'm 40. I think having the browser zoomed out one level looks best to me on some sites.

Re: 16 pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

#30

Post by sunkencity »

Flenser wrote: post #25
sunkencity wrote: post #4

Interesting, 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 can read a full line in 3 focus movements I doubt it: The distance the eye moves in each saccade (or short rapid movement) is between 1 and 20 characters with the average being 7–9 characters. Thus, the most impressive fact about fixations (the point at which a saccade jumps to) and saccades is that there is considerable variability not only between readers, but for the same person reading a single passage of tex…

I've trained specifically on this by reading thick books of prose like Ulysses,Dhalgren,Gravitys Rainbow etc. where the context is more important than the specific meaning of a sentence, the goal is to try to read faster than I can think, and then parse the information when I have more context. It's also possible to read too fast for any comprehension at all, and then slow down a little and take advantage of speed-blindedness - you'll read faster than you did before.

One thing that slows down a reader is focusing on individual words. Try instead to focus between two words, and use secondary focus to pick out the words next to it without re-focusing.

http://www.speedreadingtechniques101.com/meta-guiding

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