Yesterday while I had very little to do at the office I was browsing casually through a bunch of websites for web developers and designers and came across an article on Smashing Magazine that was discussing the use of 16 pixel font size for web content. I've always been a bit annoyed that so many websites use such small font sizes for their content, and the article was the tipping point for me to give a larger font size a try and make the change here on the blog.
I really don't mind when sites want to use smaller fonts for things such as sidebars, disclaimers, or other content that is deemed less important to the reader/user, but I always love it when I open up a site and see the reading material at a larger size. It makes me much more likely to read, I can tell you that much.
Being a web developer means you learn a lot of stuff, a great deal of it peripheral stuff that you only use on very specific occasions, or only need to recall for very specific conversations with others. The fact that all web browsers default to a 16 pixel font size is one of those kind of details, and to convince myself I actually spent a bit of time yesterday messing with browser settings to make sure it was indeed the case.
Turns out it was, so I'm now fully on board with such practices. So, whatever personal web project I decide to work on next (whenever that may be), I'll be using this new information when putting my design together.
I like smaller sizes on blogs, if only because then I can scan the majority of the article without having to scroll down. Did they mention something about that in the article?
ReplyDeleteYou should both check this out:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.readability.com/
It'll make any article EXTREMELY pleasant to read, since it not only standardizes color/font/size to your personal tastes, but gets rid of all those annoying ads/links/stuff that gets in the way of reading.
Cheers!