And what's up with the growing number of websites which take deliberate pains to prevent me from using pinch-to-zoom on iOS?<p>Surely there's a special ring in Hell for those web anti-designers.
I use a Firefox addon called NoSquint,[1] which lets me set zoom levels globally and per-site. It's one of the most useful Firefox addons I have, and really makes my browsing experience much more pleasant.<p>I also used to use an addon called Stylish[2] to force a nice CSS style on websites. I've since switched to using a Stylish stylesheet I like directly with Pentadactyl[3], which gives me the same effect of using Stylish but without needing an extra addon (since I'm using Pentadactyl for its other features anyway).<p>Using the above combination standardizes the look of virtually every website I go to and makes it a pleasant experience for me, where both the font sizes, font colors, and background colors are all quite pleasant and readable.<p>Unfortunately, this does mean I don't get to see occasionally pleasant original website designs, but it's a sacrifice I'm more than happy to make for a painless websurfing experience.<p>[1] - <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nosquint/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nosquint/</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/</a>
I'm glad I'm not the only one who generally surfs the web at 150% magnification.<p>I also have decent eye-sight and am 29, so I don't think it's an age related thing.<p>Anecdotally, I find reading large text to be a lot more comfortable. I don't have to strain my eyes to read.
I wish I could get a list of every web developer in the world and mail them a copy of this in a holiday card with a cookie attached.<p>I'd like to see a report that has the age curve of internet users, a projection of that curve over the next 20 years, and that curve in relation to the average decline of eye sight over time.<p>My hypothesis is that given the declining birth rates all over the world, most users are going to be older and therefore have worse eyesight than younger folks.<p>Make your fonts bigger!
While I too dislike small fonts, I'm particularly rageful of web designers that <i>force</i> this on the user using <i>-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;</i> [1]<p>That bit of CSS will prevent Chrome and Safari from allowing the text to be resized <i>at all</i>.<p>The Facebook Social Comments plugin is one such occurrence, but I see it all over the web.<p><i>[1] <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1831922/how-to-prevent-users-from-resizing-the-font-on-my-web-site/12263866#12263866" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1831922/how-to-prevent-us...</a> </i>
Two comments:<p>1. I agree that type is typically too small. Even Bootstrap's 14px default, while better than the popular 12px and 11px, is inferior to the browser's default of 16px. Funnily enough, on the website for my new business which I'm polishing off now, I include no text below 16px. The result? It's always readable.<p>2. I personally <i>have</i> complained of text too large: by default, tumblr seems to have this utterly idiotic notion of treating my 10" Android tablet (with Firefox as the browser) as a mobile browser, applying some extremely strange mathematics and winding up displaying massive text, with a line-height of almost an inch. This results in a page that on my laptop fits in one screen (to be fair, at 16px it'd be a page and a half) taking a couple of dozen screenfuls, with my finger needing to work overtime scrolling. All this in spite of the fact that the laptop's viewport's physical size is less than double that of the tablet's. This article's site is one of an extreme minority that don't break on my tablet. Many WordPress blogs are also tedious; I have come to <i>hate</i> WPTouch. (Admittedly, I don't have a phone, so I don't know exactly how it affects the experience there, but far too many sites on the Internet treat a tablet as a third- or even seventy-ninth-class citizen, actively destroying their site for some reason.)
People keep talking about px. Mac and Windows use different DPI thus a reasonable size on one will be too small on the other.<p>Don't set a font size. Set anything that needs to be set relative to that; H1 is 200% bigger etc.<p>You have no idea what monitors people are using, nor what dpi they have, nor what resolution they're using, nor what fonts are on their machine.<p>Everyone can scroll. Not everyone can hit ctrl +, or install extensions like readbility, or install client side CSS.
I'm sick of tiny, tiny type too, but not in my browser....<p>Rather, almost all modern video games seem to have huge amounts of <i>insanely</i> small type, that's in many cases <i>literally</i> unreadable on my TV because I have a smallish (20") olde-style CRT television with only analogue inputs, not a wall-sized HDTV. The pixels in the characters are blurred into unreadability—even putting my nose 10cm away from the screen and using a magnifying glass, there's text which <i>cannot</i> be deciphered (seriously, I've tried this).<p>This is particularly bad with CJK text, because it has more fine details, and especially for CJK text translated from English, as they typically don't increase the character size enough to compensate for the differences (I guess they're trying to re-use the same layouts).<p>I find it hard to believe that even those people who <i>do</i> own wall-sized HDTVs are comfortable reading much of this text, because people generally sit fairly far away from their television. I suppose it's a sign that video game makers are designing for the PC, and then doing a very poor job of adapting for consoles ....
Put me in the opposite camp: I'm young and nearsighted, which means my close vision is very good. I usually read HN on my iPhone at min zoom, and I find it really frustrating when mobile sites helpfully won't let me zoom out to read more than a paragraph at a time. (In fact, I found hitting ⌘- a few times made this post much more readable.)
In general, web developers (and the designers commandeering them around) need to stop resetting font sizes on body {} or something similarily silly. The default browser font size should be the base value, and all other fonts should simply be bigger or smaller by some factor. In an ideal world, people would also start using ems instead of pxs for media queries, but alas, we probably won't see that for quite some time.
16px is the new minimum. You START there.<p><a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-copy-anything-less-costly-mistake/" rel="nofollow">http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...</a>
Counterpoint: On a 22", 1680x1050 screen, the text on that website is way too big to be comfortable to read.<p>I wonder how many comments here are from desktop machines, which ones are notebooks or tablets.
True. But I'm also sick of your giant, giant body font. Fluid layouts are especially bad at this, to the point that I need to resize my browser window every time I load a page, to make the font smaller.<p>The body font on - for example - this blog is way, way too big for me. My eyes hurt by reading it. I would make it 2px smaller and give it better line-height.
The opposite of one man's "tiny-tiny" is another man's "10 lines per screen" in humongous "screw-you-,-i-have-a-retina-mbp" designer typeface.<p>The solution is there, but it's not working. The CSS 'pt' size measure was supposed to address this exact issue, but in reality it doesn't. "Reality" being the most of Windows world that still runs at 96 DPI (dots-per-inch), regardless of whether one has 1080 scan lines on 12" display or 768 - on 20" one. What's twice as unfortunate is that Windows added mainstream support for higher DPIs starting with Vista. So, in theory, if I were to get a high-res laptop, it'd come with a manufacturer's .inf that sets my DPI to 120 <i>if</i> my display is physically small. In practice - na-da. I've seen this done only on selected ThinkPads, but that's it.
I strongly disagree. Provided you have a properly configured system (correct DPI settings), anything above 14-16 font size is large and anything below 9-10 is small.<p>You have to code your site for the norm and not for the outliers.<p>There are times I like to sit back and surf, about 0.75m away from the monitor. In this case I just adjust my browser's zoom level.
At the beginning of my current gig I was a one-person web development shop inside a larger agency. The agency has a team of quite talented print designers who would often be tasked with providing designs for web projects. Every single time I got a design from one of them it would contain impossibly small lorem ipsum. I would make it bigger during implementation, often resulting in comments of me "messing up the design", or having the type look "goofily large".<p>One of the primary reasons for the small type, I learned, was that they were used to seeing type set on an 8.5"x11" page. If you open up a magazine and hold it as far away from your face as a monitor would be, you'll see some pretty small type. They just wanted the web to work the same way.
The real problem here is column width--magnifying doesn't help if the column width is screwed, but it seems nobody gets this on the web for some reason. Why, in 2013, don't people understand that really long lines of text are difficult to read?
I like massive fonts. This blog's font is about the right size.<p>The other thing I don't like is Helvetica Neue in a very light weight, especially if it's grey on bright white.<p>Readability and others fix the problem, but it's weird that some designers get this so wrong.
While this is completely true and by far the more prevalent problem, I also dislike the other extreme, large fonts on a narrow layout. I don't see why you need a layout (for a desktop) that only manages to put 7 words per line.
I don't get it either. I'd like to hear from a designer on why this ever happens. I used to work with a designer who set h2 to 11px. Boggles my mind. Does tiny type look better? I honestly don't get it.
“More times than I’ve heard them complain about fonts being too large—wait, I’ve never heard a user complain about that.”<p>For what it’s worth, several people at my office <i>do</i> complain that they can’t read my display because the text is often too large (~18pt) for their comfort. I don’t have vision problems, but would prefer not to strain my eyes any more than necessary.
When I open a print book at the typeface is large, I know I'm either reading a children's book, the elderly version, or something from an author attempting to hide his lack of content.<p>Certainly I am not the only person who finds large type font hard to read and obnoxious?<p>If small font is giving you a headache you probably need a better monitor or glasses.
The tiny type thing doesn't seem to be such a problem as it used to be. In fact I often find the reverse problem of sites with type so big that it prevents much information fitting on the screen. The early 2000s where everyone used 8pt verdana seem to be behind us.
> <i>Sometimes I’m on my computer, and Reader doesn’t work on your web app. I hit CMD + two or three times... then the layout falls apart. </i><p>In ML, in Safari, double tap a text column with two fingers. It will zoom the text to fill browser width, just like the double tap with one finger on an iPhone or iPad.<p>The browser will zoom into that column without changing layout, and then re-render the page to make the text full resolution. Scroll will be lightly tied to the newly zoomed column.<p>Double tap with two fingers again to zoom back out to full page width.<p>Still, agree with the premise. Designs should anticipate text size of "content" areas being changed by the user, and the layout should support reflow of arbitrary text size changes without breaking.
I use "Readability" in Chrome, "Reader" in Safari Mobile, and "Readability" on AlienBlue for reddit. But the best is when I also use the "Alex" voice on Mac OS to read the text aloud. That's how I read nowadays.<p>Small fonts on mobile devices are a curse.
Personal preference ahead.<p>I love small type. I love dense information. I prefer the dense gmail layout over the "comfortable" one with huge fonts and gaps between text.<p>I really dislike how text got larger and more spread out in Windows 7 over Windows XP. I dislike how huge the fonts in Ubuntu are out of the box. It makes it nearly impossible to have even 2 apps on a 1920x1080 screen without them overlapping each other.
One of my favorite things about Mac laptops has long been the lower DPI (72 vs 96 for Windows, IIRC). Fonts rendered smaller, and I could fit more of it onto a small laptop screen. But I guess I'm in the minority on this, and MS had it right all along.<p>Except now people are making more and more sites on Macs, with text that I find overly large whenever I'm on a PC. Sigh.
I refuse to write anything with less than 18px default font size, for this very reason. It's so infuriating when text is small. I have silly old screens and I still can't read your content!<p>I've read comments in this about differing DPI sizes, so I'll see if I can take that into consideration as well.
The underlying problem is that people are still, to this day, treating presentation as more important than data.<p>Here's an idea: use the absolute bare-minimum of styling and layout, and let me decide via OS and browser preferences what default font faces and styles to use.
I've been convinced that I shouldn't use small font sizes.<p>Now, re-reading and looking around the further reading section, I can't find the answer to the question this immediately brings up: what font sizes aren't too small?<p>edit: vbl posted a link that suggests 16px is a good minimum.
I don't even really mind it, since I can manually adjust the size. What drives me up walls in a murderous rage is when they lock it down with CSS, so my zooming has no impact. I'm all for your site looking however you want, but don't force it on me.
I wonder whether <a href="http://csslint.net/" rel="nofollow">http://csslint.net/</a> would be receptive to the idea of warning against a font-size declaration on html/body which led to smaller-than-16px text?
It was certainly worse back in the day though ;-) Around 1999-2001 there was an annoying Web design fad of 10px or 11px Verdana or Tahoma (when both were relatively new yet widespread due to Windows 98).
I thought it was just me that likes my font to look like Safari's reader at all times. Good thing I know I'm not alone. I designed my blog the same way.
Amen bro. If a site has tiny tiny type, I leave.<p>My pet peeve is low contrast font colors.<p>If you think you're cool because you have #ddd font on #fff background, YOU'RE NOT. JUST STOP.
this is really a problem. as developers we really need to take care of this problem. I think we don't need to build everything "responsive" (sure, it's the best solution, but not every budget makes that possible).<p>If you're not making your site responsive, take care of font sizes. sure, your design will maybe look terrible, but it really helps.
This is why Android reflows text on double-tap zoom. No more tiny text or zoom-and-pan. (I didn't know until recently that Mobile Safari has no comparable feature)<p>By the way, downvotes don't change the fact that this is a non-issue on Android and desktop because double-tap zoom puts the content at a comfortable and <i>customizable</i> font size effectively solving this issue and that desktop browsers have the <i>same</i> ability to set minimum font sizes and zoom levels.<p>edit: Apparently Mobile Safari now has this as well. I don't know if it also allows you to adjust the font size but it just goes to show that there are existing solutions to this subjective problem.
That's actually true about Hacker News on mobile screens. Yes, you can zoom in, but then you have to scroll left and right to see the text. Extremely annoying.