Grids From Typography

Lots of hate for this here, but I have to say I actually like this blog. +1 from me.

I'm really happy when I see bigger fonts promoted. I zoom in on most pages no matter if I'm on my big monitor on my phone.

Ironically enough, I was reading the article on my iPad and I immediately moved the display to an arms-distance to ease the reading of such a futilely big font. Ok, hipster typography. I get it. Then I read this:<p>&quot;The idea is that since text is meant to be read, our task is to make the process of reading it as comfortable as possible. This means that whoever reading should be able to do so without straining their eyes or having to move closer to (or further from) the screen. Just as if they were comfortably reading a book from their favorite armchair.&quot;<p>Enough with this bullshit. If you make an assertion this bold, you back it up. For real. I completely lost interest in what the essay was really about and left.

»Currently we find between 18 and 22 px to be reasonable for desktop webpages«<p>- and why is that? Sounds like a horrible reading experience. Browsers &quot;default&quot; to 16px.

If you use Firefox and use the page zoom feature a lot, I recommend the add-on NoSquint (<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nosquint/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;nosquint&#x2F;</a>). It gives you more control over zooming, most significantly the ability to choose between text zoom and full-page zoom on a per-site basis.

I get that it can be a bit easier in the eye, but for me this style doesn&#x27;t work on many levels.<p>1) You have to scroll a lot, and scrolling means a tiny pause, move to the next point and resume reading; which done regularly becomes distracting.<p>2) You see the text in pretty tiny amounts. Maybe it&#x27;s fine for a short and simple blog post like this one, but if it was displaying a complex text in longform this style would make it harder for you to understand it.<p>3) Finally, from a purely aesthetic and subjective point of view, a text with a very big font, lineheight and short lines looks like a book for children.<p>I think the optimal the solution is easy, let the user at least choose the font size he prefers. Line-height and width would be great, but just the font size should be enough. Of course, having a good default is very nice, but an opinionated design which gives you no way to tweak it is a nightmare when you feel uncomfortable with it.