
Grids From Typography - Ashuu
http://blog.weare1910.com/post/72755990718/grids-from-typography
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imdsm
Lots of hate for this here, but I have to say I actually like this blog. +1
from me.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
I also like their design a lot, that's why I work with Stellan from 1910 on
HypedSound.com :)

Oh and I enjoy their blog too. Love their tumblr weare1910.tumblr.com

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Ingon
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.

~~~
tech-no-logical
I'm not, I'm always zooming out on those hipster sites. So I guess both
paradigms are incorrect.

~~~
e12e
I guess the correct paradigm is to have a format that [ed: allows] simple
semantic markup and simple aesthetic markup to combine with user preferences.
Like html, css and user styles in browsers. We had it good there, for a few
years around y2k.

People don't distribute letters and books for consumption in Eclipse and
Visual Studio, I don't see why we should distribute blogs and web sites that
way, just because a small percentage of sites are more like applications than
just a collection of hypermedia.

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camillomiller
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:

"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."

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.

~~~
adrianhoward
No design will please everybody of course. For me it was just about right.

So the question becomes - what is the best for the majority. What makes a
useful default.

Over the years doing usability tests I've seen _far_ more complaints about
text being too small, along with no complaints but obvious problems (watching
people move their head closer to the screen, etc.).

Putting that together with the fact that almost nobody in the "real world"
knows how to zoom in or out. That there are lots and lots of people whose
eyesight is not even close 20/20\. That as age your pupil size decreases and
you just get less light into the eye (see
[http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/EHSL-Moran-
Ne...](http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/EHSL-Moran-Neuro-
opth/id/105) for example). That a bunch of research work on font size and
legibility has been done (see the sources on
[http://guidelines.usability.gov/guidelines/113](http://guidelines.usability.gov/guidelines/113)
for example.)... and I'd rather err on the size of slightly too large than
slightly too small.

Again and again I come across designs put together by a designer in their
twenties with 20/20 or better vision that just fails miserably when used by
"normal" people.

And it will certainly not please everybody. No design pleases everybody.
There's a huge amount of non-utilitarian stuff around how people react to
designs. Just having things be different from "normal" can cause folk to react
badly against something.

I sometimes wonder if the approach some developers have to typography is
driven from us spending so much time looking at code full of of long lines
where getting the most text possible on the page is utilitarian in ways
unrelated to just reading from top-to-bottom.

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kalms
»Currently we find between 18 and 22 px to be reasonable for desktop webpages«

\- and why is that? Sounds like a horrible reading experience. Browsers
"default" to 16px.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
For how long have browsers defaulted to 16px? By how much has the average
resolution increased in that time? I agree that it's best to leave the base
font size at the default, but I also think there's an argument for that
default to be increased.

~~~
kalms
That might be true, but I have yet to find a compelling argument for it.
Personally, I dislike reading at that size (> 18px), and every time I ran
tests, the users were more inclined towards using a smaller font size, usually
at around 14/16px.

In the end, I suppose it's more about using a proper baseline, and making sure
the grid hold up, when users feel compelled to enlarge the text size
themselves.

Opinion pieces:

[http://ia.net/blog/100e2r](http://ia.net/blog/100e2r) &
[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-
co...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-copy-
anything-less-costly-mistake/)

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roryokane
If you use Firefox and use the page zoom feature a lot, I recommend the add-on
NoSquint ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/nosquint/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/nosquint/)). 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.

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Shamanmuni
I get that it can be a bit easier in the eye, but for me this style doesn't
work on many levels.

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.

2) You see the text in pretty tiny amounts. Maybe it'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.

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.

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.

