Many of you may wonder what is the deal with the big font size on my website. The font size is re­ally not at all as big as you thought it is. We only think it is big because we are surrounded by website with freak­ishly small font size.

Take DaringFireball for example, the font size set on this website is 11px, that is extremely diffi­cult to read comfort­ably with­out plac­ing your face near your screen. Even it’s lev­el 1 heading is sized at 1.55em, that is 17.05px just about a pixel big­ger than the default font size.

It’s Not Big

When talked about 16px font size we im­me­diately say big font or large type. The fact is it is not big or large, it is the default size. Website us­ing font size small­er than 16px are the ones we should be call­ing small and yet 11px & 12px font size have dom­inate the mar­ket so such a long time it has been perceived as the default size by the viewers. Be­ing presented with the default font size now seem to be huge and odd.

The default font size is not odd, in fact, when you look at it again for a few times it almost seems right. The question then becomes “why isn’t most website us­ing the default font size?”.

To under­stand it we have to look at the old age. The time where com­put­ers are starting to gain public recog­nition, as a tool that can use at home to simplify our life. A time where the Inter­net is boom­ing. A time where displays are still rel­atively expensive and most website are faced with a prob­lem. The displays have low res­olution.

Us­ing the default size means that information is hard to display as 800×600 can’t display that many lines of words on the screen so we use a small­er font to get the message across. Us­ing a small­er font size makes sense back then but somehow web designers nev­er kept up with the display changes. We are no longer confined by 800×600, I don’t even have vis­itors view­ing this website with 800×600 res­olution. We find so much space in design and there are so many empty spaces on both sides and I don’t think anyone wants to fill them with 12px Hel­vet­ica.

It’s Small

Phys­ically 16px is about as big as 12pt in print. That is not at all big, most print ma­te­rial are print with this size. Add to that is that we normally read from a dis­tance much fur­ther than we do with print ma­te­rial, the impact is signif­icant.

The saying 95% of web design is typog­raphy should be fa­mil­iar to web designers—if it isn’t I suggest you don’t call your­self one to save your­self from embarrass­ment—then what is more important than to design your website to be eas­ily read with­out print­ing your face onto the screen ev­ery time you need to read—I be­lieve we have enough young chil­dren wearing glasses.

There is no rea­son at at all to squeeze that much information into the screen, in fact it is even rec­ommended by w3c. Having a font size big­ger or equiva­lent to 16px could also be ben­e­ficial to busi­nesses as well.

The prob­lem here is a ba­sic us­ability and ac­cessibility issue: a good design should look good with­out requiring the us­er to enlarge or reduce the text size.

Join Now

Change is hard. Why ven­ture into the un­known when we are comfort­able just the way we are?

We people are always resistant to change, a study howev­er have found that happi­ness can lift the mood of a per­son’s ex­tended network of friends and that very same support can influ­ence change in some­one. People are better able to change when people in their social network are chang­ing as well.

People are more likely to make pos­itive changes in their lives not only when their friends do, but when their friends of friends do, and when their friends of friends of friends do.

All it takes is just to de­fine the font size with font-size:100%;.