Why Bother with Relative Font Sizes?
Some 8-9 years ago when I started knocking up pages in my Geocities page builder, I specified 8pt Verdana and considered myself ahead of the curve because my site text was bigger than most at the time. A couple of years later (or thereabouts) I learned that pt was bad — pt, or ‘point’, is a print measurement not intended for screen — and moved to 11px. Same size, but ‘more correct’.
A few years passed, and I involved myself in accessible design. Catering to the visitor’s many needs was suddenly at the forefront of everyone’s mind and so I swapped from px to em and/or % measurements; instead of 8pt or 11px Verdana, I gave you 72%. My text — the text that you’re reading now — became your text.
Of course, therein lies a small problem. I make the effort but you (generalisation), as readers, don’t. I provide you with the facility to resize my text to suit your individual needs and instead, you complain that it’s too small, or the opposite (on ‘big’ designs).. you complain it’s too large. So why do I bother? After all, even if I changed it to suit one hypothetical person’s wants, it wouldn’t align with those of another.
So, do yourself (and me) a favour: learn to use your browsers text resize facility to make the text look how you want it to look. I don’t just use relative font sizes for the crack of it, you know.
Aisling said:
On 05 Jan at 7:17 pm
I agree. I mean, I always have people saying "your text is too big!" about my site. But, it’s the easiest size for me to read, and *I* would like to be able to read my own site without much fiddling. YOU can fiddle, if you like, or you can just be happy that I haven’t given you tiny tiny fonts to read.
Annie said:
On 05 Jan at 7:17 pm
I guess some people are too quick to nit-pick and forget the facilities that are available to them. :/
M said:
On 05 Jan at 7:23 pm
You go girl ;D
I agree though. I don’t get why people implement relative font sizes if they’re going to change the font size anyway because someone doesn’t like it. What’s the point?
Personally, I like this font size. Verdana makes me hard.
Kaylee said:
On 05 Jan at 8:49 pm
I love playing around with the relative font size on people’s sites — just increasing and decreasing it for fun. But at the end of the day I never really change it for reading. Size doesn’t really matter to me, as long as it’s not too small, if you know what I mean ;)
Vasili said:
On 05 Jan at 8:51 pm
Now that I started using monitors that have resolutions greater than 1024×768, I love when sites use relative font sizes. Most of the time I have to zoom in if they don’t use at least 12px. :|
Nellie said:
On 05 Jan at 8:52 pm
I like it when they say ‘I’m too lazy to resize!’ when they spent the time to write out a comment complaining about your small text. It takes a quick stroke of two damn keys simultaneously and you’re done!
Firefox 3 is awesome in respects to resizing too. It saves your preferences for every website you visit and need to up or downsize and doesn’t mess with other websites when you browse away.
Jem said:
On 05 Jan at 8:55 pm
Nifty, Nellie! I didn’t know Firefox did that – now I’m even less inclined to care ;p
echo said:
On 05 Jan at 9:01 pm
Ha! I always have your site sized-up one notch. Thanks for keeping me in mind while designing :D
(I suppose Firefox deserves a thanks for keeping my ctrl++ setting, too.)
Stephanie said:
On 05 Jan at 9:34 pm
Hear, hear!!
Nat Marie said:
On 05 Jan at 9:35 pm
I don’t mind the size of your text now. I can still read it, although if I upped it, it looks much better. But it’s not that serious.
Marieke said:
On 05 Jan at 10:06 pm
Gheh, well I could read everything. Maybe I should change we text to relative as well…
Anita said:
On 05 Jan at 10:20 pm
All of the images in the header (and only the header) don’t seem to want to load for me in Google Chrome :( It happened rather suddenly yesterday.
Jem said:
On 05 Jan at 10:50 pm
I can’t check the problem Anita, there’s no Chrome for linux yet. Have you tried a hard refresh? (CTRL + F5)
Anyone else having this problem?
Vasili said:
On 05 Jan at 11:51 pm
@Jem Nope, all the images are loading fine.
Anthony said:
On 06 Jan at 12:25 am
I love the layout, I love everything about and I think it’s quite perfect. Honestly if people are going to whine and cry about eh font size it’s their problem. If their too lazy to re-size the font it’s yet again their problem. Seriously, your the l33t one here not them.
Stepherz said:
On 06 Jan at 12:28 am
But it’s so much mroe fun to complain and not do anything about it!
M said:
On 06 Jan at 12:35 am
@Jem: images are loading fine for me, except the emoticons which show as broken images in IE7.
Ashley said:
On 06 Jan at 1:36 am
I don’t care what size font someone uses unless their site is horrifyingly bad and uses like white text on a yellow background. I never resize text. If I realy like someone’s site, I’ll read it at whatever they have their font size set to. If I don’t like your site and/or it’s skanky-bad, then I just leave. :D
Anita said:
On 06 Jan at 2:01 am
Hmm…the weird this is, the images where showing up fine at first. I almost didn’t say anything because I was sure it had to just be me ;)
Cel said:
On 06 Jan at 2:44 am
Honestly, I think any complaint about font sizes being too large or too small is perfectly valid. Admittedly it’s easy to resize text in a browser, but the average user (not the web-savvy design crowd around here) might not know how. Quick survey of the nearest ‘average’ internet users around me shows that they don’t have a clue.
Also, it’s hard to cater for everyone, but I do like to know what sizing is agreeable to the majority of my site’s visitors. I don’t necessarily have to listen to opinions, just have them. ;D
But if you’re interested, the BBC has a very thorough guide to doing all this stuff on their site. Personally, I think it’s a bit much, and there’s far too many subpages to click through, but anyway: http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/mac/seeing/text/browser/firefox2.shtml
OliviaK said:
On 06 Jan at 2:53 am
I don’t care about font size as much as line height.
Increasing the size won’t help if it’s all scrunched together in the first place.
I can see how assigning the font size a percentage failed.
But, some (can’t think of a link now) use clever little links that increase the font size if you click them. They’re usually in a row of increasingly large A’s whose size how big your font will be if you click it.
Vera said:
On 06 Jan at 5:12 am
Oh I use the resize function of FF a lot… but dunno, it doesn’t seem like I should for a blog entry. That is to say, it tends to break the layout, sometimes…. plus it also makes your images larger, which reduces the quality.
Ah well, if you like your current font-size (presses ctrl+).
Maria said:
On 06 Jan at 7:19 am
It’s true that many will grip about sizes and I think for the most part, people should know what is and what isn’t an acceptable font size. Those who stick their sizes at 10pt or lower should probably go shoot themselves and deserve having people telling them their size is too small.
And yes, gotta love FF3 for remembering the zooming preferences.
Jem said:
On 06 Jan at 8:25 am
@Cel: my visitors are far from average, though. The majority are tech-savvy Firefox users.
@Vera: View – Zoom – Zoom Text Only
Mike said:
On 06 Jan at 8:42 am
Face it, though. Your font is far too fucking small. Honestly. What were you thinking? Asking us to read text that tiny? I don’t read anything if it doesn’t sting the back of my retina with its size and brightness. Also it should be pink.
RiN said:
On 06 Jan at 10:06 am
Oh.. I tried to change my font size to em or % but weird "things" will happen. For example, if I add 72% to body {}, in table {}, I have to change it to 100% D:!
Audrey said:
On 06 Jan at 5:20 pm
Instead of %s you can use "em" according to a few souces. 1em is 100%, which is 10pt. Have you had any issues with em or just prefer %?
Jem said:
On 06 Jan at 6:43 pm
1em / 100% isn’t 10pt, it’s 12pt / 16px
I don’t have any preference over % or em, I just use % out of habit. The result is identical so it makes little difference.
Vera said:
On 06 Jan at 8:31 pm
pfft! It’s so much easier to just click ctl+
Honestly, I rarely ever look at the design anyway… so… OK I just like to complain. :P
Audrey said:
On 06 Jan at 10:14 pm
12pt, my mistake. I thought em and % were the same, but wanted to check in case there was something you’d heard/discovered.
Cel said:
On 10 Jan at 2:33 am
@Jem: fair enough. But surely you wouldn’t upload your site before checking if your text is readable? I have no problem with your argument, but I’ve heard it before from people who refused to take advice.
I still like to think that, up to a point, the responsibility for readability lies with the designer.
Jem said:
On 10 Jan at 8:44 am
I don’t disagree with you, but the point is, I took responsibility by giving people the ability to resize the text in the first place. My text IS readable.
I think there’s a big difference between (the equivalent of) 11px Verdana (resizable), and the 6pt Georgia (unresizable) that you see on teenybopper sites, defended because the author can see it just fine.
Mimi said:
On 11 Jan at 9:03 pm
I wasn’t aware that so many people did not know how to increase the font size with their browsers? Especially the people that come here.. Well, the ones that comment obviously do (go you guys!) but I guess the others are.. lacking the knowledge? :o I am glad that you cleared up the pt thing with me, though. I try to preach about making fonts re-sizable in my reviews and I don’t like telling people wrong things. D:
Josh said:
On 09 Aug at 10:19 pm
Does using pixels really make text unresizeable these days? In IE6 maybe, but as you say your audience is absolutely not the kind of audience what uses IE6. It's impossible to make text unresizeable with text zoom and page zoom in every Tom, Dick and Harry's browser. I don't really think you gave the ability to anyone, unless you have been contributing to the development teams of web browsers, in which case I apologise.