Web typography, explained without the jargon

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Here is web typography without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to do next

Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about web typography before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.