Getting started with web typography
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A short on-ramp to web typography for teams who have not touched it before.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Why this earns attention
Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read
- Change one thing and measure it
Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
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
- Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.