The real cost of ignoring web typography
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Nobody bills you for neglecting web typography. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Where to go from here
Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
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
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.