A short guide to web typography

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Everything we would tell a client about web typography in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What is actually at stake

Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The practical version

Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to watch for

Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about web typography before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice — 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.