Why web typography matters more than it looks
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Web typography is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
What is actually at stake
Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The mistakes we see most
Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
In practice
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
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.