When web typography is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Web typography is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

When it is worth it

Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to decide

Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. 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

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.