Tiny Text: love it or leave it

Leave it! Why in the world would you use text that nobody can read???? Not to mention people with less then perfect eyesight. Fine for the "fint print" stuff but for body text there is no reason why anyone should do that.

I'm sorry, but this is one of my current pet peeves. Seems to be the current "cool" (but dumb) things to do.

I agree with Megan
We make web sites for other people to see, so we should be helping to make it easier for them, not harder. If I come across a site that I have to download something (like flash), adjust my browser settings (window size, font size etc) I just leave and find another site on the same topic.

I'm finding more and more people are setting their own style sheets in browsers now because of all these dumbs fads, it helps the user but can make some sites look really bad.

yeah, it's really stupid and pointless using really or small text one your site, the smallest i'd ever go is 7pt; (for the credits or footer) but that's it. Any smaller and it's just rediculis

I have to agree with everyone else on this. Why would you want to have text nobody can read?

I've been saying this for years, you'll probably remember my rants on this at WPTS, Peter -- anything smaller than the font size in your address bar is too small for reading on a website.

Slightly smaller than that is fine for fine print, such as copyright notices, address at the bottom of the page, et cetera.

Navigation and text-based content should be that size or BIGGER.

Comprehension plummets when text is too large or too small to read. Legibility is not the issue, readability is. You shouldn't have to concentrate to read (when you're a fluent reader). Microtext forces people to take each word one at a time, much like ALL CAPS WORDS DO.

Ratios between line length and font size are also important. Graphic designers have specific numbers in mind for this - but in general small font sizes should have shorter line lengths while larger text should have longer line lengths.

Good point! I forget the ratios, though -- do you remember them?

I seem to recall a line-length of 65 characters, regardless of font-size for optimal readability? Or was that 40? Or four inches. Shoot.

I have this somewhere because I wrote an article on text formatting... let me see... 50-70 characters is what I have.

Well then I'm not too far off, at least line-length wise! At 640x480 res, SNW has about 40 chars in the center and right columns (with the Explorer-only menu hide feature on). At 1024x768 it has about 70 chars in the center, and still 40 in the right.

Peter

There you go. It's all of the above, lol...

40 to 50 charecters...hmmmmm....now that's interesting! Should that include spaces too I wonder?

I don't mind the smaller text anymore, but I think I'll start paying attention to what my eyes do, and what they want to do when looking at text lines that are much longer than that.

Gosh I'd love to take a Typography class!

Quote: Originally posted by Roo
Gosh I'd love to take a Typography class!

no you wouldn't, they are sooooo boring

Quote: Originally posted by Roo
40 to 50 charecters...hmmmmm....now that's interesting! Should that include spaces too I wonder?

I'm pretty sure that doesn't include spaces. You can try this out in your word processor if you want - MS Word, at least, will give character count (with & without spaces) in the word count window.

almost close enough to a typography lesson ... boring ... lol

http://www.dsiegel.com/tips/wonk4/emphasis.html