Increasingly, I'm seeing more sites designed with bigger font. Nowadays, 10pt font is considered "small", and we're seeing more and more 12pt fonts as standard. Even if paragraph text is still relatively small, headlines and titles are getting bigger.
I love it.
Bigger screen sizes now mean that we have the space. What used to be readable on the old 800 x 600 screens of yesteryear now requires a magnifying glass if you put it on a 1280 x 1024. Only a tiny percentage of users now have the small screens.
Silver surfers are driving the demand for simplicity. When you get older, your eyesight deteriorates. Larger font sizes it make it easier to read what's going on. Usability is now a common place discipline in e-businesses (although not common enough in my opinion), and time after time, usability studies show that small fonts can create unnecessary hurdles.
It's not just older folks that benefit. The rest of us can see what's going on from a distance, in poor light, on the move.
How many sites have you got frustrated with because the font was too big? I can't think of any. What about sites where the font was too small? Now, I could think of a few there.
To illustrate why big works, here's some examples of sites that use larger fonts...
The new rightmove.co.uk property search site
BBC news
Amazon
37 signals
Jakob Neilsen's alertbox
Note that you don't need to use large fonts throughout. There is still a place for smaller fonts, although they shouldn't be standard.
Set your browser to "larger" font and start looking at sites with smaller fonts. You soon realise how much easier many of them would be to use if they increased their font size.
No comments:
Post a Comment