What exactly is too small?

Most sites still use a base size in the range of 15-18px. Only a few are starting to show bigger – about 20px or even more on small screens – but, in my opinion, that’s not enough. *

• I will take as an example in this article the font size in pixels (px) instead of points (pt), because it is easy to compare on the web and other digital resources.

I’m not saying that small print is bad. 18px text is perfectly readable from the right distance. And an even smaller font will even be extremely useful in certain situations – on signatures, cards and other UI elements. But there is a good reason to increase it several times.

A little history

The era of the printing press has established that 12pt is the optimal size for the readability of printed materials, despite the fact that books, magazines and newspapers are shrinking every year to reduce paper costs.

The concept of “point” originated in the 1600s and meant the height of the metal body on which the symbols were cast. However, today, in the digital space, the point – the concept is quite complex and is not deciphered so unambiguously.

In the 1990s, digital platforms moved from dots to pixels, but of course we had to deal with 14-inch low-resolution screens. Apple’s Mac OS went for a direct conversion – 12pt was 12px at 72 PPI. And Microsoft has established that 12pt is 16px at 96 PPI, which, as defined by IE, is the default default size of 16px.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the sites used 9-14px body text. For a while, designers thought 16px was too much text because they were used to 12pt (12px) by default on Macs.

Let’s move to 2007. Believe it or not, the 16px size was still considered huge for text, but by 2011 with the development of adaptive design and large displays, designers began to consider 16px at least, and until recently it was.

Why the base text doesn’t get bigger

To appreciate the benefits of larger text, let’s first look at the reasons why designers (and developers) prefer small text. This often happens because of expectations; we are used to it, and almost everyone uses just such a size.