A Short History of Body Copy Sizes on the Web
A Short History of Body Copy Sizes on the Web
Section titled “A Short History of Body Copy Sizes on the Web”
Metadata
Section titled “Metadata”- Author: Florens Verschelde
- Full Title: A Short History of Body Copy Sizes on the Web
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://fvsch.com/body-copy-sizes/
Highlights
Section titled “Highlights”- nowadays, theguardian.com has 1.0625rem (17px) text with 1.5 line-height, nytimes.com used 17px font-size and 26px line-height circa 2017, and in 2019 it went up to 20px font-size and 30px line-height on wide screens; body copy in the 18–21 pixel range is common (Medium, bostonglobe.com, newyorker.com, liberation.fr…).
- Personally, I favor more limited tweaks in font size. I like starting with a 100% basis for small screens, bump it for large phones or tablets (say, 110% or 115%), and maybe go up to 125% on laptops and larger screens. Then I tweak those values depending on the font I’m using, the look I’m going for, and what I’ve seen in testing on a variety of devices.