Typography that gets read

Typography is the part of design most often treated as a style choice and most reliably a functional one. Six settings carry almost all of the effect.

1. Line length

The single most under-attended setting. Text is comfortable to read at roughly 45 to 75 characters per line.

Wider than that and the eye loses its place returning to the next line, which is why full-width text on a large monitor is so tiring. Narrower and the reading rhythm breaks.

On a website this means constraining the text column, not letting it fill the viewport.

2. Size

Setting screen body text at 14 pixels because it looks neat costs you every reader over fifty, which in many trades is the paying audience.

3. Line spacing

Roughly 1.4 to 1.6 times the type size for body text. Tighter and lines blur together; looser and the paragraph stops reading as a unit.

Headlines need less, around 1.1, because large type at generous spacing falls apart.

4. Contrast

Near-black on near-white. Grey on white is the most common self-inflicted readability problem in modern design.

If the design demands lighter text, increase the size to compensate, and check it outdoors on a phone.

5. Alignment

Left-aligned, ragged right, for almost everything. Justified text creates uneven word spacing unless it is properly hyphenated, and few systems do that well.

Centred body text is unreadable at any length. Reserve centring for two or three lines.

6. Restraint with display faces

A distinctive typeface is a brand asset in a headline and a liability in a paragraph. Its personality is exactly what makes it tiring at length.

The self-hosting point

On websites, load typefaces from your own server rather than a third-party service. It is faster, it avoids a data transfer to another provider, and it removes a dependency you do not control.

The final check

Print the page, hold it at arm's length, and read the first paragraph. If your eye slides or you re-read a line, adjust length, size or spacing before touching the typeface.