A 12pt Font Should Be the Same Size Everywhere (2012)
We should standardize on <i>something</i>, but it shouldn&#x27;t be inches.<p>You might be looking at a phone screen a foot away, or a monitor two feet away, or a TV four feet away, or a projection 10 feet away, or a jumbo display 100 feet away.<p>How does measuring in inches help? Answer: it doesn&#x27;t at all.<p>Measuring in points <i>used to</i> be a good system, back on the Mac in the old days. The user interface was in 12 pt Chicago, new Word documents defaulted to 12 pt Times New Roman -- 12 pt was the baseline for normal body text both for interface and for content, and everything else made sense relative to that.<p>Then what happened? For some reason, web browsers defaulted to 16 pt. So the text on web pages was too big.<p>Then, laptop screens started packing more pixels in (this is pre-retina) to advertise higher resolutions, and OS interface text became physically smaller -- really hard to read. 16 pt webpages were actually OK though, so now that kind of made sense.<p>Strangely, at the same time, interface text got even <i>smaller</i> -- look at the tiny text OSX now uses in a lot of dialog settings, or the small size Chrome uses for tab titles. (Menus and buttons are usually still OK.)<p>And then bloggers wanted to make webpages easier to read, so they started doing things like 18 pt text (e.g. Medium) and sometimes you see 20 pt or even 22 pt. So now, each letter on Medium takes up about three times the area of a letter in the title of the tab I have open on Chrome.<p>Scale on computer screens no longer makes <i>any sense</i>, and you have to <i>constantly</i> use some combination of monitor resolution and browser zoom to keep all the elements of your screen in any kind of reasonable proportion.<p>So my humble suggestion is: can&#x27;t we just go back to where 12 pt meant normal computer screen UI text and body text, and everybody stick to that? Forget that points are based on inches, just make everything relative to 12 pts = body text. Then everyone can pick a resolution or zoom level for each device so it&#x27;s legible for <i>your</i> eyes at <i>your</i> distance... but then everything stays in proportion!