I noticed on Coté’s blog a few week’s ago that he was using a very big font size. At first I thought it looked goofy, but after I while I thought to myself “damn if this isn’t easy to read!” I played follow-the-leader and changed the default font size setting of my WordPress blog from the default 75% (normal letters approximately 10px high) to 120% (normal letters approximately 22px high). Since then, I’ve gotten a number of compliments from friends and family who can now read the blog easier (and aren’t familiar with the browsers’ font scaling controls).
So unless you’ve got a really good reason to keep your font tiny, why not follow Coté’s lead and make your blog’s font real big?
noooooo…he got you too? 😉
i really don’t care for bigger fonts b/c it drastically reduces the amount of text i can fit on the screen.
i’ve got 8 lines of your entry on my screen, and only four of cote’s. i don’t like paging that much. add to that the fact that my parents haven’t reported any problems reading it, and i’m fine with non-huge fonts.
but as always, to each their own 😉
I thought for sure something must be wrong with my browser when I hit coté’s site, when it got big, whenever that was. I think it’s terrible. A couple of [cmd-minus] hits fix it up.
Yours is not so bad, I think.
It’s probably not a bad idea to do this, for your readers who don’t go through an aggregator. Like your mom. And folks happening upon your blog from the Google.
Probably the nicest thing to do would be to allow the user to tweak the display, font size up/down, dynamically, store the result in a cookie, so I don’t have to cmd-minus, cmd-minus when I hit these big pages ..
I have to ask, what’s up with the sponsor? Reef Sandals?
Steve, eight lines? Are you on a Palm?
Pat, I’d be happy to code up the function you mention, but until I get off of WordPress, that would mean hacking PHP, and I think you know how I feel about that. 🙂
No, I think you can do it all in JS, can’t you? Add a little gadget to change the font size via css, hook it to a setcookie call of some kind, retrieve the cookie in your page load. I’m not expecting you to persist the setting for me on your server!
I like the new digs.
On most sites where I’m doing serious reading I unconsciously do a few cmd+’s anyway.
I think the best policy (which I don’t abide by) is to leave your text at the default size, in which case people can tweak their browser’s font settings as desired…
Problem is nobody does this, and it’s hard to be in the minority.
I like the larger print
Well my mom likes the larger print so that settles it. 😛
Well, obviously I have only one thing to say: YUH!
I’ll tell why I started having big fonts. I have them now because, like you say, they’re easy to read.
But, my dad used to always complain — I mean always — that my fonts were too low. So I up’ed them.
Now, if I change them back down, he goes ape-shit. Thankfully, I really like the big fonts. I have FireFox setup to not allow anything below 16pt. It makes most web apps look like crap (meaning they didn’t code well, but hey, why would that change after 10+ years of web app development), but I can’t stand those little fonts on my 12″ PowerBook.
So, congrats on seeing the light 😉
[…] Bill Higgins :: big up your blog’s font size “I noticed on Coté’s blog a few week’s ago that he was using a very big font size. At first I thought it looked goofy, but after I while I thought to myself ‘damn if this isn’t easy to read!’” Bill is a wise, wise man 😉 (tags: type blogs design ego ibm redmonkclients) […]
Somehow I feel that this large font trend is related that the internet generation is growing up, say over 30 , some even 35 (don’t look at me). Eyes just don’t get any better, especially when writing this middle of night. So thanks!
how to increase font size of my embarq email and while i want to print it, i want a bigger font too. I tried lot of options, no go. Help me emailing me. Thankyou.