September 3rd, 2024

Quick guide to web typography for developers

The guide offers web developers typography principles to enhance text appearance, covering font selection, performance optimization, readability improvements, and establishing a clear text hierarchy for better user experience.

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Quick guide to web typography for developers

This guide provides web developers with essential typography principles to enhance text appearance on websites and applications. It emphasizes the importance of making informed choices about typography, even in the absence of a designer. The guide covers key aspects such as selecting fonts, using local versus external fonts, and the advantages of variable fonts for better performance and flexibility. It also discusses font formats, recommending WOFF2 for modern browsers, and highlights the significance of subsetting fonts to optimize loading times. Developers are advised to focus on font size, line height, and line width to improve readability. The guide suggests using relative units like rems for font sizes and emphasizes the need for appropriate line height to enhance text flow. It also recommends limiting line width to between 45 and 100 characters for optimal reading experience. Additionally, the guide touches on establishing a clear hierarchy in text presentation through size, weight, and color. Overall, it aims to equip developers with practical CSS techniques to achieve aesthetically pleasing and readable typography without extensive design knowledge.

- Typography is crucial for web development, impacting readability and user experience.

- Use local fonts for faster loading times and consider variable fonts for flexibility.

- Optimize font sizes and line heights using relative units for better accessibility.

- Limit line width to enhance readability, ideally between 45 and 100 characters.

- Establish a clear text hierarchy to improve content navigation and understanding.

Link Icon 4 comments
By @swyx - 3 months
By @Brajeshwar - 3 months
Hi Oleg, Good start. I suggest reading up some of the article that came out a while back from https://utopia.fyi

They also have tools to define your own scale and space.

I really like their method of fluid typographic scaling, including the spacing that plays well with the rhythm you like.

I recently made a website for my 7-year old daughter, and I really like the easy at which I can scale and control the typography without much effort from me. Prior, my method would have been to have a base and use a modular scale ratio and write media query to respond to the size size and the type-scale.

By @madsaylor - 3 months
Nice article