Friday, June 22, 2007

Web Design & Font Size aka Don't use small fonts retard

Many web masters seem painfully unaware of any news that doesn't come from digg, their favorite web master forum or some other social bookmarking site.

I've read two studies that show web browsing has become the new favorite hobby for many retired people. This isn't noticed by most web designers (or other people in general) because another study showed that older people (retired age) were less likely to interact when on the net. In the event they do "interact" there is a decent chance they are choosing to interact with people in their age range to avoid all the lame teenagers on the internet who "know it all".

Short version : there are lots of old people on the net but they aren't interacting

What does it all mean ?

This is the part that really gets me. I'm in my mid twenties and I run across sites all the time that use a 9px font for regular text. Are you retarded ? I have excellent vision and even I have trouble reading fonts this small. Furthermore, even if I can read it what makes anyone think I want to read 9px font for hours on end ?

Web masters do this in order to cram more content on the page for one reason or another. But in most cases they end up loosing visitors because the font is so stupidly small. Before anyone leaves me a comment saying "oh but duh you can resize the font doing XYZ". Guess what, not everyone knows that. Do you think your grandma knows that ? There is a good chance she doesn't. On top of that there are many web pages that have fixed sized fonts, they can't be enlarged. Why people engage in this level of stupidity is beyond me.

Short version : Hey web masters, make your fonts bigger and make them re-sizable. No one wants to read whatever it is your writing on a 9px font.

FYI : In firefox you can resize fonts by holding down the CTRL key and scrolling the mouse wheel (towards you for bigger, away for smaller). Also you can hold CTRL and press the + key. In IE I think you can go to View -> Font Size.

1 comment:

Raisul Islam said...

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