In the recent weeks and months I started wondering more and more about the size of fonts on common websites. Screen sizes are getting bigger and bigger, and while we gain screen estate font sizes on the web get smaller and smaller. At least it seems that way. The font size used on most of the web sites out there was defined in times where we had a 640×480 or 800×600 screen resolution on our computers. Even our smartphones have higher resolutions nowadays.

I am not a designer myself, but I like to use things that are well designed and thought-through. Small fonts on websites that I primarily visit for their written content are neither. Nowadays we can chose from a huge amount of beautifully designed fonts for whatever it is that we want to publish to charm the visitor’s eyes. Many people aren’t doing that, though. Content is wrapped up in small-size fonts most of the time. The library of fonts we have to select from gives us so many gorgeous font types. I would love my eyes to be allowed to be flattered by the beautiful curvatures of Georgia while reading an article or a blog post.

I went looking whether there are others who think in a similar way and found many like-minded people. I especially would like to link to an article of Jeff Zeldman who had similar thoughts and an article of the Information Architects with a rather in-depth view about the design choices during the development of iA Writer, a writing app for Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Big, beautiful fonts make both reading and writing much more enjoyable. Big fonts are much friendlier to the eyes. As a reader one doesn’t lose the reading position within an article so easily (see for yourself on sites like Medium); As a writer the progress during composing an article can actually be felt. Every word is a big step forward.

Please give beautiful fonts the space they deserve.