The four most important typographic considerations for body text are point size, line spacing, line length, and font (see font recommendations), because those choices determine how the body text looks.
point size should be 10–12 points in printed documents, 15-25 pixels on the web.
line spacing should be 120–145% of the point size.
The average line length should be 45–90 characters (including spaces).
The easiest and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to use a professional font, like those found in font recommendations.
Avoid goofy fonts, monospaced fonts, most free fonts, and system fonts—especially times new roman and arial.
Use curly quotation marks, not straight ones (see straight and curly quotes).
Use bold or italic as little as possible, and not together.
Never underline, except perhaps for web links.
all caps are fine for less than one line of text.
Use centered text sparingly.
Put only one space between sentences.
Don’t use multiple word spaces or other white-space characters in a row.
If you don’t have real small caps, don’t use them at all.
Use 5–12% extra letterspacing with all caps and small caps.
kerning should always be turned on.
Use first-line indents that are one to four times the point size of the text, or use 4–10 points of space between paragraphs. Don’t use both.
Always use hyphenation with justified text.
Don’t confuse hyphens and dashes, and don’t use multiple hyphens as a dash.
Use ampersands sparingly, unless included in a proper name.
Use proper trademark and copyright symbols—not alphabetic approximations.
In a document longer than three pages, one exclamation point is plenty (see question marks and exclamation points).
Put a nonbreaking space after paragraph and section marks.
Make ellipses using the proper character, not periods and spaces.
apostrophes point downward.
Make sure foot and inch marks are straight, not curly.
Posted June 4th, 2025 @ 08:17pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I love when "remind me of this message at 7pm" works… but when it doesn't, there's seemingly no way to make it work. I can't add a link to that message thread in Reminders.
And that's just Siri.
On my HomePods I can say "Play my Alison playlist on Shuffle." It works every time. On my iPhone it plays Allison Crowe every time. That's not what that playlist is (it's Taylor Alison Swift songs. 😃)
When we buy a physical product, we accept that it won’t change in its lifetime. We’ll use it until it wears off, and we replace it. We can rely on that product not evolving; the gas pedal in my car will always be in the same place.
However, when it comes to software, we usually have the ingrained expectations of perpetual updates. We believe that if software doesn’t evolve it’ll be boring, old and unusable. If we see an app with no updates in the last year, we think the creator might be dead.
Posted June 25th, 2023 @ 12:02pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I am liking iCloud Private Relay. One feature, though, that I wish it had… let me specify an IP address or a website domain name for which I don't want it to be active. A "whitelist" of sorts.
I administrate a few sites, and it's a hassle to turn the feature off and turn it on. I appreciate the "Reload and Show IP Address" option, but that doesn't work for new tabs from the same session and it's something you have to do every time.
Posted March 13th, 2019 @ 12:52pm by Erik J. Barzeski
So… it's been awhile. I don't think I wrote my 2015 prescription down, nor my switch to the Oakley Barrelhouse 0.5 frames. I'm sticking with the same frames (in a "matte midnight" color, which has a strong blue tint to it).
My prescription and eyesight actually improved quite a bit. I was -1.25 in both eyes, and am now -1.00 in the right and -0.50 in the left. I hadn't noticed before how bad my eyesight had gotten (with my glasses) out of my left eye, but now I can see it… Anyway:
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