You forgot "microscopic font size".
Why is this even a thing? Who thought microscopic text was attractive? It's such a turn off. I instantly close a page if I have to strain my eyes to read the text.
Why is this even a thing? Who thought microscopic text was attractive? It's such a turn off. I instantly close a page if I have to strain my eyes to read the text.
Though I do notice when text is well laid out. A nicely chosen font, a page that's comfortably wide-but-not-to-wide, good spacing and thought out contrast. As well, when there's nothing but the text (or as little else as possible) it's just perfect.
I've really tried to do that with my own projects like http://xwl.me . I really just wanted the nicest reading experience for random [0]things that I feel like writing and posting on the web.
Btw, I'd actually love it if there's more I can do for readability. I really just want this to be as easy on my eyes as possible, but I'm often not the best judge of that.
I have actually seen this quite a lot amongst less popular websites, such as websites for local dental practices. I work for a marketing company in the UK and I've even seen our own contracted designer do this. If I don't do it myself, I'm often asked by the client to increase the font size. It's quite pervasive.
xwl.me is readable and I like how it's very simple too. I might tint the background colour but not so much that it kills contrast between the BG and text. I notice my eyes feel scorched using editors with pure white BGs after some time and I'm not surprised; #fff creates the brightest light source for a monitor and it's never pleasant looking directly at a light or, more extreme, the sun.
If I always wore my reading glasses, which I usually don't, I would probably set this to 120%. With reading glasses, my vision on this retina display is razor sharp, and I still think the text on most web pages is too small for maximum comfort.
> Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory
> length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size.
> The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal.
The measure on your site is around 99 characters and that's a bit large. The best way I've found to work on the character length involves a dead simple tip I appropriated from Trent Walton[2]. If you add an asterisk at the 66 character of a line, you can easily manipulate the font-size up and down (I prefer percentages on the body element and ems on the individual elements, and then fuss with the single percentage) until you achieve an appealing measure.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...