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Winging It

Relative Units & Typography

With special guest Alan Stearns

Join Miriam Suzanne, Stacy Kvernmo, and special guest Alan Stearns – typography enthusiast, co-chair of the CSS Working Group, and self-described CSS Panjandrum – for a conversation about typography.

Responsive Typography has been around for at least a decade in various forms, but has become even more popular with tools like Utopia.fyi, Fluid.style, Typetura, and more – all relying on the latest CSS units and math functions. But there are still a lot of questions worth asking.

This post is part of a series on revisiting fluid typography:
  1. Relative Units & Typography
  2. Reimagining Fluid TypographyAre we responding to the right inputs?
  3. Revisiting Fluid TypeWith special guest Richard Rutter
  4. Designing for User Font-size and ZoomUsing modern CSS units and math functions
  5. Visualizing Responsive TypographyWhat do all the numbers in our `clamp()` do?
  6. The Best CSS Unit Might Be a CombinationWe don't have to choose between `px` and `rem` for spacing
  7. Responsive and Fluid Typography with Baseline CSS Features

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Posts about Typography

  1. A graph showing font size and zoom effectiveness versus viewport width. The font size, calculated as calc(17px + 2.5vw), increases linearly with viewport width. The 500% zoom line, representing the maximum possible zoom, shows that zoom becomes less effective as viewport width increases, failing to provide a 200% font size increase beyond a viewport width of 2040px.
    Link post type

    Responsive and Fluid Typography with Baseline CSS Features

    As designers, it makes sense to think about what space is available in the browser, and adjust your typography accordingly. It’s also important to remember that different users will have different font-size needs – and the more a font size is responsive to the viewport, the less responsive it will…

    see all Link posts
  2. A measuring tape with both imperial and metric, then a ruler with only metric, and another ruler with combined units
    Article post type

    The Best CSS Unit Might Be a Combination

    We don’t have to choose between px and rem for spacing

    There are many articles and established CSS best-practices that rely on determining the correct or best units to use. Now that comparison functions are well supported in CSS, we don’t have to choose.

    see all Article posts
  3. Miriam gesturing as she talks in a video thumbnail
    Article post type

    Visualizing Responsive Typography

    What do all the numbers in our clamp() do?

    There are multiple tools that can help create a fluid font-size calculation for CSS – generally expressed as a clamp() function combining em (or rem) with vw (or vi) units. But the results are difficult to understand at a glance, so I wanted to visualize what’s going on…

    see all Article posts