Reimagining Fluid Typography

The browser provides a default text size based on user preferences, and our text should be relative to that preference. Establishing our root font-size with an em value helps keep that relationship intact.

Similarly, font ‘scales’ are intended to maintain some internal harmony across a range of different font sizes. By establishing our entire scale in relative units like em and rem, we maintain a consistent relationship between sizes, while allowing the entire system to scale up or down relative to user defaults or browser (page) zoom.

Recently, ‘fluid typography’ has pushed us to incorporate viewport or container relative units into our font sizing as well – generally with a clamp() function to integrate both em/rem and vi/cqi inputs in a responsive algorithm with lower and upper boundaries. See utopia.fyi for the most common approach:

:root {
  font-size: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0815rem + 0.2174vi, 1.25rem);
}

Those numbers look a bit magical, because they are. Utopia asks us to start from a range of font sizes defined in px values, and then it does a conversion to rem by assuming that 1rem == 16px. As long as that assumption holds true, the math above will scale our font from an 18px minimum to a 20px maximum.

This is an assumption that developers often lean on, even when we’re not doing fluid math. It’s not an entirely reliable assumption, but it matches the default in most browsers, and things can feel pretty squishy if we don’t do some form of translation-to-pixels. How can we choose a font size using units that are entirely untethered from the display? What is 1rem without a conversion?

It’s a reliable approach, but the more I play with it the more questions I have. So let’s dig in, and see if there are improvements we can make.

I’ve been playing with my browser settings, starting with fonts and then the default font-size. These are settings that most browsers provide. Since I generally prefer web text around 24px, that seems like an obvious preference to set, right?

But I’ve already designed my site to have large text relative to the user default. Ignoring the fluid bits for now, I set the root font-size to roughly 1.5em – half again the size of the user setting. When my preference was set to the default 16px, my site would already display text at 24px. Now that I’ve said I want 24px font-size, my site has increased to 36px!

It seems like Chromium browsers now have a way of selecting from the default medium or a list of larger and smaller options:

• Very small
• Small
• Medium (recommended)
• Large
• Very large

You can still get to an exact-font-size setting, but it’s hidden away. That change makes some sense to me, and better reflects what’s happening. I can make font sizes generally larger or smaller across the web (at least where sites use relative sizing) – but I can’t actually establish a single font size that sites will directly respect.

The problem is that’s not actually what I want from setting a font-size preference. My goal here is not to make the text on every website larger than it was before – regardless of the existing design. I really do want sites to usually just give me text around 24px (or ‘large’), because that’s a pretty good default for me. Sites with smaller body text would ideally increase their font size, but sites with the same size or larger text certainly shouldn’t get even bigger.

It’s not just my site – this has become a common practice across the industry. And it means some of my favorite sites already using large type become too large when I set my browser preference. So I had to remove that preference.

I see this situation play out over and over on the web. The lesson we often learn is users don’t set preferences, when the reality is that we applied their preferences badly. When the preference doesn’t do what I want, of course I have to stop using that preference.

That leads us to an assumption that the browser preference will always be 16px. We compare that to our mockups with 24px fonts, do some basic arithmetic, and set our base font size to 1.5em. Good enough.

TL;DR – Never do pixel math with em and rem units. That’s where we went wrong, by assuming that 16px == 1em is a reliable fact.

In this case, there’s a quick and easy solution that would make font-size preferences work across the board. There’s a single root font size setting that is guaranteed to match the user font size. It’s generally kept a secret, but Adrian Roselli has broken the magician’s code to bring us the good news:

It’s none.

—Adrian Roselli, The Ultimate Ideal Bestest Base Font Size That Everyone Is Keeping a Secret, Especially Chet

Don’t set a root font size. Adrian’s article is excellent, and I think he’s probably right on this one. The best base font size is the user’s default font size – set in the browser.

html {
  /* no size is the best size */
}

But I still have an issue, because the browser doesn’t give me many options for setting the preference. And (not surprisingly) one size does not fit all sites or situations.

I like reading large text, but ‘large’ is a relative concept. A font size of 72px is nearly unreadable on my phone, but looks great for headings on my external 20-inch monitor. Similarly, the common default 16px font size feels fine to me on a phone, with limited line length, but it’s smaller than I want when I have 20 inches to fill.

Of course, I could set different defaults for different devices, but that doesn’t help when I resize windows. Even with the browser constantly running fullscreen, my laptop is only sometimes plugged into an external monitor. When I unplug it, I have less space available.

Again I’ve heard a common refrain that “users don’t resize their windows” – but I find that entirely unbelievable. In fact, I’d bet I’m in a very small minority by using mostly fullscreen apps. When I watch other people compute, I expect to see a scattering of randomly-sized windows overlapping each other on a single desktop. That’s the default. And so those overlapping windows have to get dragged around and resized in order to navigate through different tasks. Average users don’t sit around resizing windows up and down for fun, like we do, but they absolutely adjust the window size to fit different tasks. I set up a poll to see how people on Mastodon manage browser windows.

As a web surfer, I would like my default font size to respond to those changes. As a web author, I would like my site to be responsive as well. We design layouts that respond smoothly from the smallest screen to the largest – it seems absurd to keep the base font size locked in place through that entire responsive process.

So I want responsive typography, and browsers (as a rule) don’t make that available in user settings. There are some browsers (like Safari) that accept arbitrary CSS preferences, but that’s rare – and only useful to people who write CSS.

There are a few ways I could imagine approaching this. Maybe we just add a slight scale factor to the user default:

html {
  font-size: calc(1em + 1vw);
}

But that will always be larger than the user asked for. So we could adjust it down slightly, and provide clamps:

html {
  font-size: clamp(1em, 0.9em + 1vw, 1.5em);
}

For now, I like that we’ve put the focus on what an em represents to the user, rather than how an em will render under default conditions. We’re not trying to achieve a specific font size (or range of sizes) by assuming the user has a 16px default. There’s no calculation witchcraft aimed at some target value in our designer mind, and the clamps are not related to my desired range of outcomes. Instead we’re adding a slight responsiveness to the user value, and using the clamps to keep our fluid value within range of the user’s intent.

Relative units like em and rem are excellent for internal relationships – keeping the scale consistent between body text and headings, for example. But things always go wrong when we try to treat em as an alias for px, with mental conversions based on their assumed default relationship. At that point we’re keeping zoom, but discarding everything else about the user preference.

Any time you start doing mental math with 16px == 1em, stop yourself and ask if that math holds up over a whole range of user preferences.

(It doesn’t. Don’t do it.)

I also have an issue where my web-surfing preference for large text does not apply equally to all sites. When I’m reading a blog post, I just want a nice big view of the text. When I’m scanning bank transactions, I’m happy for something a bit more compact. I think browsers like Arc are on the right track with per-site style adjustments.

We could take my responsive-default approach even further by providing site-specific controls as part of our UI. We still want to make sure the defaults are reasonable, based on the global preferences, and only provide the UI as a progressive enhancement. To quote accessibility expert Kate Kalcevich:

The real advance in accessibility is providing options and adapting to user preferences.

—Kate Kalcevich, Scaling up Accessibility (video)

I mocked up a (stand-alone) custom element with a rough proof of concept. I’m sure there are ways to improve it, such as adjusting the values, adding a form submit option, or tracking the preference in local storage – but I’m curious what you think.

See the Pen Fluid-Type Custom Element by @miriamsuzanne on CodePen.

It may not be the Ideal Bestest ™ base font size, but we haven’t strayed far – and we’ve avoided magic numbers or calculation witchcraft. Maybe the slight deviation is warranted for a more responsive and user-adaptive site?

What do you think? Let us know on Mastodon or Bluesky!