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You have completed Web Typography!
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Choosing a font size can make or break the readability of your webpage. We’ll talk about some general rules of thumb to go by and utilizing a typographic scale.
Video Correction
-
1.25rem =
20px
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Rems, which stand for route ems, have been
on the rise in web design.
0:00
Instead of being relative to it's parent
class or
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element like an em, Rems are relative to
the route em, set to the html.
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As mentioned before, the common default
font size for browsers is 16 pixels.
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So in this case, one Rem will always equal
16 pixels.
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Instead of being relative to a parent
class, or element.
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In our example, let's use rems, or root
ems, instead of ems.
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We know that 16 pixels is the browser
default, so
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here, 1.25 rem will be equal to 24 pixels.
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Then we can set our h1 at 3 rem, which
will be equal to 48 pixels.
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Let's save and refresh.
0:44
Our font sizes have changed based on their
rem values.
0:45
Even if we add a container value of ten
pixels, and we'll set this to be
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1.25 rem for our paragraphs, we can
refresh, and we can see that these do
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not change because they're referencing the
root element and not the parent element.
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This also corrects the problem of
compounding ems and
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still provides the benefits of scalability
for responsive design.
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It should be noted, that Internet Explorer
8, does not support rems.
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So if IE8 support is required, then you
would want to set a fallback in pixels.
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I've also provided some further reading in
a link to tools that
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help size references with pixels to ems
and rems.
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Lastly, sizing your headings, paragraphs
and other text elements may seem a little
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tricky, and it's not a great idea to just
guess by shooting in the dark.
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This can lead to inconsistent heading and
paragraph sizes.
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This is why following a typographic scale
can help immensely.
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A scale gradually increases at a certain
rate to ensure consistent proportions for
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your font sizes.
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The classic typographic scale increases in
intervals of one, two, three and then 12.
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It's been used for centuries and
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is reliable to adhere to especially if
you're using 16 pixels as your base size.
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I liked our body copy at about 20 pixels,
but
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that size is not in that typographic scale
we just looked at.
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Don't fret.
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Let's take a look at typescale.com and
build one out.
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This site is incredibly helpful because
you can set your base size,
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test different scales, and even import
Google webfonts to the site.
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So let's set ours up.
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We'll put 20 pixels here, and we see it's
in reference to 1.25 em.
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We can set our scale.
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I like the major third for our example.
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If we wanted to, we can even see what our
typeface, alegreya,
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looks like by writing it in here, and then
copying it and
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pasting it into this font family, and here
it appears.
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So we're now presented with different em
values to build our scale.
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We'll start with this base size at 1.25 em
so I wanna set that for our body copy.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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So now we're given some sizes in em's and
this largest one will be our h1,
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the next largest is our h2, h3, and so
forth.
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This 1 em is what we want our paragraphs
to be at.
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Now, in our design, I've already set these
up down here as h1, h2, h3,
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with those corresponding sizes.
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I didn't go all the way to h6 because our
design doesn't have all those
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heading numbers.
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We could also set the p element to be 1 em
if we like, but
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this is set by default in the browser.
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Remember, these are relative to our body
font size of 1.25 em.
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So let's go check out what the scale looks
like.
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Great.
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Our typographic scale looks good and it's
intact, and
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if we were change our body font size here,
let's say to 1 em,
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our whole scale changes with it which is
very nice, and it's great for responsive
3:49
design, but I really want this to be 1.25
em, so I'll move it back to that.
3:53
Now that that's set up, we still have a
little ways to go,
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but getting a proper body size and scale
is a great place to start.
4:01
To summarize this lesson we saw that
pixels give the designer much control over
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the design but lack easy scalability and
accessibility.
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Em's are easily scalable but can be
confusing at first and
4:15
have issues with compounding font sizes
and nested elements.
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Rems are root ems.
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They're growing increasingly in popular
use because they bring
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the scalability of ems without that hassle
of compounding font sizes.
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Once you've set your body text size,
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he sure to build the rest of the sizes
based on a typographic scale.
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That's it for font sizing.
4:37
Next we'll look at measure and space
4:39
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