Typography that breathes

I spent years treating vertical rhythm as a tidiness problem. It is a tone problem. Tight leading reads as urgent. Open leading reads as considered. Neither is correct in the abstract.

The change that mattered

Moving body text from fourteen to seventeen pixels and leading from 1.4 to 1.7 did more for how the writing felt than any typeface change I have made.

Nobody has ever told me a page was too easy to read.

The numbers I use now

• Body copy at seventeen pixels, leading 1.7
• Measure capped around sixty-five characters
• Headings at 1.15 leading, because tight looks deliberate at large sizes
• Paragraph spacing at roughly one line, never less

None of these are laws. They are a starting point that is defensible, which matters more than being optimal, because it ends the argument and lets you look at real text.

Read it on a phone at night

Most typography decisions are made on a large bright display by someone who already knows what the text says. Almost all reading happens somewhere else. Checking your work in the actual conditions changes more decisions than any amount of theory.