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Comment by jlangemeier | Hacker News Reader

I was going to comment on much the same thing; I had to adjust my monitor angle a few times to find a sweet spot where I could actually see what the guy was talking about. Also, a fixed font size in the age of responsive design is a huge no-no in accessibility; as well as, general UI/UX.

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> a fixed font size

Do you mean like using px values instead of ems? If so, don't most rendering engines convert internally to px anyway, rendering ems irrelevant for zooming these days? That was my understanding at least.

em is more important when dealing with allowing fonts to be able to handle going from phones to tablets to large screens; while rendering engines do convert to px on the fly; using em allows them to handle it for the machine it's rendering on. At least that's what I was fed as reasoning a few years back.

So then what is a better "when in doubt" guideline?

For what it's worth, Google recommends using pixel units for font sizes: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/UseLegible...

I personally use a base font size in pixels and use em units to increase or decrease relatively.

I don’t want to start a flame war of any kind here but I did want to state that I very much dislike googles designs, I find their UIs very hard to navigate and generally ‘displeasing’ to the eye.

For colors and contrast, use something like http://paletton.com/ where they have it set up to show a color scheme for multiple types of sighted issues.

For fonts and text; the Google guidelines aren't awful, assuming you're not hand calculating your px and use em (they talk about it, but it's extremely brief).

Or were you asking about something completely different?

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