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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

What is the reason for extremely large font size trends, especially ticking up after 2015?

Huge typography is obnoxious, from marketing philosophy standpoint - it screams insecurity. From a technical standpoint, it is inappropriate for the screen size. Yet designers today love choosing HUGE typography to be bold and daring. From Dropbox to IBM, from GS to Apple - this whole trendy huge font thing bothers me.

I understand that they're using huge font sizes to show off to the world their new typeface. Make no mistake, it will be used in huge sizes as it is the current trend - a cool thing to do as a designer is to employ massive bold typography today.

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Font licenses are expensive. It's far cheaper to take something like Helvetica, and make slight changes to each of the glyphs, and rebrand it.

For context, I used to work on Google Fonts.

What's that have to do with Font licenses? I am talking about the size of the font taking up almost half of my screen.

> It's far cheaper to take something like Helvetica

Helvetica costs $$$ if you want to use it for commercial use. No more than any other font. Also, you cannot modify Helvetica, especially if you get it from Monotype (previously Linotype): https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/helvetica/

Nobody’s suggesting modifying. It’s accomplished through R&D... ripoff and duplicate.

Even ripping off requires time/money. Font design isn't a trivial activity that most people deem it to be.

I suggest downloading FontForge and try to make your own ripoff. You'll be amazed at the complexity and the skill required to design a typeface. Adjusting kerning pairs alone will take weeks of meticulous work.

All the cool kids are designing web sites on retina Macs. They bump up the font sizes because Safari doesn't have sane default scaling.

Genuine question. Aren't most fonts free?

No, most [citation needed] fonts cost money (assuming you mean "free as in beer"). Also just because a font is free as in beer (ie maybe it's shipped with your OS or something) doesn't necessarily mean that it's free to use on your website: everything is still copyright by default in most jurisdictions. Some fonts provide you with a license just like open source software (which may or may not be an open source or free software license, there are plenty of fonts that license themselves specifically for webfonts and charge a fee, or something along those lines).

Typefaces cannot be copyrighted. The actual font code can.

Yes, fair point, thanks. I don't know that the distinction matters for this discussion, but in case it does it's good to be precise. Mea culpa.

I think there's a good case to be made that most well-designed fonts, particularly for body text, still cost money. It takes a lot of time and effort to design a good body font. Having said that, the word "still" in my first sentence is doing a lot of work. :) I think over the last... oh, let's say 15 years, free fonts (both in the freedom and beer sense of "free") have really stepped up their game, and there's an increasing number of great ones out there.

Having said that, though, if you're an organization looking for subtle branding through typography, you aren't gonna go for any font, commercial or otherwise, that's in wide use. For Goldman Sachs, the cost isn't the point -- it's not like they couldn't afford to license any font they wanted in perpetuity. The branding is.

Well, body text in browsers now tends to be set in larger than the long-held default of 16px mostly because so many people have not only larger screens but denser screens than we did twenty years ago. I tend to land around 18 or 19px for body type, although that depends on the typeface and use case. (A lot of what I'm "typesetting" for the web is long-form fiction and it turns out that going a little bit bigger than "standard" often increases readability, although just a little.)

But I don't know that this is really a "trend"; Apple.com's body font size, for instance, appears to be 17px. If you actually look around the Goldman Sachs Design web site, they're actually using a surprising amount of 14px text as body text -- if anything, I think their design standards are for text that's too small, not too large.

(And, no, I really don't think Hacker News's default 12px body font is reasonable; I view this site zoomed to 115% or 125% normally.)

Doesn't it come from mobile-first design?

What an act of megalovania.

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