> You either end up with insufficient distinction, or grossly excessive variation.
That’s the point of scales — to provide structure to any scale of values so there’s distinction without excessive variation.
That’s the point of scales — to provide structure to any scale of values so there’s distinction without excessive variation.
The only reason their values might seem to make any sense is if you have this weird idea that you should support at least five or six levels of headings. You actively shouldn’t.
Take the scale of 1.250 (the default of this tool). −1 is riskily small for any purpose, and −2 should never be used. +1 isn’t big enough for any kind of heading. +2 to +4 are reasonable heading sizes, but aren’t different enough from each other. +5 might be OK as a title, but very often you’ll want to go bigger. Depending on content, it might do for a heading style too.
Another mildly popular value: φ, 1.618. −1 is already too small for any purpose. +1 is decent for a subheading level, and +2 for a heading, and +3 for a title. (+3 is normally too big for any sort of heading; +4 could also be reasonable for a title.) But at that point you have only about four usable values, and where was the virtue in using a scale for them? You could have chosen more suitable values manually.
The virtue was in drastically reducing the space of correct answers.
How long would it take the average developer to pick sizes out of an infinite number of sizes? And how long would it take them to pick sizes out of a small number of sizes?
I know I do not want to fiddle with an infinitely large problem space.
Although the four values from φ are usable, they’re unlikely to be excellent for the purposes of anyone in particular. You can easily choose more suitable, and will if you consider your content and intended design rather than just slapping a number on it.
I am not a designer. Excellence is not for me by any stretch of the imagination.
It sounds like you have not yet figured that one out for yourself and are maybe severely misjudging your own capabilities. It is just absolutely, completely bonkers to suggest anybody can "easily" pull off "excellent" rhythm, space, dimensions, design.
"Just pick up the saxophone, wiggle your fingers, and off you go, Coltrane!"
What in the actual what are you talking about
We’re comparing font-size values for headings, not anything more in the design. I didn’t say anything about pulling off excellent rhythm, space, dimensions or design, nor would I.
There's a well known book called The Elements of Typographic Style that deals with text size (among many other things.)
This scale isn't helpful because it's arbitrary and based off of math percentages. And the actual values are just decimal values. 1.25, 1.33, etc...
It's not any better than eyeballing, and could in fact be worse, where a heading size might actually look better at 1.3rem instead of 1.33rem but because you're forcing yourself to stick to math you are using a size that is slightly too big.
And if you are looking for someone to have done this work for you, I'd recommend using Tailwind which has good sane defaults for many elements of typesetting:
No, it’s not. You don’t statically know what the default font size is, because it depends on various user configuration and document language. For English text, it’s mostly 16px, but there are devices where the default is higher or lower.
> You can scale it down to 12px for mobile viewport sizes
Please don’t. I’d advise against going down to even 15px; 12px is madness, you should basically never have any text that small.
> I'd recommend using Tailwind
Eh, dubious for web sites. Tailwind is very clearly designed for and targeted at apps, and makes all kinds of decisions that are not suitable for general-purpose websites. It’s not terrible, since there have been enough people wanting to use it for general-purpose websites that they’ve made it tolerable, but it’s still going to be at least mildly painful to work with, because its actual defaults are deliberately extremely stupid, and adapting it to this kind of work requires effectively overriding quite a lot of stuff. (Disqualifier: I’ve never actually worked with Tailwind in anger, because I hate most of its defaults and near-defaults, and it just doesn’t match how I like to work philosophically, which is a pity, because I could quite enjoy working with something not far off it for some purposes. But a lot of the way it treats things like colour and dark mode is just objectively a terrible way of doing things—they designed themselves into a corner and insist on using tools they designed like an abundance of modifiers, even when they’re clearly inappropriate.)
You don't even have to use Tailwind, simply open the demo and look at how they scale the text size and line height on different elements. You could pull the computed styles from your browser.
You and I agree that using arbitrary numbers is pointless. You clearly have a lot of other strong opinions I don't care to debate with you about.