Admittedly this is a matter of opinion and the web is not short of opinions, but I'm wondering what users here have found are the most pleasant to read font and styling combinations?
I use this trick in my blog[1] to get typographic variety within the same font.
It's become my go-to.
- Make sure your text is not to small (HN also fails this one spectacularly)
- Lines should not be longer than like 132ch
- There should be left and right margins as to not have letters directly on the edge of the screen.
- For fonts, I prefer that a site just uses "sans-serif", "serif", and "monospace", but most people don't choose their browser default fonts, so for a general audience I'm not sure on this
Which suggests that content wins and form just needs to be good enough for the intended audience.
To put it another way, san-serif is usually the best font absent a brand identity because it is the simplest thing that might work.
The problem is there’s no shortcut to typographic expertise. Design is a process not two tips and one trick.
I agree to an extent, but why not put the extra effort into making that content easier to read, especially for those whose vision is degraded (which is ultimately all of us given enough time).
On desktop HN outperforms even an analogy with email where the trend seems to throw the user's functionality to the side where margins and padding result in only 5-6 emails appearing in an inbox list. No wonder people need AI to sort their mail if they can't even see it.
General recommendation is to reduce contrast a bit.
A good starting point would be #444 for the text and #eee for the background. #eeeee6 would warm the background a tiny bit.
Recommended line size is 65-85 characters, line-spacing at 1.3-1.5.