Hacker News Reader

Comment by ambrop7 | Hacker News Reader

L E T ' S A L L F I X T H I S P R O B L E M B Y U S I N G O V E R S I Z E D F O N T S S O T H A T T H E R E A P P E A R S T O B E M O R E C O N T E N T.

(seems like I can't change font size in the comments, spaces and caps will have to do)

View on HN

I thought you were just nitpicking, but then I tried to change the font size on TFA and was unable to. Cmd-minus and Cmd-plus in Chrome on OSX does nothing to the body text, just changes the size of the logos and social buttons. What's up with that? I don't think I've ever seen something like that before, is it some CSS gone bad or something worse?

It's a responsive layout. Change the window size, and the font size changes with it.

Poorly implemented here, though a sound concept when done correctly.

Information Architects (the creators of iA writer) shared an interesting post [1] on responsive typography that you may find interesting. One rational for having smaller text on small viewports, in addition to saving space, is to adjust for the distance that most readers view content on their phones from. We tend to hold our phones closer to our eyes, sit farther from our desktops, and hold tablets some distance in the middle. Having smaller text on a phone therefore accommodates that. Trent Walton wrote a useful post on the subject as well [2].

1. http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive-typography-... 2. http://trentwalton.com/2012/06/19/fluid-type

You're right, that's really strange though. It looks crappy on my phone, the font size is too small there, but it's too large on the desktop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com