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How to Boost Website Readability With Typography

🌙 When it comes to designing long articles or blog posts, you want to make it easy for your visitors to read online. The choice of font is crucial here. Learn what to look for when choosing fonts and editing text:

✔️ Stroke contrast. This is the difference between the main strokes of the character and the connecting ones. Fonts with very high contrast are hard to read. However, they are best for headings. For your body text, use a low-contrast font.

✔️ Font type. For long pieces of texts, avoid using the display and handwritten fonts. When the outline of the font looks familiar, it saves the reader from having to adapt to it. Sans serifs such as PT Sans, Mediator, Futura, Open Sans are easy to read. From serif fonts, opt for PT Serif, IBM Plex Serif, Kazimir Text, or Charter.

✔️ Font size. We recommend the font size of 18px for body text. For short texts—photo captions or quotes—increase your font size to 20px or 22px.

✔️ Line height. This is the vertical distance between lines of text. It can be set as a percentage or in pixels. Remember: Line height should be visually larger than the space between the letters. Too much line spacing makes the text too loose, and too little makes it too tight. The smaller the font size, the larger the line height.

✔️ Line length. The ideal number of characters per line is 50-60 characters including spaces and punctuation. Depending on the font this number may go up to 75 characters. In any case, use 8 column text width and you won't go wrong. If the lines are too long, the reader can lose the line or the meaning of the text. If you make the lines shorter, the reader will have to move their eyes too often, which can be tiring.

✔️ Alignment. People are used to reading texts from a fixed position on the left, so for a lengthy copy, it is better to align text to the left. Center or right alignment is best for short phrases like quotes.
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