Text is an integral part of design. It is used in product labels, product descriptions, and price tags. It’s easy to use and even easier to edit compared to stuff like images.

It’s hard to go wrong with text though this still happens. A lot of these problems usually arise when you port the entire design from desktop to mobile or vice versa. Sometimes it’s just something you overlook. There are two kinds of problems with font sizes: 

They’re both hard to read and bad for your conversions.

Overlarge fonts usually take up too much space. Text that could fit in a single line ends up filling multiple lines. These lines intimidate users and slow down reading speed. It can be doubly annoying if you have short sentences running over multiple lines. If you can only fit three or four words in a line you’re doing it wrong. This is especially damaging on mobile where screens are relatively small.

Undersized text forces your customers to squint at the screen. This isn’t an ideal experience. A lot of customers, the impatient ones and those with poor eyesight, just won’t bother. 

The ideal size depends on the font though 16px has been found to work well across all of them. If you’re targeting senior citizens you can increase it a little but don’t get too carried away and end up with a font that only displays three words per line.

 

Contrast

Ensure your text stands out against the background by using contrasting colors. Black text against a white background is great but light grey text against the same white background is a bad idea.

 

Spacing

Whenever you have to use large blocks of text, say in product descriptions, space out your paragraphs. A wall of text is just intimidating. You can also use bulleted points and vary both text color and font size to create emphasis around certain words or phrases. The internet is a visual medium and you always have to keep that in mind.

 

Examples