r2witco

R2witco is Whit Anderson: designer, Star Wars geek, cat lover, artist of sorts, and probably a few other things as well.

This is an outlet that tracks my online behavior. There are a few of my different feeds pumping information here to be easily digested by anyone wanting to see what's going on.

I've stopped posting so much Star Wars stuff on this tumblr, and have started posting all of that on my Star Wars tumblog ~ DBSW.

mattmcinerney: The book to screen comparison photo I posted the other day got me thinking about other devices compared to books in terms of point size. I decided to see what iPhone font sizes compared to type size in a book might look like. The book I used for comparison was Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style(I can’t think of a more carefully designed book). I then put together a page for the iPhone with a range of different point and pixel size placeholder text, with a pixel ruler on the left side. The Elements of Typographic style is set in 10pt Minion. For the iPhone we’ll use Times New Roman, since Minion isn’t available. Getting a decent picture was kind of difficult but I managed. I found that I hold my phone about an equal distance away from me as I do a book when reading, so distance doesn’t need to play too much into the equation. Laying the two side by side, I came to the conclusion that the best point size for easy reading on the iPhone is somewhere between 13pt-14pt(or 17px-19px). Default for the iPhone(like any browser) is 12pt/16px. Conclusion? This little test is by no means definitive, but… If you are creating an app/web app for the iPhone with a significant amount of text, think about bumping up the font size just a little bit more than the default setting, especially if you’ve set user-scalable=no. And don’t forget about line-height. Note: I didn’t try using em or percent for measurement in this test, but if you want to do the conversion yourself, here’s a nice chart for that. great write, thanks!

mattmcinerney:

The book to screen comparison photo I posted the other day got me thinking about other devices compared to books in terms of point size.

I decided to see what iPhone font sizes compared to type size in a book might look like. The book I used for comparison was Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style(I can’t think of a more carefully designed book). I then put together a page for the iPhone with a range of different point and pixel size placeholder text, with a pixel ruler on the left side. The Elements of Typographic style is set in 10pt Minion. For the iPhone we’ll use Times New Roman, since Minion isn’t available.

Getting a decent picture was kind of difficult but I managed. I found that I hold my phone about an equal distance away from me as I do a book when reading, so distance doesn’t need to play too much into the equation. Laying the two side by side, I came to the conclusion that the best point size for easy reading on the iPhone is somewhere between 13pt-14pt(or 17px-19px). Default for the iPhone(like any browser) is 12pt/16px.

Conclusion? This little test is by no means definitive, but… If you are creating an app/web app for the iPhone with a significant amount of text, think about bumping up the font size just a little bit more than the default setting, especially if you’ve set user-scalable=no. And don’t forget about line-height.

Note: I didn’t try using em or percent for measurement in this test, but if you want to do the conversion yourself, here’s a nice chart for that.

great write, thanks!

  1. ffffone reblogged this from r2witco
  2. r2witco reblogged this from mattmcinerney and added:
    great write, thanks!
  3. mattmcinerney posted this
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