Suggestion for v11: font-size

Considering global.css, I looked at several CMS's example sites and tried to get an idea of what font-size and line-height is used, on average.  This might be worth considering for v11. I believe we have 13px as a default for Composr, but here's some information that might help to set a new default font-size and line-height. I collected these from example sites using the browsers 'Inspect Element' tool.

Anyone else have thoughts on a default font-size and line-height, please share your experiences and views.
 

CMS	font-size	line-height	color
Joomla	17px	32px	mostly black
Wordpress	18px	32px	Mostly grey
Drupal	18px	29px	Mostly black
Typo3	14px	24px	Mostly black
SquareSpace	19px	34px	Black
Wix	18px	"normal"	Black

 

v11 will up the default from 13px to 14px. I think when things are done it'll be a config option, if it isn't already - so nobody is going to have to change the CSS if they want a bigger font size.

Most of the products you listed are designed for a big-splash/casual-reader kind of feel rather than designing for varied and dense content sites, which is more typical of how Composr is used. Or at least, that's what the designers of those default themes liked, and designers of themes don't necessarily design for practical use.

Here's what I collected from some popular information-dense sites…

Facebook 15px
Twitter 15px
YouTube 13px
Google 14px

(15+15+13+14)/4 = 14.25px. i.e. if rounded this is what we will have as the default in v11.

I think really the most critical thing is readability, followed then by how good things looked. Clearly font sizes have gone up a lot since the early days of the web, due to bigger screens, better design, and older audiences.

I looked at a couple of articles:

• https://learnui.design…font-size-guidelines.html
• https://varvy.com/mobile/legible-font-size.html

which both said 16px.

I think here we can see there's a disagreement between designers, and popular websites that want to cram a lot in. That's understandable, different professionals are optimising for different things and rarely put themselves in each other's shoes.

I'll add an issue to the tracker to reconsider the default and link to this topic, which is where we should organise this kind of thing. Practically speaking for Composr, we have 834 issues on the tracker, so if people have strong views about changing the default they should vote on the tracker issue to express that, and the issue will stand out against the others.

Edit: Tracker issue 0004500: Reconsider default font size - Composr CMS feature tracker