What are website standard font sizes?

Funky Munky

I was wondering for headings if size 12 bold and then plain size 10 for normal text is the way to go or size 14 and 12? What looks best on a page in your opinion and whats the general standard?

Goodshape

10px is very small. I'd go for at least 12px for normal text.

Although, as with all things web-design, it depends very much on the nature of the site. 10px is too small no matter what (imo) but you could maybe push it a bit in the other direction.. make important content (not just headings) stand out with a size 14px or 15px font.

buddy

Depends on the font. Verdana looks nice in 10pt and not so nice in 12pt.

Huggles

I've gone off verdana in a major way, I use Arial at 11pt nearly all the time now. I personally think 12 looks rotten in any font and 10 too small.

11 is the way to go baby!

Ph3n0m

I try and use percentages these days instead of points/pixels

Serbian

It is against the Accessibility Guideline 3.4 to use absolute sizes when controlling fonts. The proper way of dealing with fonts is to create a body class something like this:

body {
   font: normal 62.5% Verdana, ...;
   color: #333;
   margin: 0;
}

Why set the font size to 62.5%? This standardises the size of fonts across most browsers when using relative units like em. 1em = 10px, 1.1em = 11px etc. when using this. Also, when using units like px, they can't be resized in Internet Explorer 6 or earlier.

Ph3n0m

Serbian wrote:

It is against the Accessibility Guideline 3.4

c'mon give the people a link

Serbian

Ph3n0m wrote:

c'mon give the people a link

Apologies, I was referring to my hard-copy. I have edited the post to contain the link.

Funky Munky

TheGooner wrote:

I've gone off verdana in a major way, I use Arial at 11pt nearly all the time now. I personally think 12 looks rotten in any font and 10 too small.

11 is the way to go baby!

I'll give that a go, seems to make sense as 12 Arial looks a bit strange on the eye for some reason.