unraveled

Joshua Kaufman Goes Back to Pixels

On the advice of the infinitely wise Jeffrey Zeldman, I’m going back to pixels for my fonts. In theory, ems work great, but in practice there’s a pretty good chance that at least a few of my visitors are seeing mousetype. What about you? Did the site work better when I was using ems or do you prefer pixels? What do you use on your website?

Comments

  1. Points :S
    It looks fine in IE, but a couple of people have told me it looks awful on a mac.
    They suggested em’s, but as they can cause problems, would pixels be better?
    Why are they better?
    Thanx, Est

    Est on 5 Jun 02

  2. Pixels look fine.

    I use pixels, but mostly out of laziness to experiment with anything else. And they’ve never caused me problems, so I haven’t had reason to switch.

    Victor on 6 Jun 02

  3. I hate px.

    Two points:

    - I designed a site or Seniors about Discounts (Called SeniorDiscounts, oddly enough). I didn’t use any px measurements for this site, and left the font at default size, switching it to Arial.
    - I’ve been stuck using (someone else’s computer) with a 17 inch monitor set to 1280x1024. 10px is no fun like that.

    When this happens, I click on these options in Internet Explorer: Tools, Internet Options, Accessibility, and check “Ignore font sizes specified on web pages”. Assuming I actually want to read that page.

    Laptops and LCDs in general often can’t change resolutions. As a web designer, I think a lot of people change their resolutions back down to 800x600 because they don’t know how to make their fonts bigger (I’m talking Windows here).

    Surprisingly, many sites don’t break as horribly as you’d expect. This one, for instance, handled it reasonably well.

    I don’t think many people know about this: at a Web design conference 2 years I mentioned to the “px” man himself, Jeffrey Zeldman, and he indicated he hadn’t heard of it.

    Chad Lundgren on 7 Jun 02

  4. - Default sizes do work, but that’s hardly ever an option for designers.
    - 10px is definitely no fun at high resolutions but as Zeldman points out, many of the current browsers allow users to resize text set in pixels. IE Win should, but doesn’t yet. I believe it will be able to in the next version.

    Sorry Chad, but I didn’t understand your last comment. What exactly did you mention to Zeldman?

    Joshua on 7 Jun 02

  5. Joshua, I use both pixels and ems. Considering there is no ONE solution for this font thing, I’m trying to do the next best thing by, at least, offering the viewer a choice. So I’m using the swticher javascript (also described on A List Apart). One stylesheet is in pixels and the other is in ems. So far I have not heard a complaint.

    Jeff on 18 Jun 02

  6. Good idea Jeff. When I first started my site, I used the switcher, but then removed it soon after because I thought it was a little excessive. I might being using it again sooner than I think.

    Joshua on 18 Jun 02

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