Ask a team to improve their typography and the first instinct is usually to change the typeface. It is the most visible lever and almost always the least useful one. The paragraph in front of you is probably let down by measure, rhythm and contrast long before it is let down by its letterforms.

Set the measure first

Line length governs readability more than anything else on this list. Somewhere between 60 and 75 characters is comfortable for continuous reading. Wider and the eye loses its place returning to the left edge; much narrower and the rhythm turns choppy.

Set it in characters rather than pixels, then let the container respect it. A body column that stretches to fill a 27-inch display is not generous, it is unread.

Then set the rhythm

Line height should grow with measure and shrink with size. Long lines of small text need more space between them; a large headline needs noticeably less than its default. Most default stacks apply one value to everything, which is why headlines so often look loose and body copy looks cramped.

Contrast, in both senses

Two kinds matter. Tonal contrast, which is whether the text is legible against its background, and typographic contrast, which is whether a reader can tell a heading from a paragraph at a glance while scrolling past at speed.

If your page has four heading levels and a reader cannot rank them from a metre away, you have four decorative sizes and no hierarchy.

Small things worth the minute

  • Use real punctuation. Curly quotes, proper apostrophes, en dashes in ranges.
  • Prevent single-word final lines in headlines where you can.
  • Never centre more than three lines of continuous text.
  • Check every heading at 320 pixels wide before signing it off.

None of this requires a licence, a budget or a new library. It requires reading your own page slowly, once, on a phone.