Better Typography

Great typography

Good typography is mostly restraint. A sensible scale, comfortable spacing and enough contrast beat any clever effect. A label, a table cell, a marketing headline and an article paragraph should not share one set of rules. Apply these principles when building or reviewing anything with text in it.

Match the project's styling system. Before suggesting or writing any fix, check how the codebase styles things and express every change in that system: Tailwind utilities in a Tailwind project, plain declarations in CSS, CSS Modules, styled-components or StyleX. The cheat sheet maps each declaration to its Tailwind equivalent. Never introduce a second styling approach just to apply a typography fix.

Quick Reference

Core Principles

1. Serve the Right Format

Use .woff2 (Brotli compression, broadly supported) on the web. .woff is a fallback only for very old browsers; .ttf and .otf are raw desktop formats with no web compression. How the files are loaded is the project's own concern, this skill does not prescribe it.

2. Properties Over Raw Tags

When a CSS property exists, use it. font-weight: 650 instead of font-variation-settings: "wght" 650, font-optical-sizing: auto instead of "opsz", font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums instead of font-feature-settings: "tnum" 1. Properties keep working when a non-variable fallback renders. Reserve the raw-tag properties for custom axes ("GRAD" 80) and niche features ("ss01" 1) that have no property of their own.

3. No Fake Weights

When a weight or style is not loaded, the browser synthesizes it. That is a safety mechanism, not a feature. Set font-synthesis: none so missing files fail visibly instead of rendering a faked bold or italic.

4. Fewer Fonts, Sizes and Weights

Rarely use more than three fonts. Weight and size define hierarchy, but overusing them hurts readability quickly. Pair for contrast, not similarity: a serif headline with a sans body reads as deliberate, two near-identical sans-serifs read as a mistake.

5. Use a Type Scale with Semantic Names

Define a small set of sizes and deviate from it as little as possible. Hard-coded sizes without a system break down at scale. For solo projects, default names like text-sm work fine as long as the usage rules are clear. On a team, name sizes by use (text-body-sm), not by size, so the rules stay consistent.

6. Heading Sizes Descend with Level

Map each heading level used on a page to a descending step of the type scale: a lower level must never render larger than a higher one on the same page. Adjacent levels may share a size toward the small end of the scale as long as weight or spacing keeps them distinct. Pick the tag from the document outline and control the size with CSS; never skip levels or reach for an h4 because it "looks right".

7. Line-Height by Role

Headings tighter, around 1.1. Body copy 1.5 to 1.6. Prefer unitless values so line-height scales with the font size; fixed values like 24px do not.

8. Letter-Spacing by Size

Large headings often look better with slightly negative letter-spacing. Small uppercase labels need a little positive letter-spacing so letters do not feel crowded. Body copy at reading sizes needs neither.

9. Cap the Measure

Long lines make it hard for the eye to find the next line. Cap long-form text around 60–75 characters per line. Any unit works: 65ch measures characters directly, and a pixel or rem cap is just as good: at a 16px body size the range lands roughly between 560px and 680px depending on the font, so Tailwind's max-w-xl or max-w-2xl fit. What matters is that a cap exists and the resulting line length sits in range.

10. Wrap Deliberately

text-wrap: balance distributes text evenly across lines: use it on headings. text-wrap: pretty avoids leaving a single short word on the final line: use it on descriptions. Skip both in long-form text: browsers ignore balance past a few lines anyway, and evening out a whole paragraph wastes space and makes it harder to read. overflow-wrap: break-word where long words, links or IDs could escape the container. white-space: nowrap on labels and badges where a line break looks broken.

11. Tabular Numbers on Changing Values

Digits have different widths by default, so timers, counters and prices shift layout as they update. Apply font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums to any value that changes.

12. Truncate Without Losing Content

Single line: text-overflow: ellipsis with overflow: hidden and white-space: nowrap. Multiple lines: line-clamp. Truncation hides content, so if the missing text matters, keep the full value reachable in a tooltip or expanded view.

13. Write Copy Naturally, Style with CSS

Store text in natural case and control presentation with text-transform, so redesigns never require rewriting copy. Use smart punctuation: curly quotes in prose (straight quotes in code), an en dash for ranges like 2010–2020, an em dash to set off a thought, the single ellipsis character,   to keep values like 16 px together and ­ to control where long words may break.

14. Underlines from the Font

Default underlines sit wherever the browser decides. Pull position and thickness from the font's own metrics with text-underline-position: from-font and text-decoration-thickness: from-font, or tune manually with text-decoration-thickness, text-underline-offset and text-decoration-skip-ink. text-decoration-style draws the line dotted, dashed or wavy; a dotted underline is a common hint that a word carries extra information, like an abbreviation or a defined term. Unless the only thing animating is a color change, build the underline as a separate element instead of using text-decoration: color is the only part of a real underline that animates reliably.

15. Inputs at 16px on Mobile

iOS Safari zooms the whole page when an input's text is smaller than 16px. Keep input text at 16px on mobile viewports (text-base sm:text-sm). Avoid the maximum-scale=1 viewport meta: Safari ignores it for pinch zoom, but every other browser honors it and blocks zooming, which fails WCAG.

16. Size and Contrast Floors

Body text 16px (the web default and the right reading size). UI text can go smaller: 14px for inputs and menus (inputs still need 16px on mobile, see principle 15), 13px for captions, rarely below 12px. WCAG AA: 4.5:1 contrast for regular text, 3:1 for large text (roughly 24px and up).

17. Font Smoothing on the Root

On macOS text renders heavier than intended. Apply -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased and -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale (both covered by Tailwind's antialiased) once on the root layout so they cover all text.

18. Logical Properties for Direction

To support right-to-left content, use direction-agnostic properties: margin-inline-start instead of margin-left, text-align: start instead of left. Set lang so browsers pick the right quotes and hyphenation, and dir="rtl" where needed.

19. Style the Selection, Disable It Where It Distracts

::selection is a subtle way to embed brand in the reading experience; keep the combination legible. Use user-select: none on button labels where copying is unlikely and selection feels distracting, and make sure cmd+A only grabs text the user expects to copy. In cross-platform apps that feel closer to native, disable selection for the interface and keep it only on content worth copying.

Review Output Format

Always present changes as a markdown table with Before and After columns. Include every change you made, not just a subset. Never list findings as separate "Before:" / "After:" lines outside of a table. Group changes by principle using a heading above each table, and keep each row focused on a single diff. Write every After snippet in the styling system the project already uses.

Example

Tabular numbers

Line-height and measure

Rows should cite the specific file and property when it is not obvious from the snippet. If a principle was reviewed but nothing needed to change, omit that table entirely.

Common Mistakes

Review Checklist

• Web fonts are .woff2
• font-weight / font-variant-* used instead of raw axis and feature tags
• font-synthesis: none set; no faked weights or styles
• Sizes come from the type scale, no one-off values
• Heading sizes descend with level (h1 ≥ h2 ≥ h3…), levels stay visually distinct, none skipped
• Headings ~`1.1line-height, body1.5–1.6`, unitless
• Large headings have slightly negative tracking, small uppercase labels positive
• Long-form text capped around 60–75 characters per line
• Headings use text-wrap: balance, body uses text-wrap: pretty
• Changing numbers use tabular-nums
• Truncated content is reachable in full somewhere
• Copy stored in natural case, presentation via text-transform
• Underlines use from-font or tuned thickness, offset and skip-ink
• Inputs are 16px+ on mobile viewports
• Text sizes and contrast meet the floors (16px body, 4.5:1 / 3:1)
• antialiased applied once on the root layout
• Directional properties are logical (inline-start, start)
• Any styled ::selection stays legible