Miriam Suzanne avatar Miriam Suzanne

Reimagining Fluid Typography

Screenshot of “Reimagining Fluid Typography”

https://www.oddbird.net/2025/02/12/fluid-type/

Never do pixel math with em and rem units. That’s where we went wrong, by assuming that 16px == 1em is a reliable fact.

It reminds me a lot of what I was pretty vocal about a few years ago, including “People don't change the default 16px font size in their browser (You wish!)” and “Users DO change font size”.

But I don't understand how this code suggested by Miriam would fix the issue with “some of my favorite sites already using large type become too large when I set my browser preference. So I had to remove that preference.”:

html {
  font-size: clamp(1em, 0.9em + 1vw, 1.5em);
}