A type scale you can defend

Every type scale generator will hand you a geometric ratio and a column of numbers. Almost none of those numbers survive contact with a real page.

The problem is that a scale is not a sequence, it is a set of jobs.

Six jobs, not twelve steps

A content site needs roughly six sizes, and each one has a job:

• The statement. One or two per page, set to be read at a glance across a room.
• The section heading. Large enough to break the page, small enough to sit near body copy.
• The subheading. Almost body size, carried by weight rather than scale.
• Body. The one size you are actually going to read.
• The caption. Metadata, credits, dates.
• The label. Small-caps energy, wide tracking, used for structure rather than reading.

If you cannot say which job a size does, you do not need the size.

Ratios lie at the extremes

A 1.25 ratio is pleasant in the middle and useless at the top — you need eight steps to get from body copy to something genuinely large, and steps five through seven do nothing.

We set the two ends first. Body size comes from the measure we want: around 65 characters at a comfortable reading distance. The statement size comes from the layout: how much of the viewport we want a single sentence to occupy. Then we fill the middle with as few steps as we can get away with.

Tracking is part of the scale

The number everyone forgets. Type set at 72px with the tracking that looked right at 16px reads as loose and cheap.

Our rule of thumb: negative tracking that grows with size, roughly -0.02em at body and down to -0.05em at display. It is not a law, but it is a much better default than zero.

The measure is the real constraint

A beautiful scale at a 120-character measure is an unreadable page. Set the measure first, between 60 and 75 characters, and let the size follow. Everything else is decoration.