Text is the main reason why websites exist. To serve its content it is good practice to design the site around its text. This does not stop by defining the typographic style but, for instance, includes the line length as well. The line length on the other hand defines the width of the content area, which in turn most likely has an impact on the dimensions and positions of all other elements on the site.
If you used this approach in times of the fixed 960px width, you would have done it for this width and be fine. Because of a very rigid layout you could rely on absolute lengths. This has changed with responsive design.
If you need the dimensions in a website to adapt in relation to another value, relative lengths are the method of choice. For measures in relation to text, there is a CSS unit called em. It’s a length proportional to the current font-size of an element and thus well suited, if we want to design our website around the text.
If em is new to you or you want to refresh your memory, there is a short introduction to em on Impressive Webs. Its conclusion
While it is possible to do an entire layout with just em units, I think for responsive layouts it’s probably best to use pixels or percentages — and, as mentioned, use ems for typography.
might not be quite along the lines of this article, but if it was I couldn’t tell you anything interesting.
Media Queries As Starting Point
When implementing a responsive design with text in mind one usually starts with using em in media queries. Breaking-points are, where the line length becomes to long and switching lines is getting harder for the eye.
Line length is measured by the number or characters per line (CPL). Good line lengths are roughly between 55 and 100 characters. So, if the lines become too long, we break the layout, so the width of the text area is shortened again.
Using em as units in media queries is beneficial compared to absolute lengths like px, because things don’t break, if the user chooses to zoom in or has set an initial font-size other than the default medium (16px).
Using em Around the Main Text
There is another possibility to reduce the CPL: increasing the size of the font. But things can get out of proportion if there are fixed paddings and margins around a text with changing font size. The logical step is to set paddings and margins in em, too. This way, they scale along with the text. We can take this approach even further and define more distances and sizes with ems. Probably we have to anyway, because the text area is likely to be aligned with other elements on the site. To keep the alignment, we need to use em there, too.
Have a look at this example directly taken from this blog:
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
On the left, there is a cutout of the top left area of an article page at a viewport width around 800 Pixels. On the right, the same region is shown at a viewport width around 960 Pixels. The only difference between these two states is a change in font-size from 1em to 1.25em. No other values were touched.
You can see, the gap between the white text area and the transparent sidebar increases, paddings around the elements of the sidebar increase, the size of the logo increases. The sidebar stays aligned to the right edge of the logo and top edge of the text area. Also, the big white headline keeps its alignment to the left edge of the main text, although the padding around the text increased.
This method turns out to be very powerful. The font-size acts as a central scaling factor, which we can adjust to scale whole parts of our layout with proportions intact. This whole idea is not new. But I haven’t noticed it in the wild very much. I’d like to see examples. So, if you know of some, let me know in the comments.
Putting It Together
The two types of breakpoints I mentioned above are:
- layout-breakpoints: The general layout of a site is changed by modifying position and size of header, footer and/or content columns.
- font-size-breakpoints: The general layout is untouched but the font is scaled.
Generally, I use layout-breakpoints if the main areas of the page can be shifted in a reasonable and non-confusing way. Otherwise, I use font-size-breakpoints as intermediary steps. em-based styling makes adjusting and playing around with these breakpoints very cheap and easy. Just change the font size and be sure everything will still look good and in proportion. As a result, I noticed I care less and less about screen sizes and set breakpoints where the text needs them.
Of course, where is light there is (some) shadow. It can be no fun to calculate with em units. You will find yourself converting px into em, which is especially annoying, if there is some element having set font-size to .7em or the like. You end up with thoughts like
Ok, for the root element
1emequals16px, so for this element1emequals.7\*16px. I want a padding of5px, so to set it inemthat is … uhm ….4464em. Great, what a nice number.
If you later choose to just scale up the font-size to .8em, but want to keep the size of paddings and so on, you have to recalculate them. For these cases, I find it useful to just set font-size for the element directly containing the text. Margins and paddings are then handled by wrapping elements for which the 1em reference will be the root element.