Apr 20, 2025
As I contemplate a long-overdue redesign, it’s worth looking back at what we’ve learned about web typography over the past 20+ years. (Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.)
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As I contemplate a long-overdue redesign, it’s worth looking back at what we’ve learned about web typography over the past 20+ years. (Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.)
A modular scale is a sequence of numbers that relate to one another in a meaningful way. Using the golden ratio, for example, we can produce values for a modular scale by multiplying by 1.618 to arrive at the next highest number, or dividing by 1.618 to arrive at the next number down. By using culturally relevant, historically pleasing ratios to create modular scales and basing the measurements in our compositions on values from those scales, we can achieve a visual harmony not found in layouts that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers.
More Meaningful Typography by Tim Brown