Typography does most of the work

A test we like: take a website you think looks expensive, remove every image, every colour and every icon, and look at what is left. Most of the time it still looks good. That is the typography — the choice of typeface, the sizes, the spacing, the width of the lines. It carries the design, and almost nobody notices it, which is the point.

Most business sites get five type decisions wrong, and they are the same five.

1. One typeface. Two at most.

A site with four fonts looks like a ransom note. One good typeface, used with discipline — bold for headings, regular for text — reads as confident. If you must have two, make them clearly different: a serif for headings and a plain sans for everything else, say. Never two that are almost the same.

2. Body text is bigger than you think

The most common mistake on the web is body text set at a size that was fine on a 2009 monitor and is squinting-small on a phone held at arm's length. Sixteen pixels is the floor; eighteen reads better for anything longer than a caption. If your designer says it looks "too big", look at it on a phone in daylight.

3. Lines should be short enough to find the next one

Around 60 to 75 characters per line is comfortable. Full-width paragraphs on a wide screen make the eye travel back across a desert to find the next line, and readers lose their place. Constrain the text column. Let the whitespace either side do nothing, gloriously.

4. Space between lines is where reading happens

Tight line spacing looks dense and skippable. Around one and a half times the text size gives each line room. It is the cheapest upgrade on the internet: one number in a stylesheet, and the whole site becomes easier to read.

5. Hierarchy: the eye needs a path

A page should be scannable in three seconds: this is the headline, these are the sections, this is the thing I can tap. That comes from a clear scale of sizes — big, medium, text — used consistently, not from making things bold at random. If everything is emphasised, nothing is.

Why this matters more than the logo

People read your site. That is what they do there, even if they think they are looking. Type that is easy to read makes the business feel careful; type that is hard to read makes it feel cheap, even when the words are good. Nobody will ever compliment your line spacing. They will simply stay a little longer, and trust you a little more, and not know why.

The rest of design — colour, imagery, motion — sits on top of this. Get the type right and you can be restrained with everything else. That is how we build, and it is why the sites still look right five years on.