During the early part of my career, I used to love to design and develop with very tiny fonts. In-fact, there were a time when there was a craze for Bitmap pixel fonts which looks the best at 8px. I used to build apps for Physicians who uses a hand-held device called Pocket PC[1]. My weapon of choice when it comes to fonts were these 8px bitmap fonts for the interfaces.
They look super sleek and smooth but the physicians keep complaining about the font-size. The clinics/hospitals were replacing pen-paper with these Pocket PC Devices and the physicians depend on them for their earnings. I learned my lessons and made the fonts bigger. Designs do not look so nice (at-least to me and my team) but they loved my work. It paid for them, their families. The last time I heard, they were still using the 'programs' (not apps) for over a decade or so.
Of course, my IDE had tiny fonts too. Then I grew and aged. By the time I crossed 30, my IDE's fonts were big enough and I began liking it that way. Today, I occasionally write code with "Monaco" font at 16px on a 5K iMac. One day, I might scale it and even make the text/content bigger.
Enjoy your tiny fonts while it lasts, you will also appreciate BIG text and fonts as you progresses.
I am 47, and still prefer smaller fonts. Not because my vision is perfect! But it seems to have accommodated to looking at small fonts for last 25+ years. I wonder how rare / frequent it may be.
50 is about the age where you get presbyopia, ie. start to get difficulties focusing details due to loss of lens elasticity, circular muscle weakening, and makula degeneration.
Can confirm. I used to love tiny fonts for coding, for everything — more text, less scrolling! 10, maybe 11pt. But as I approached 50, I started bumping font sizes up. When one of my eyes actually started twitching, I gave in and got glasses. My 20 year-old self would shake his head at my 50 year-old self in his glasses, peering at his 15pt code.
> I learned my lessons and made the fonts bigger. Designs do not look so nice (at-least to me and my team) but they loved my work.
That sent me down a nostalgia trail to this[1] book which has similar advice for Pocket PC developers. Drag the buttons and other form controls onto your program, then at least double their size, to make them go from stylus-required to semi-finger-friendly. Implement some custom code to drag empty screen to scroll, avoid the SIP where possible, wow, lots of memories making UX better for mobile users in the pre-always-connected-mobile-device days.
We're still here working, even if the form factor has retreated to serving delivery drivers and warehouse workers more than the general public. Pocket PCs / Windows Mobile 6.5+ embedded devices are a (often barcode-scanner-enabled) tool to get work done, data input, or data referenced in the field, with no VPN or internet access in several cases.
During the early part of my career, I used to love to design and develop with very tiny fonts. In-fact, there were a time when there was a craze for Bitmap pixel fonts which looks the best at 8px. I used to build apps for Physicians who uses a hand-held device called Pocket PC[1]. My weapon of choice when it comes to fonts were these 8px bitmap fonts for the interfaces.
They look super sleek and smooth but the physicians keep complaining about the font-size. The clinics/hospitals were replacing pen-paper with these Pocket PC Devices and the physicians depend on them for their earnings. I learned my lessons and made the fonts bigger. Designs do not look so nice (at-least to me and my team) but they loved my work. It paid for them, their families. The last time I heard, they were still using the 'programs' (not apps) for over a decade or so.
Of course, my IDE had tiny fonts too. Then I grew and aged. By the time I crossed 30, my IDE's fonts were big enough and I began liking it that way. Today, I occasionally write code with "Monaco" font at 16px on a 5K iMac. One day, I might scale it and even make the text/content bigger.
Enjoy your tiny fonts while it lasts, you will also appreciate BIG text and fonts as you progresses.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC