On 4 Sep 2008, at 17:58, Christian Montoya wrote:

>
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 11:03 AM, spills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> I am sure this has been approached before but, the default 18px
>> baseline height is a horrible multiplier. Why not add 2 lousy pixels
>> to make it 20px high? In layouts where I have added the 2px addition,
>> they seem to work just fine and in Mac world look better in IMO.  
>> There
>> is an added benefit of making it easier for clients to maintain  
>> layout
>> baseline consistency as they can do math better with 20px rule more  
>> so
>> than the 18px rule especially on really long layouts.
>>
>> Just my 2 cents.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>
> Your 2 cents are understood, but the reason for the choice is to
> follow the typographic convention of 1.5, where the height of the line
> is 1.5 times the height of the text. You could change the line height
> to 20 px in your custom stylesheet, but then you wouldn't be able to
> impress the typography nerds with your attention to their conventions.

There is no such convention, if that advice has been proffered to you  
as a guide it is overly simplistic to the point of simply being bad  
advice. I don't even think blueprint itself sticks to that convention  
for its own heading section (which incidentally is typographically  
quite poor in parts)... The default settings for leading in page  
layout applications are usually around 120% that of the type size and  
I can only think BP use's 1.5 because it is a simple multiplier that  
will not produce many rounding errors across browsers.

Eric Spiekermann actually gives some advice that if you want to  
improve readability but also maintain the roughly same area of  
content, you should increase line spacing and reduce font size.  
Spills's idea isn't entirely without merit, although choosing a line  
height based on it being easier to multiply in ones head is obviously  
not a good visual reason on its own, rigidly sticking to a formula is  
also bad advice.

The principle of the baseline (and the grid) is that it should be used  
as guide as part of the design solution (that is if you even decide it  
is needed). It should be created during the visualisation process and  
be appropriate to the content and the message; and even once you have  
created it, you can still always break it. It shouldn't be used as a  
single formula to fit your design into - that is entirely the wrong  
way around to think about things.

By sticking to prior rules the results can only be formulaic, above  
all, you should use your vision to decide what is appropriate for the  
text your are attempting to communicate.



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