Text and Your Target

I may have written about this topic before, but after my last post I thought I would stick to an easy one. Fresh coffee is in the blood, and I took a nice long break from the computer.

For this example I will use the site, Organic Plant Food. The question I ask you is this: Do you think the average visitor looking to buy this product is under the age of thirty? They sell organic plant food. I would have to take a wild guess, and say no. With a little research I am sure you will find your average gardener is a homeowner. Being under the age of thirty rakes out a huge amount of the younger generation, and their well performing eyes.

With that said, what happens to those older eyes? Often, especially after forty, they require glasses. Even the spokesperson appears to be wearing glasses. So when designing for a site that is catering to an older audience, you should avoid using small text. The Organic Plant Food site has chose to set their body font size to 11px, not huge, and will most likely be a strain for their target audience.

If it were me, I would design for at least 12px, but I would also not use pixels to define the size. I would use EM. When you define your font by pixels, Internet Explorer is not so kind. If I required to increase the font size using my browser I would not be able to, (CTRL + or -). However,  using EM or percentage, the font size  will easily adjust. Here is a good reason to test your site with different browsers. Firefox will allow you to increase the font size regardless on how it is defined.

For those of you that argue adjustable font size is not really an issue, comment here if you are over forty.