Yeah, gray font on the white background is not pleasant. For a page which talks about books like "The Design of Everyday Things" it's kind of a fail ;)

"Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances" is your friend.

Zap Colors is super handy when I can't easily make out text from background.

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

try it now. how is that on your screen./

Your base font size is at 12px. I think that's really, really small. I find it much easier to read when it's at 18px instead. Here's a comparison: http://imgur.com/O7F5N,zCyyz#0

Now, anyone can zoom in with their browser... but your entire layout changes width when I do that: http://i.imgur.com/U96Py.png

good article about body text size here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...

That's actually a terrible article about body text. Maybe it has the right conclusion, but it might be wildly wrong.

This seems the most trivially easy thing to A/B test. Does anything less the 16pt cost you revenue?

Simple question, yes/no.

Actual data is so much better than someone's untested opinion which has been shown time and time again to be worthless in real life.

Looks better now, but I'd still make the font a bit larger.

That's how it looks in my browser:

http://freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/cyqjo.png

(Firefox 18 / KDE 4.8).

Wow, your system has super crappy font rendering IMHO.

Not really - it depends on the choice of fonts and their settings. Most sites look good on my system. Occasionally you get such ones, which look weirdly because they rely on some non existent font, and are rendered in fallback mode, using some generic one. If you want to avoid relying on system dependent fonts, use WOFF.

Example (from this site):

    font-family: 'proxima-nova', 'proxima-nova', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

proxima-nova and Helvetica Neue are not common fonts, so putting them as first with fallback to Helvetica is not the best option, if the font isn't provided as WOFF.

It's possible that the text color has been changed since you wrote this, but it's now at #333333.

If you have trouble reading that on a white background, then the problem is with your screen, not with the page.

Really uncomfortable reading here (regular PC in a regular office environment) and according to Chrome's inspector it's #777. If I remove the "proxima nova" font it improves a bit because of Helvetica's added weight.

Really unfortunate design for an article about design, and blaming the users' browsers, operating systems, lighting conditions or etc. is NOT the correct approach.

On a more useful note, I enjoyed Fred Brooks' "The Design of Design", on the process of design rather than on visual design.

Oh and is not mobile optimized so not readable there!

"Universal Design" :)