Smashing Newsletter: Issue #576

Editorial

Typography brings words to life. It reflects the tone of voice, how friendly and sincere we are, and how approachable and respectful we are. We’ve written about typography so many times, but it’s always worth highlighting, exploring, and amplifying.

In this newsletter, we dive into the issues as old as time — ideal line length and font sizes, consistent type, kerning, accessible fonts, and a free UI typography book.

Roll up your sleeves! We’re excited to launch 🇳🇱 SmashingConf Amsterdam 2027 — a friendly, practical conference for designers and front-end engineers, with speakers, workshops and schedule coming up — and gezelligheid that Amsterdam has to offer! Jump to early-bird-tickets.

Until then, we’re adding more and more hands-on online workshops on frontend, design and UX day by day:

Accessibility For Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Sep 21–29
Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christine Vallaure. Sep 23–29
Live Accessibility Testing Free
with Manuel Matuzović. Sep 24
Resilient & Maintainable CSS Dev
with Miriam Suzanne. Oct 1–15
Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. Oct 7
Accessible Frontend Patterns Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Oct 12 – Nov 2
How To Measure UX And Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Oct 20 – Nov 3
Jump to all workshops →

Happy learning and wishing you a fantastic rest of the week!

— Vitaly

1. User Interface Typography Book

What do you need to consider to create good UI typography? That’s exactly the question that Alex Baranov explores in his book User Interface Typography. It covers everything from readability and choosing typefaces to modular scale, vertical rhythm, responsive typography, and tables. You can read the first edition of the book online for free.

2. Better Web Type

Whether you’re a designer or developer, if you want to take your typography skills to the next level, Better Web Type is for you. Created by Matej Latin, the site features typography learning games, quizzes, guides, tools, and plugins on everything from creating rhythm to shaping the perfect paragraph and combining fonts.

3. How To Set Text Properly

Great typography might seem like an art, but actually there’s a lot of science behind it. To help you master it, Oliver Schöndorfer explores what he calls the “holy trinity” of typography: line length and line height and font size. The guides are the perfect foundation to help you find the ideal values for all three.

4. Kerning Visualizer

What does your text look like with optical kerning applied? Hunter Thompson built a handy little tool that makes the difference visible at a glance. The Kerning Visualizer analyzes every letter pair in a word, then creates the correct letter spacing and explains the reasoning behind each adjustment.

5. Accessible Web Fonts

Highly legible typefaces make it easy for readers to recognize characters. This benefits people with low vision, dyslexia, and ADHD in particular, but also enhances legibility for everyone else. If you’re looking for options apart from the well-known Open Dyslexic, Dyslexie, and Comic Sans, Vitaly compiled a selection of highly-legible typefaces you can use in your UIs. All of them can be downloaded and used for free.

6. Keeping Type Consistent

Paper, ink, contrast, and light can change the appearance of text. Take light type on a dark background, for example: It looks heavier than dark type on a light background, despite being set in identical font weights. Elliot Jay Stocks’ post “Keeping Type Consistent In Changing Conditions” explains how grade smooths over the differences to make your text look consistent across different backgrounds, materials, and lighting conditions.

Keeping Type Consistent In Changing Conditions

7. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚

We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.

Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.

8. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences

That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.

Smashing Online Events — With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.

As always, here’s a quick overview:

Accessibility For Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Sep 21–29
Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christine Vallaure. Sep 23–29
Live Accessibility Testing Free
with Manuel Matuzović. Sep 24
Cascading Style Systems: Resilient & Maintainable CSS Dev
with Miriam Suzanne. Oct 1–15
Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. Oct 7
Accessible Frontend Patterns Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Oct 12 – Nov 2
How To Measure UX And Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Oct 20 – Nov 3
Building Modern HTML Emails Dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Oct 26 –29
Deep Dive On Accessibility Testing Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Nov 9–23
Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 16–24
Jump to all workshops →

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

September 15, 2026 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #576

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