The Case for Serif on Screen

For about a decade, the consensus in product design was that sans-serif was the only acceptable choice for body text on screens. Pixel grids were too coarse for serif details, the argument went. Antialiasing was inconsistent across browsers. Apple set the example with San Francisco. We all followed.

None of that is true anymore. Retina screens have been standard for a decade. Variable fonts ship with smooth weights. The browsers all rasterize the same way. Source Serif 4 at 19px on a modern phone looks like a printed book.

So why are we all still defaulting to sans?

Inertia, mostly. And the suspicion that serif "looks dated" — by which we mean it looks like the New York Times, which is a reasonable thing to look like if you are trying to be read instead of scrolled past.

Try it once on a long-form page. Set the body to a serif. Bump the line height to 1.6. Cap the line length at 680 pixels. Read your own draft. You will spend longer with it.