Why Your Interface Feels Cheap (It Is Almost Always the Type)
Four typographic decisions that separate software that feels considered from software that does not.
Clients rarely say "the typography is wrong." They say it feels cheap, or unfinished, or that it does not look like the other one. Then they point at a colour.
It is almost never the colour.
Line length is the one nobody checks
Comfortable reading happens between 45 and 75 characters per line. Most dashboards run text at 120 characters because the container was full width and nobody thought about it.
The reader does not consciously notice. They just find the page tiring, read less of it, and leave earlier. Set a max width on your text containers. It is the highest-leverage change available to you and it takes one line.
Line height should fall as size rises
Body text wants roughly 1.5. A 42px headline at 1.5 looks like a ransom note with gaps you could park in. Large type wants 1.1 to 1.25.
If you set a single line-height on the body and let it cascade, every heading on your site is slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name and easy to feel.
Tracking works the opposite way
Large text needs negative letter-spacing. Type designers fit spacing for text sizes; at display sizes those same sidebearings read as gaps. A headline at 42px usually wants somewhere around -0.01em to -0.02em.
Small text, especially uppercase small text, wants positive tracking. The same rule inverted.
Pick a scale and refuse to leave it
Most interfaces I audit have between nine and fourteen distinct font sizes, arrived at one component at a time. A considered interface has five or six.
The constraint is the point. When you cannot invent a new size, you are forced to express hierarchy with weight, colour, and space — which is what actually creates hierarchy. Size was always the blunt instrument.