Medium and the wrong paragraph

Warning: this is inessential stuff.

It was going to be so long, too, a detailed analysis of my site’s font sizes, line heights and margins; how they all subtly affect each other achieving harmony and readability. But it either looks alright or not.

So the basic point I wanted to make was that Medium, which takes inordinate care over the way it styles links, gets paragraphs wrong.

There’s too much space between paragraphs.

Really? I think so. Too much reaching between lines. These big gaps break up the text, make it less fluid. The paragraph bottom margin is 30 pixels, a little less than the 33 pixel line height.

As a consequence, Medium looks like a Word document, which sits uncomfortably with the cool colours and tasteful typeface (Freight Text). Better, I think, to aim for a space between paragraphs of around half the line height (16 and 28 pixels in my case).

I generally head to Joe Clark for his view on these things, only to find he’d made exactly the same point a few months back, only better. So it goes.

However, I disagree with using text-indent instead of a space, although I couldn’t tell you why no space between paragraphs doesn’t work for me on a screen.