I am not a graphic designer or a musician. My wife, though, graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Music. She also has a bookcase full of graphic design, interaction design, and user experience design books I have largely ignored. She may not be surprised by what I learned today, but I was. Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised, too.
Music-Based Type Scales
When choosing font sizes for websites, I usually use a lead-based font scale, converted to px. Today I learned that people have taken the word “scale” more literally than I would’ve, and connected font sizes to music. There are calculators out there that give you the appropriate font sizes for <h1> through <h6> when you pick a musical scale and a base font size for your body copy.
Don’t know the difference between a Major Third and a Minor Fourth Perfect Fourth? I don’t either. (Update: after reading this post, my wife said, “You can’t have a minor fourth. It would be a major third.” Oops!) Luckily, a couple people have published opinion pieces on which scales are best for which scenarios: Ozan Öztaskiran and Karyna Khmelyk.
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