“Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal. For multiple column work, a better average is 40 to 50 characters.”
Source: The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
When designing a website, predominately for desktop, how do you balance a reasonable font size with container size? Particularly in parts of the website that are fairly dense with information.
With image this is easily achieved by using it as a stopping point:
But without image, it becomes very dense in appearance and harder to follow from one line to the next:
For these dense sections should I reduce the width of the content wrapper? Or enlarge the font size? In the actual document there are already some call-out boxes, lists, and images scattered throughout which helps. But for the portions where its just text how should it be dealt with? I've aerated the content a quite a bit so don't really want to adjust the entire site's width or font size just because of a few denser sections, but if everyone thinks that's the only acceptable way then I will.