Recently one of our UX designers floated the idea of going with a font size smaller than our standard because they needed the extra space. Being the avid researcher I am I went out and started hunting for information on best practice font size on the web or in applications. I mean it's been years. Someone must have done a study. I came across someone else on Stackflow asking the same question , but none of the answers were anything supported. Just unsupported tribal knowledge. To make a long story short I managed to find a great study, The Uncrowded Window of Object Recognition , done by Denis G Pellli and Katharine A. Tillman, 2008. It comes down to this. Letters in a word are an object and must be recognizable by the brain. As you reduce a font, you need to add a little space around the letters so they can be recognized. It really doesn't have anything to do with size. Here's an example in the standard Verdana/Helvetica at 13 pixels: "You saved my life,"...