If you won’t make your text narrower, I will

I once watched a video on Youtube, as I often do. It was a talk at some tech conference titled “Practical UX design for developers” or something along those lines. It was quite some time ago, so I don’t remember much of it (and for the love of Science could not find it again), but one thing that stuck with me was this piece of advice:

For better readability, limit your text width to 60-90 characters.

Personally, I perfer the text I’m reading to have width of 60 characters width, or at most 70.

Since I learned about this design practice, it has become the no. 1 reason I add style to someone else’s website. Whenever I see that the text I’m about to read is too wide I hover over said text with the mouse, then right-click followed by Q. Once the dev tools open I find the first <article> or some other <div> that might work and add to that element’s properties:

max-width: 60ch;

I will not tell you how wide your text should be, but I love that it’s possible for me to make a choice about my own reading experience.