We can’t just design our way out of the insidious digital environments we created over the past decade. A modal asking for cookie permissions or warning about potential risks is not stopping users anymore — we are way past this point. We made our digital products all too convenient, and the ubiquitous yet impenetrable legalese of user agreements has made people numb to risks.

Eva, a designer from Denmark, was a high performer for years at the company but still got the boot. She was disappointed by the lack of responsibility from the CEO: “The stock of the company where I worked dropped from around $130 per share to less than $30 in just five months. Yet, it’s the CEO of this company who gets to decide to ax 7% of its employees. Why doesn’t he carry some responsibility for the terrible results of the company? Why is he immune?”

Larger x-height is generally considered to have a positive impact on legibility for small font sizes. This certainly applies to fonts for coding so x-height will be one of the major factors in my analysis. Fira Code’s x-height is what I would call “regular” (Fig 3). Not small, not large, somewhere in between. This is another property that makes it a good baseline to compare other fonts.