The typographic scale has been used for centuries as a means of creating balanced and harmonious font sizing. It is the bedrock of modern typography. The classic typographic scale is a harmonious progression of font sizes, like the notes of a musical scale. Because the classic typographic scale is a scale, it must obey the scaling property: if f is a size in the scale, then rf must also be a size in the scale, where r is the ratio of the scale.

Classic typographic scale, with whitespace removed to show scaling properties. A scale of the font sizes is depicted; the font sizes are all twice as large as the last: The classic typographic scale has a ratio of two. As in music, each C note vibrates twice as fast as its predecessor. Typographic scales have the same ratio as musical scales.

Another defining characteristic of any scale is the number of notes, n. The classic typographic scale has five font sizes in each interval. Chromatic music has twelve notes per octave.

The third and final property is the fundamental frequency, f0, of any scale. A Stuttgart pitch is what this is. A pica is the fundamental frequency in typographic scale. The baseline font size used in print typography is 1 pica, or 12 points.

It is fairly straightforward to calculate the frequency fi of the ith note of a scale if you follow these steps:

By using this formula, we can generate every font size in the classic typographic scale and compare it to the “rule of thumb” values guessed by the original typographers:

Thankfully we have Jeremy Church to thank for simplifying the calculations of scales with a handy tool TYPE SCALE i found it particularly useful when making considerations