This article was written in 2016. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

Please do use the snippet (but it’s not mine)

I love viewport relative units. And I promote them whenever I have the chance to. I write blogposts about them, I tweet about them, and whenever I have the chance to speak at a conference about CSS, I will talk about them. But alas, I am not clever enough to come up with very clever viewport relative solutions myself, unlike some people might think. I am smart enough to copy them though.

In his article about using less code Heydon Pickering writes about a very clever, super flexible line of code — font-size: calc(1em + 1vw) — and thanks me for showing it to him. And Christian Heilmann calls it Vasilis’ trick in a tweet. Which is flattering. But it might also give people the impression that I came up with the idea of using flexible units in combination with calc to create this minimum font-size function. Which isn’t true.

The first time I saw this line of code, was in this excellent article about fluid typography by Nathan Ford — and he saw it in this article by Mike Riethmuller. Later I saw a similar function in a tweet by Vitaly Friedman, which is the one that I quote in my talk about responsive webdesign without media queries, which is probably where Heydon remembers it from.

So to conclude. Nope, I did not come up with this code snippet, other people did a long time ago. But I am very happy that finally a big audience was introduced to it. Now go on and use it!