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Should Modular Scale be used in 2025?
Modular Scale has established itself as a discreet but essential pillar for creating consistent visual hierarchies in the world of design. It is the ideal tool for structuring your typography and spacing, ensuring effortless visual harmony. But in 2025, with the constant emergence of new tools and evolving practices, does this seemingly simple instrument remain relevant for your creations? Simplicity, relevance of ratios, potential limitations... After years of using it at Easy Web, I share here my feedback and objective opinion on its real usefulness according to your needs.
My experience with Modular Scale
Modular Scale has been a staple in my toolkit for years. Since the early mockups at Easy Web, it has been a pillar for creating consistent typography. What I love is its ability to generate impeccable visual harmony for every project.
Why is it so valuable? For us designers and agencies, typography is the backbone of UI/UX. Modular Scale automates the creation of harmonious ratios for text and spacing, greatly simplifying the workflow. The result: striking consistency.
However, let's be honest. While Modular Scale is excellent for laying the groundwork, it doesn't do everything. It provides the science of scales, but the artistic touch, the choice of fonts, and the precise adaptation to the content is our role as designers. It's a tool, not a replacement.
Is Modular Scale really useful for my needs?
The real question to ask yourself before using Modular Scale is: what is my goal? Because the relevance of Modular Scale depends greatly on how you use it. If your goal is to build a solid and consistent typographic hierarchy, where each text element aligns naturally, it is a powerful tool for defining proportional font sizes.
Whether you're a solo web designer, UI/UX designer, or agency, Modular Scale saves you valuable time by ensuring flawless visual consistency. It provides you with an indisputable mathematical and aesthetic basis for defining your H1, H2, body text, or captions, optimizing your daily workflow.
Another major advantage is its ability to offer you an effortless experimentation experience. You can quickly test different ratios and bases to find the perfect harmony, a real decision-making aid that streamlines your creative process.
Is Modular Scale suitable for beginners?
Are you new to design and find typography daunting? Modular Scale is the ideal co-pilot. It radically simplifies the creation of harmonious typographic hierarchies. No more headaches over font sizes: you choose a base, a ratio, and the tool generates a whole coherent scale. Consider using it to define your headings, paragraphs, but also your margins or paddings, ensuring perfect proportionality.
It's a valuable aid for laying solid foundations without getting bogged down in complex mathematical theory. The tool guides you visually, allowing you to develop your eye for rhythm and balance without even thinking about it consciously. For me, it's one of the best ways to demystify the principles of composition and quickly gain confidence in your projects.
How much does Modular Scale cost?
Let's talk money. You know, what often makes the difference when choosing a tool is its cost. For Modular Scale, it's quite simple: there are no direct payment options.
The main and most widespread "formula" is free access. You will find Modular Scale in the form of open-source web calculators or integrable CSS and JS libraries. This free version offers you the essentials: the ability to generate harmonious scales for your typography and spacing, ensuring impeccable visual consistency. It's the perfect tool for freelance designers, small teams, and even large agencies that already incorporate these principles. It costs nothing, but the investment in time saved and the improvement in the quality of your designs are considerable. If there are any costs, they are usually related to larger platforms that integrate this functionality.
What are the key features of Modular Scale?
Modular Scale is, above all, the art of harmonious typography. No more headaches over arbitrary font sizes! This tool generates a consistent and visually balanced scale based on mathematical or musical ratios. It automatically creates a clear hierarchy, from H1 to body text. For us, it guarantees a professional design that exudes cleanliness, without hours of trial and error.
What makes Modular Scale powerful for us is its flexibility. Far from simple presets, you define the base size and choose specific ratios (Perfect Fourth, Golden Ratio, etc.). This customization is essential. It allows you to adapt the typographic scale to each brand identity, ensuring perfect visual consistency. It's this precise control that makes all the difference for a customized and professional design.
What makes Modular Scale truly powerful is its ability to handle complex ratios. We're not just talking about traditional scales; you can define your own custom ratios, or even composite scales. This is ideal for creating a truly unique typographic identity that breaks away from the norm and ensures precise visual harmony across all your designs. At Easy Web, this flexibility is a major asset for our most demanding client projects.
Another strong point is flexibility with base values and dynamic incrementation. You can define multiple starting points for your scale, which is crucial for responsive design. Imagine adjusting a base size and instantly seeing how all text sizes adapt, maintaining proportion. This greatly simplifies the adaptation of your typography on different screens, ensuring consistency and readability everywhere.
Modular Scale is great for typography, but its limitations quickly become apparent. For complex spacing or responsive grids where proportions vary drastically, it can lack flexibility. I've seen teams struggle to apply it to component paddings or section margins that don't strictly follow the text scale, making it less relevant.
For these cases, tools such as Figma (with Auto Layout) or design token systems offering greater flexibility are more suitable. Modular Scale, however, remains unbeatable for building a consistent and powerful typographic hierarchy. It excels where it is designed to shine, and that's what you need to remember.
In plain language:
Advantages: Strong typographic consistency, natural visual hierarchy, simplified text size choices.
Disadvantages: Less suitable for complex spacing and dynamic grids, limited flexibility outside the typographic framework.
FAQ
Is it reliable and secure?
Its reliability, when talking about the online tool or its code implementations, is intrinsic to its mathematical nature. It is not a complex application with databases or user accounts. It is a calculation. Security, in this context, mainly concerns the website on which you use an online generator. For my part, at Easy Web, we integrate it directly via Sass or CSS variables, which eliminates any external concerns. The concept itself is inherently reliable.
Is it compatible with my other tools?
Clearly, Modular Scale is more of a methodology or design principle than a standalone software program. Its strength lies precisely in its flexibility. It is often implemented via variables in CSS preprocessors such as Sass or Less, or via dedicated JavaScript libraries. This makes it compatible with virtually any web development environment—whether you're using React, Vue.js, or CMS. It's less about "plug-and-play compatibility" and more about adopting its principles within your design system and codebase.
Is there responsive customer support?
When you use a tool like Modular Scale, you need to understand that the support is not that of a traditional SaaS. There is no dedicated customer service with tickets or guaranteed SLAs (Service Level Agreements). It is an open source project, so you rely primarily on an active community and solid documentation. Whenever I needed help, I always found my answers on specialized forums or GitHub. It is a more collaborative model, where autonomy reigns supreme.
What do other users think?
Overall, the feedback has been excellent. Designers praise Modular Scale for its ability to create flawless visual consistency, especially in terms of typography and spacing. They appreciate the automation it provides, reducing the time spent manually adjusting sizes and margins. It is often cited as a major time saver and a way to ensure a harmonious aesthetic. For many, it has become a must-have for robust design systems.
Can I easily change later?
Absolutely. The beauty of Modular Scale lies precisely in its flexibility. By defining your proportions using variables (the famous "base" and "ratio"), any future modifications become child's play. You adjust these two values, and your entire typography updates harmoniously, without having to retouch each element individually. It's a systemic approach that greatly minimizes refactoring. At Easy Web, we appreciate this agility on projects that evolve and require constant responsiveness.
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Specializing in business creation, sales and digital marketing, he puts his expertise at the service of users to help them identify the solutions best suited to their needs. Passionate about digital innovation and online performance optimization, Alexis is committed to providing detailed, transparent and unbiased comparisons.
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