Legibility Enforcement

Legibility is non-negotiable. A visually stunning asset with unreadable text is a failed asset. The legibility enforcement rules apply to every asset that contains text — generated or composited.

Minimum sizes: body text never below 14px rendered (12px is technically legible but causes eye strain at scale). Captions never below 11px. Headlines have no minimum — they are always large enough. Maximum line length: 65-75 characters for body text. Beyond 75 characters, the eye loses its place returning to the next line. Minimum contrast: WCAG AA (4.5:1 for body, 3:1 for large text). Line height: minimum 1.4x font size for body text, 1.2x for headlines.

For AI-generated text in images, the legibility rules have an additional constraint: the text must remain legible after the image is resized to its deployment size. A 48px headline in a 1920x1080 hero image is perfectly legible. The same image resized to a 400x210 social thumbnail renders that headline at approximately 10px — illegible. The critic must evaluate legibility at the target deployment size, not at the generation size.