Stop Writing Media Queries for Font Size

A teammate opened a PR titled "fix hero heading on small screens." The diff added a media query. Mine, reviewing it, found four more already in that file — one per breakpoint, added over eighteen months by four different people, each one patching the width the last person didn't think of: .hero-heading { font-size : 3rem ; } @media ( max-width : 1200px ) { .hero-heading { font-size : 2.5rem ; } } @media ( max-width : 992px ) { .hero-heading { font-size : 2.25rem ; } } @media ( max-width : 768px ) { .hero-heading { font-size : 1.75rem ; } } @media ( max-width : 480px ) { .hero-heading { font-size : 1.5rem ; } } Five rules to make one number — the font size of one heading — track the width of the screen it's on. And it still didn't work everywhere: resize the window to 850px and the heading is stuck at the 992px value, a little too big for the space it actually has. Every gap between breakpoints is a size nobody chose, it's just whatever the nearest rule left behind. Here's the part that stings: none of this has been necessary since 2020. The fix that isn't a breakpoint at all clamp() takes three values — a minimum, a preferred value, and a maximum — and returns whichever one the situation calls for: .hero-heading { font-size : clamp ( 1.5rem , 1rem + 2vw , 3rem ); } Read it as a sentence: never smaller than 1.5rem, never bigger than 3rem, and in between, scale with the viewport. The five media queries above collapse into that one line — and unlike them, it doesn't have gaps. clamp() recalculates the size continuously, every pixel the viewport moves, so there's no "850px value" that got left behind. It's a formula, not a lookup table. The middle value is where the "preferred" size lives, and it's 1rem + 2vw — a fixed part plus a viewport-relative part — not just 4vw on its own. That's not decoration. It's the one part of this pattern worth getting right, because the shortcut version quietly breaks something. The version that looks fine and isn't The formula you'll see