Typo Face

Typeface or Font Readability

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:09:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Which typeface (or font if you prefer it that way – moogk explains the difference) is the easiest to read, especially by less-accomplished readers?

I started this series of pages about font readability in 2004. I found I kept being told in a work context by those people who knew someone who was a world expert in these matters that such-and-such as font had to be used because it was the most readable, so I looked into it a bit.

And I thought, that’s fun, the world expert must be on shaky ground, so I began to put my researches onto my blog, to keep the thoughts in order as much as anything else.

The answer is, my researches have uncovered, that the question itself is, for various reasons, barking up the wrong tree.

If you are given a choice, then it does seem to be a natural human need to want to know which, among the choices you are given, is the best choice to make. This despite the experience that in many things, there is no absolute perfect choice. If you look in the cake shop window, you will not want to choose the same thing always, now, will you? At breakfast you might like a croissant and in the afternoon a cream cake. Everyone knows that don’t they? Do they?

And different fonts are used for different reasons; even if there was one that turned out by some magic to be ‘easier to read’ (whatever that means) than others, to use it all the time and everywhere would make life dull, tedious, utilitarian and poor.

Look at a newspaper. One aimed at the less erudite readership. What font do they use? Well of course they don't use a single font, they break up the page with variety. A singe font would make the page heavy and turgid.

Next, roll the newspaper into a tube, and whack those experts over the head with it.

I come at this not as a typographer but as an observer of human nature, and fonts seem have gripped the human imagination. I suspect the reasons have a lot to do with the desktop pc, and a wish to master its perceived intricacies. There must be an answer, is the wish of many.

I blame the education system (in most countries) that still seems to instill in people the idea that there is an answer to anything. It’s time that changed.

These pages discuss some of the things that you may be able to use as some form of evidence with those who are perched on their bar stool determining what is or should be. I hope you are lucky in liquidising the fixed view a bit; it will certainly be an uphill struggle. I keep thinking I’ll take these pages down, because typefaces aren’t really my subject, but then so many people from all over the world keep asking, what is the easiest font to read? that I kind of think it would be a shame to.

If someone says to you, ‘It’s been categorically proved that such-and-such a font is the easiest for people to read’, the first thing to ask yourself is whether it is a Microsoft font they are proposing and then consider Microsoft’s forgotten monopoly . Though whether the favourite font is from Microsoft or not, to think that we have recently discovered the typeface of universal optimum readability is, er, rather arrogant, or let’s be kind, innocent.

Typefaces in the sense that we know them have been around for something in the region of 550 years. For those who actually want to learn about using type, try for a startoff: 50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory by Danny Outlaw. See also The Typographer as Reader, by Will Hill on the Linotype Font Lounge. OK, some of that is a bit complicated and a lot to take in in one go. Just remember: varied blocks; not too dense; lots of air; line spacing. Don’t worry too much about which font.

And to rub in the point alluded to in the previous paragraph: t’aint what ya do it’s the way how’s ya do it! Which is obvious really isn’t it? The perfect font for readability (we’ll call it Ay Carumba!), set too close together, would give you a perfect headache. You know that.

Books have been written on how to lay out type, one of the best-regarded being The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, about which, in relation to web pages in particular see The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. That book and others like it will not tell you which is the best font to use, it’ll give you guidelines on how to lay out a page. There’s a web page discussing the issue of layout for readability (not fonts note, but layout) at The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard.

And now for something really sensible

If you have read my Typoface pages, you should surely by now have come to believe that there is no such thing as a ‘best’ typeface. And to prove it to your boss, who probably knows for sure that there is, you can show him or her the demonstration of typestyle in relation to fashions in clothing, that you can find at www.linotype.com/2258-16895/fashionandtypeface.html.

And further reading about legibility? You can’t do better than this: www.linotype.com/ 2258-16905/ aboutlegibility.html

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And in colour?

There’s also the issue of readability of different colours of text on different hues and shades of background. This complicates the subject rather, and I’m in the process of building up some pages on this. You can make a start with Readable Text in Colour, which gives some thoughts as well as some Javascript, and with my text colour readability page and you can accompany this with experiments using TypeTester.

Essentially, when looking at colour readability, the hue (eg red, green, blue etc) is of minimal importance; far more important for readability is the relative brightness of text against background. That is to say, that red on green is perfectly readable (despite what your teacher said) provided it’s a light red against a dark green or vice-versa. You really should see my text colour readability page. Have fun!

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Next page in this set: Arial v Comic Sans.

The Font Bullies

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:32:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

A Little Knowledge, and They’re Off! – August 2012

Why should anyone whose job it isn’t feel they need to be an expert in fonts (typefaces)? But they do, and there is something telling about it. I have yet to quite work out what, but I have some hypotheses.

The so-called Dyslexia Style Guide from the Dyslexia Association gives something of a clue as to what is going on, for it is not just fonts that are pontificated upon here, but a whole raft of things that the writer has learned a little bit about, and obviously thinks they are now the world’s expert on. And instead of coming over as expert, they sound to anyone who actually does know a little bit more about these topics as rather a joke, like the bloke on the bar stool who knows all there is to know about everything. And sadly, like the man on the bar stool, there are people out there prepared to believe this rubbish.

Rubbish? Who says so? Well, OK then, bad science, or unsupported assertions; assertions for which the evidence seems to be either that someone I know who knows about these things said so, or I tried it with my some of my students/patients/clients/mother and they liked it – classic bar stool.

So how does it come about that so often you see this sort of thing pontificated on, and why does it so frequently have the topic of fonts high on its subject list?

I am coming to believe it is deeply psychological, and connected with the nature of work. For something has changed in recent decades. In the old days, say, pre-1980s, when you went to work, someone told you what you had to do. Going even further back, to when many people worked on the land, you didn’t even have to be told what to do, you just knew. And for many, who followed their father or mother into an occupation, this state of inherent knowledge continued into industrial and commercial eras.

And then came along the desktop computer. And the person at the next desk said I dunno, you’ll just have to make it up as you go along like what I do. And mother hadn’t the first idea about it.

For some people, this was a welcome challenge. I am one of those. I was brought up in a social circle where anything could happen unexpectedly at any time – in working class north-east London – so getting a grip on the uncertain comes somewhat naturally. And I’m most certainly not going to be defeated by some flaky American machine.

But for others this is unsettling. If you believe that the world has answers, if your whole family culture and education are based upon the concept of right and wrong, while things out there keep trying to challenge the world being quite like that, then the desktop computer will be for you a jelly to be tamed.

And there on your word processing screen, there’s immediately in front of you a choice that you have no guidance on. The choice of a font!

Someone must know the answer - now there’s that bloke over there perched on a bar stool, probably calls himself an educational psychologist or something.

And this personal need for order becomes exacerbated further when we introduce the issue of the DISADVANTAGED.

For we all want to help the DISADVANTAGED now, don’t we? In fact that's right, most of us do want to, but whether this assistance necessarily means putting a kind of suburban middle-class order onto everything is a much mooter point.

Suburban middle-class? Who are you calling suburban and middle-class? Well right-on-ness is essentially that, in its insistence on there being only one way, the 'right' way.

I am not an expert in reading disabilities or dyslexia, but I feel confident in saying that dyslexia is not a single, fixed thing; there are degrees and types of it. And it surely is patronising to say that, whereas the majority of people can whiz through a newspaper or book without a second thought, those people with dyslexia can only be expected to do this if the font is 14pt Comic Sans printed on pink paper. Surely we want everyone to be able to enjoy the everyday don't we? Saying that someone with dyslexia must be restricted to infantile first readers seems to me to be patronising in the extreme.

So it is do what I say because I say so, and limit your output to the infantile for those less 'fortunate' than ourselves. Bullying and patronising or what?

But we must not forget to spare a thought for certain disadvantaged people, those for whom a computer is a scary mystery, a machine enveloped in a halo of iconoclasm.

It's all right, folks, uncertainty is fine, you only have to throw off your mantle of conceptions about the world. Well OK, I suppose that is easy to say.

And through all this, there is a significant thread running, because for those who hanker for the old, clear, certain ways, things aren't going to get any better. Somehow we as a society have to make sure that even the tree-lined avenue set can eventually learn to cope when they see a priest with no trousers on.

Arial v Comic Sans

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:09:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Arial and Comic Sans, some thoughts, some good, some less so

You sometimes hear ‘expert knowledge’ that this or that font is the ‘easiest to read’, and this or that often seems to involve Arial or Comic Sans. This fashion for pedantry appears to be waning a bit now though, thank goodness, but is still about, e.g. see www.4dyslexics.com/dyslexia9.htm.

But then how about this:

The word that begins the title of the article is ‘ill’ with a capital i, i.e. Ill. The font is Arial, which as we are all told by those experts who know these things, is the most easy-to-read typeface ever invented and is essential for use by people with dyslexia, dontja know? Capital I and lower-case l in Arial must of course be easy to distinguish from each other, for the experts assure us they are.

The ‘evidence’ for the assertions about Arial and Comic Sans being the most readable of fonts is probably the University of Wichita whose results are highly skewed (see my Academic Evidence Base for Typeface Readability page)

Arial and Comic Sans are designed for use on your desktop computer. Neither of them was ever intended to be a printer’s font, so they don’t have many of the features that a font that is designed for print is likely to have, though of course not everyone knows that there is such a distinction and so will demand their favourite font – that which they have heard about as being so perfect – for everything including sometimes uses that are inappropriate.

Personally, I don’t take a stand on this in the sense of believing any one to be being better or worse, my view is that in the right place either could be quite comfortable to read, and in the wrong place (especially for example blocks of text for a quirky font like Comic Sans) either could be considerably less comfortable to read than a whole host of alternatives. I just think it’s rather a joke that, when it comes to fonts, many people demand cornflakes for dinner.

It seems that Arial (and probably Comic Sans too) are not very ecological.

And certain academics say that Arial is easy to read and Comic Sans hard.

I’ll comment on the two fonts one by one:

Arial

Some people believe that Arial is definitely NOT the answer that some others would have it to be:

Mark Simonson gives a rundown on the history of Arial and concludes, ‘ . . . a professional designer would rarely—at least for the moment—specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable. It has what you might call a “low-end stigma”.’

www.mimeartist.com/helvetica, is a kind of game where Helvetica kicks Arial out of the way for, as the site says of Arial, ‘We don’t need its type round here’.

http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html, tells you how to spot the difference between Arial and two fonts it is based on, ie Helvetica and Grotesque 215 .

And why not take a look at www.cafepress.com/72dpi.1368492 which is not actually Arial but Helvetica (upon which the Arial font was based) and as it says on the page, ‘Annoy the crap out of your type-snob friends!’ – so I thought it was germane to include that one.

I have a page which demonstrates that the Arial font in particular can be very jiggety.

The Arial font, like many sans-serif fonts, makes little or no distinction between an upper case i (I) and a lower case L (l). So in a word like Illegal, set in Arial like that, the first three letters are pretty-well indistinguishable. The Verdana font distinguishes upper case i from lower case L clearly, viz Illegal, as does Comic Sans: (Illegal).

But there’s not many people know that. Lots of typefaces have these similarities between two or more letters and no one notices most of the time.

As an indication of that (that just about nobody notices what you might think would be a reading ambiguity), take a look at my Letter Ambiguities, a Readability Conundrum page.

There’s a page of discussion on whether Arial or Verdana is a more preferable font (that’s Verdana, not Comic Sans), at Signal vs Noise. No comment!

Comic Sans

Comic Sans is an eccentric font and can look rather daunting and rather garish, and the number of websites that try to use it for body text is mercifully diminishing. One example still extant at time of writing is http://www.peoplefirst.org.uk, a website maintained by people with learning disabilities, unfortunately. For an example of how Comic Sans can look poor on readability in comparison with a font of more uniform letter shapes, see my Fonts for People with Reading Disabilities page.

No typeface is right or wrong in every circumstance. The picture is an information sign in the village of Ravenfield near Rotherham in the north of England. Comic Sans is used for the body text (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what the font is) and in my opinion it works really well. I think it’s the concise text (that is to say not dense blocks of text) in combination with the light-touch drawings that makes Comic Sans look so comfortable. (You should be able to expand the pic by clicking on it, so you can read the type.)

In Comic Sans the a and o (a and o) can be hard to distinguish, especially in smallish point sizes, in a word like goal (goal).

On 28 April 2009 The Guardian newspaper in the UK printed an editorial piece called In praise of . . . Comic Sans and it generated a large number of comments on its web page; clearly Comic Sans is something that some people have strong views about.

I found it amusing to read Applications that annoy the appointments committee . . . on the forums of the Times Educational Supplement, where the writer, ‘TheoGriff’, under ‘Some of the daft things that I have seen:’ includes ‘Documents sent in non-professional font (Comic Sans)’. This has clearly shocked some of the people who commented on the post, who until they read that had no idea that Comic Sans was not the finest font known to humankind. But if it is going to annoy the appointments committee – oh dear!

Now for those Comic Sans fans in the world, of which I have come to believe there are some, how about this: Comic Sans for bus destination indicators. I have so far only found one place that uses this, and that is the eccentric Italian city (that is also one of my favourites), Bologna. It’s only some buses that have it, and I don’t know whether it is a choice that the driver can make, or whether there’s some other reason. Anyway here’s a photo:

I can find just one other example on the web, on this page and scroll down to Bologna. So far as I know Bologna is the only town where there are bus destination indicators in Comic Sans. Anyone know of any others? If so please do let me know as I would like to build up a collection.

Comic Sans for a bus destination indicator where the words are in upper-case is quite a good choice in my opinion , it has a leaning-forward look, and we assume the bus intends to be going places, and the capital I has serifs and so will not look like a number 1. Anyone disagree with me on this?

Next page in this set: Serif v Sans-serif – Arial Font Creates Optical Illusion.

Serif v Sans-Serif – Arial Font Creates Optical Illusion

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:11:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Readability Experiment

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

One of the supposed expert views that keeps on coming up is the assertion that sans-serif typefaces are ‘easier to read’ than serif typefaces. You can see some research that looks at this issue (and disputes it, while acknowledging that it’s a widespread view) at www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html

On this page, I will clearly demonstrate that the reverse is the case – this page enables you, with someone who asserts very authoritatively that sans-serif is clearer for reading, to look at their backside, then you can tell them how clever they are to talk out of it.

There are two samples blocks of text below, one in Arial and the other with identical text in Times New Roman. The two samples you see here are in thumbnail, click on them to see the full-size samples.

The Arial sample looks like the lines of text aren’t straight. They are, but there’s an optical illusion that they are not. In the sample with the serif font (which is at the same point size) the effect is much less marked – the text looks OK and not climbing hills and descending valleys. With Arial it looks misaligned.

Arial

Times New Roman

Here you can experiment for yourself with different fonts and with more regular-style text. What this all tells us is not to be pedantic with guidelines, for those who do that are not as expert as they like to think.

A pattern of text in certain fonts gives the illusion that the lines are not level. More marked the wider the window. Sans-serif fonts seem to be especially prone to this. Serif fonts suffer from the distorting effect much less seriously.

So there you are then, that settles it, a serif font is much easier to read, right? Except of course that this is a rather contrived experiment, for who would lay out lists of countries like that? Nonetheless, it does show you that what some people categorically think, is categorically wrong. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it isn’t, it all depends.

(Because this page does not ask for anything to be downloaded to your machine, it has no way of knowing what fonts are present on your machine, so it cannot give you a full dropdown list of fonts. The dropdown box just gives the Microsoft fonts that most people have. You can type in any font name in the ‘Font’ box and click ‘Set’, if the font in the font box is not found on your machine, the font from the default list will be substituted.)

If you uncheck the incl.(n%) checkbox for the list of countries, you’ll see that without the numeric percentages in parentheses the distortion illusion is much reduced, so it seems to be something to do with the parentheses, or the parentheses, numbers and percent sign, that aggravates the effect.

Making the font size bigger reduces the distortion, as one might suspect, since there will be fewer words on the line.

A word about Comic Sans. There are still some people who maintain that Comic Sans is an easy-to-read font of merit. Not on this page it isn’t, though – it’s a feast for sore eyes (it makes them sorer). Another strange observation about Comic Sans, that you will notice on this page. If you look at the country name, United States in Comic Sans, and compare it with, say, Morocco, or Lithuania, or Slovakia, United States looks altogether much bigger and wider. Of course it is much bigger and wider than those countries, as a place, but that’s no excuse for Microsoft to be so brazen about it. No wonder that some people have a downer on Comic Sans! (If you cannot see United States on the page, click on the Recalc button, which recreates the countries list using a randomiser.)

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Next page in this set: Typefaces (Fonts) for People with Reading Difficulties .

Typefaces (Fonts) for People With Reading Disabilities

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:56:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Another of my pages relevant to the issue of readability of short and simple blocks of text is Capitals Rule ok. You may find that page a corollary to this one.

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

The issue of a ‘font’ specially designed for people who have a learning or developmental difficulty is a kind of perennial weed, it keeps coming up.

Personally, I think it is a disgrace to ask the question. In a time of attempts to integrate people who have a developmental shortcoming into society as much as possible, when even in countries such as Germany where that integration happens less than in some others there is pressure to move in that direction, the moment someone starts waffling on about fonts, they seem to want to bung the less-intellectual among us back in a kind of literate institution again. Why shouldn’t everyone be allowed to read the posters trying to sell us insurance? What’s all this discrimination?

A demonstration march by young people in Köln on 20 September 2013. They are demonstrating for the inclusion of young people with learning disabilities into mainstream education. In Germany people with learning disabilities attend specialist centres that are extremely well-equipped for the most part but are separate.

I am fairly sure that the people taking photographs are from China. There’s a good chance they’ll have absolutely no idea what the march is about as the leaflet that is being handed out is in extremely complex German.

So the first thing to do, if you want a font specially for those with learning disabilities, is to examine your own motives and prejudices.

Then once you’ve done that, read on, and you can use some of the ideas given here to counter those who claim with assured knowledge and authority that such-and-such has been ‘proven’.

You might think that a passage of text that can be read easily by someone who has difficulty reading passages of text, would point to a clear-to-read and perfect typeface. But no one has found it yet, and they won’t, it’s a crazy thing to want to do. Take a look at any newspaper designed for quick-bite reading, especially those aimed at the less erudite reader. They break up the text with a variety of fonts. Can you imagine them set in a single one? Really turgid! Who would be able to read that? It would be like The Times circa 1872!

And there is some distinctly dodgy guidance out there, for example Typefaces for Dyslexia, at www.dyslexic.com:80/fonts which makes the rather surprising assertion that the serifs found on traditional letter forms ‘tend to obscure the shapes of letters’. Pretty revolutionary, considering how centuries of practice have tended to indicate the opposite (see About Legibility by Adrian Frutiger).

May I recommend that you read The Science of Word Recognition from Microsoft Typography, by Kevin Larson. Though it begins with a rather amusing-sounding sentence: ‘Evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicate[s] that we use the letters within a word to recognise a word.’ (My copy-edit in [ ] brackets). Gosh! That’s profound research isn’t it? But actually as you read on you begin to see that the sentence has a serious meaning, it’s just (inadvertently I’d guess) put in a way that sounds funny.

Kevin Larson’s paper talks about experiments in word recognition in terms of overall word shape and letter identification. It is very English-language oriented, and I would have welcomed some indication of experiments undertaken using subjects who did not know the meaning of the words they were being presented with, to see how much difference there would be in the findings, but all-in-all it does seem, from the experiments that have been done, that fluency of reading is much greater, when the subject is familiar with the content. Note that this doesn’t mean that they understand the words necessarily, more that they are familiar with the contextual content – you really need to read Kevin Larson’s paper for an explanation of what I mean here.

The implications for readability by people with a reading disadvantage are not touched on in Kevin Larson’s paper, but much may be inferred from it.

But then you read on and see that they say that serifs are ‘found in traditional print fonts such as Georgia or Times New Roman’, and you think, oh dear, those aren’t traditional print fonts, but Microsoft fonts. It’s the old story, someone has got a new computer and they think it’s really shiny.

There has been some research recently (in 2010) on techniques on how to make a page of text easier to read by dyslexic people, see a discussion on this at Monitor on Psychology interview with Kevin Larson on typofile.com. This is the same Kevin Larson referred to in the boxed text.

As a synopsis of the discussions and the research that has taken place, in a phrase, nothing has been shown yet, but it’s good these things are being looked at and it throws up some issues that are worthwhile taking a look at.

Next, go down the local bookshop, or if you like take a look at Amazon, and look at a few books. See if you can find one set in a sans-serif font. You may do, but if you do it will be in a very niche market somewhere. Why is that? Are book publishers so ignorant that they don’t know that NO ONE can read serif fonts comfortably? What bollocks! The opposite is true in fact, as you will see when you do manage to find some dense blocks of text such as in a book that are set in a sans-serif font. Try it for yourself and see! The reason you will find serif fonts in a book easier to cope with may be simply because the format in a book is one that you are used to, but who cares? If it works, it works.

Whether that observation, that a serif typeface suits the text of a book best, applies when a dyslexic person reads a book, I couldn’t say. Maybe a person with dyslexia requires a special print run, with novels set in a sans-serif typeface that the majority of people would find it more difficult to read than the usual format, with double sections in every bookshop, one with books for people with dyslexia and another for those who are not so afflicted. That would be equal-opportunity compliant would it not? Of course it would also be stark raving bonkers, but then we have to listen to these experts who know, you know.

Longish passages of text in regular patterns certainly can look jiggety in a sans-serif font as opposed to a serif one, see my Arial Creates Optical Illusions page. Notice that these experiments (that anyone can do at home) would tend to point in the exact opposite direction to many of the supposedly expert guidelines, indicating that it is the SERIFED fonts that are EASIER TO RESOLVE, though I have not, I must confess, tried out this page on people with dyslexia.

The b’s d’s

Read Regular is a typeface designed by Natascha Frensch at the Royal College of Art in London, specifically for dyslexic readers and has gained some level of notoriety. (www.readregular.com). The claims for the Read Regular font as being better-read by people with dyslexia do not appear to be backed up by any independent evidence. Natascha Frensch has tried to make each letter a different shape from any other, so for example, d is different from mirror-image b. But it’s not the only typeface to do that by any means. It appears that you cannot buy Read Regular but have to have the typesetting done in the studio of Natascha Frensch. Clever, eh?

In fact that feature much shouted about in Read Regular (and about some other fonts touted by www.dyslexic.com:80/fonts), that the shape of a letter b is not a mirror image d, applies to lots and lots of fonts. If you look at Myfonts.com and type ‘sans’ into the search box – I just did this and I can see from the results that the sans-serif fonts with non-mirror lower case b and d include: Alinea sans, Vista sans, Priori sans, Fedra sans, Benton sans, Ela sans, Relato sans, Freight sans, LTC Goudy sans, Placebo sans, California sans; etc etc etc, hundreds and hundreds of them, most of which you’ll never have heard of and the reason you haven’t is because they have not had a weight of marketing behind them. (And this is one of the reasons that I can confidently say that www.dyslexic.com:80/fonts is full of nonsense).

And in all of this, there’s something else. Do people who speak a language that doesn’t use Western scripts have more or less problem with dyslexia? Does someone who speaks both Arabic and English, of which there must be thousands, and who is dyslexic, of which there must be some among those thousands presumably, do they have more or less problem with Arabic script than they do with Western script? And the same applies to Urdu, Hindi, Thai, you name it. After all, you can’t get Comic Sans in Arabic.

Take a look at this article. It would appear that certain young people can find they are effectively dyslexic in one language but not in another, even when both languages use the same script. Oh. Where does that leave your expert font theories then?

And if you look at serif fonts, they nearly all have a ‘d’ that isn’t a mirror of ‘b’, including Times New Roman: b d.

Do yer Edin

There are a number of fonts said to be designed to help dyslexic readers to read better, another of which is to be found at Project Dyslexie and its effectiveness is said to be backed up by research from the University of Twente. But I have to ask the question, that presumably the university researchers didn’t: Can you imagine a tabloid newspaper set in only that font. Do yer head in, wouldn’t it?

Reading hand Writing

I’ve often heard it said that people with reading difficulties or disabilities find the letter forms that more closely relate to handwriting easier to deal with. This is especially significant in the lower case letters a and g. In a serif font like Times New Roman, say, a and g typically look like this: a g. Or at least they do in their regular or Roman form; in the italic form they look like this: a g, and there are some serif fonts, for example Bookman and Microsoft’s Georgia, where the Roman forms of a and g look like this: a g, and the italic forms look like this: a g. Notice that in the regular or Roman form of Bookman and Georgia the lower case a has three tiers. In the italic form, by contrast, the a is like an o with a line to the right, and the g has a tail rather than a loop.

(Note than in the above I’ve used text rather than graphics, so if you don’t have Times New Roman or Times, or Bookman or Georgia on your machine, you may just have to imagine it and believe me).

Sans-serif fonts vary. Some have the three-tier a (as do Microsoft’s Arial and Verdana) and some have a calligraphic-style (sometimes called infant-style) a. Sans-serif fonts typically have a non-loop, tailed g, but not all of them do. Again a random selection from Myfonts.com, the following fonts have a looped g like you typically find in Roman serifed fonts: Priori sans, Leitura sans, Relato sans, Freight sans, LTC Goudy sans, California sans, Alinea sans, etc etc etc. Lots and lots of them. If you keep your version of Windows XP up to date or you use Vista, then you’ll have a font called Calibri and another called Candara, which are sans-serif fonts with a three-tier g.

And are Calibri and Candara good or bad for reading by people with dyslexia? Who asked that? Get to the back of the class!

Haze and Hose

Read Regular is one of those sans-serif with a calligraphic-style lower case a that is, as with Comic Sans, very similar to lower case o, (a and o in Comic Sans) and is one of the fonts that makes pretty much zero distiction between an upper case I (I) and a lower case l (L). That may be an advantage for dyslexic readers, if the authorities say so then it must be. Seems a bit unlikely, but there you go.

Does it strike you as you read this, that websites such as dyslexic.com, together with those people who maintain that this or that font style is better for people with reading difficulties, still have a bit of mugging up to do?

Strange typeface to use, with the lower case a looking very similar to o, when your strapline includes the word ‘banking’. Perhaps the van will get more customers than it bargained for.

Looped g’s and tiered a’s for the teacher

All that said, though, if you were to lay out some text to be read by a person who has a reading difficulty, and you used a font with a looped g, you can be sure that some expert educator or another will tell you that this is not correct, that the target audience will not be able to read it easily. The research from the University of Reading, Typography for Children, is interesting in this respect, it found that there is no evidence that says that either serif or sans serif typefaces are intrinsically more legible, but teacher opinion, generally, favours sans-serif typefaces because of the ‘simplicity of the letter shapes’, by which they presumably mean the similarity of the letter shapes to those that the teacher uses when presenting handwritten words to their pupils. (For as you can quickly establish from a look at, say, Myfonts.com, there is no specific letter shape that is exclusive to a sans-serif font, except perhaps for the absence of serifs, which might be considered to make the letter shapes a bit more simple, possibly, sometimes.)

There may be something in the argument that letterforms that look rather similar to those that have been taught, will be better received by people who have a learning disability. I would imagine that this does not apply to someone with dyslexia, but for a person with learning disabilities, it may be a point to bear in mind. So far as I am aware, no real research has been done on this. And it begs the question, what typeface looks like the teacher’s handwriting, when you do not know what the teacher’s handwriting looked like?

Comic Sans is a fancy font in fact

But we’ll take a guess. Here are two passages, the first in a font called Architect Small Block, and the second in Comic Sans. These are graphic images so the fonts will be accurate and not dependent on what is on your computer (for more details on the rendering of fonts on a web page, see my page on Fonts on the Web).

Now while Comic Sans is much beloved by many teachers and self-promoted readability experts, in fact you’ll see from the above passages that relative to the font to its left it has quite a number of fancy letter features, the other passage is more like what you imagine the diligent teacher would have written on the board. Probably, the belief you hear sometimes about Comic Sans being highly readable is really that the teachers, well, they just like it.

And now, in colour.

Coloured Spectacles

Evidence seems to indicate that many people, not just those with dyslexia but also others who find reading to be a harsh experience, find a passage of text easier to read through a coloured filter or coloured spectacles. This is especially associated with a condition known as Irlen Syndrome. I have a separate page that discusses this.

Colour Blindness

I should say here something about colourblindness, which is a form of disability I suppose. http://colorfilter.wickline.org is a mighty clever and useful tool that lets you look at your website or someone else’s through a colourblindness filter. Very useful for testing one’s website indeed. You may be surprised, or not I hope, to find that the majority of web pages that are hard to read with a filter turned on, are also hard to read with it turned off. This is not to deny that those with, say red-green blindness cannot distinguish between red and green, rather it is that red on green at too close a brightness level to each other, while perhaps impossible to distinguish by someone with a colour perception deficiency, are also pretty hard to read by anyone at all. The following two pairs of blocks are in red on green, and I would make bold enough to say that someone with red-green colourblindness can read one of each pair easily enough, but will have a lot of difficulty with the other. It’s to do with relative brightness. In the first pair of blocks, the red is in fact identical in both the darker and lighter samples, even though it probably doesn’t look the same.

Read me well, sister!

Read me well, brother!

And here’s another example, where the green stays the same in the two samples but the red changes. The relative brightness has the greatest effect on readability, for as you can see, where the relative brightness of the colours is close, it’s not easy to read, even if your colour vision is 100%. Obviously more difficult if it isn’t, though with the second of each of the examples, everyone can read it OK, yes?

Read me well, brother!

Read me well, sister!

You can see more about type in colour on my text colour readability page.

Next page in this set: Capital Letters Rule ok .

Capitals Rule ok

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:30:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Capital letters, what’s wrong with capital letters?

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

illustration by Geoff Adams

Some people, who know all about these things, say that sentences entirely in capital letters are what you don’t do; they’re supposed to be hard to read.

That may be right sometimes, but not always. Have you ever seen a comic book? Hard to read? Surely not. (Comics are traditionally done with upper case in the speech bubbles.) The use of upper case in comic strips is not so universal as it once was, but looking at the cartoon picture you can see the sense of it. Here I’ve used Comic Sans to look rather weak and pathetic and it works quite well in that way. The gangster’s speech bubble is in a traditional, strong, comic book face, and if I hadn’t told you that, I’ll bet you wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. I find the all-upper much easier on the eye, though again I must stress, in this circumstance.

The other thing to consider, when someone says to you with such absolute confidence that passages written in all upper case are nigh-on unreadable by young people, is whether 140 million-odd Russians can be wrong. For while Cyrillic script does have a lower case, it’s conventionally written in books looking much like what we who are used to Western typefaces would call small-caps – from a readability point of view the lower looks quite like the upper, as in the example. (Click here and some text should appear giving more details about this.)

The example shows Russian lower case letters, consider especially the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ Some characters do not exist in an uppercase variant in the Cyrillic alphabet. Refer to line 3, word 1, last character: it is a so-called ‘soft sign’ (мягкий знак), which only exists as lowercase in the common alphabet. This is comparable to the German ß, although there is an uppercase variant for it now.

my thanks to Tobias Pape for furnishing this information

Do Russian children find it harder to learn to read than do Western European, Australian or American children? I dunno, ask your teacher. (There’s a technical discussion about Cyrillic lower case at http://www.typophile.com/node/16550).

The idea that passages in all upper case are harder to read than those predominantly in lower probably stems from the observation that passages in all upper can be slower to read than those in all upper. Slower is not the same as harder, as slower is only an issue where speed of reading is of significance, and will be of no or minimal significance in very short passages such as you find in a comic strip. For the references to experiments that show that lowercase text is read faster than upper, see The Science of Word Recognition from Microsoft Typography, under the sub-heading ‘Model #1: Word Shape’.

However, I also quote from that same paper, sub-heading ‘Evidence for Word Shape Revisited’:

‘The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kohlers & Perkins, 1975).’ (The Science of Word Recognition by Kevin Larson.)

So it does seem fair to say that those who categorically announce that all upper-case sentences are unacceptable in normal everyday human existence are categorically talking out of their backsides. You can tell them that when you next get an opportunity.

Next page in this set: The Bigger the Type . . . .

The Bigger the Type . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

. . . the further away you stand

You sometimes hear that the bigger you make the type, the easier it will be for people to read. Rather like shouting at foreigners to make them understand better. If someone says that for optimum readability you need 12-point text, say, then you could point out to them that:

this and this and this are all 12-point, in different fonts.

This screenshot comes from www.me-and-us.co.uk/psheskills/bva.html, a page that promotes a book that is designed to help teachers discuss with students issues about their beliefs, values and attitudes to life. Notice that the text appears to get smaller as it goes down the page. This is entirely illusion, it’s actually the same in each paragraph. Larger font size for easier reading? Weeelll, it depends.

One effective piece of research on whether people who are not necessarily all that erudite can read things in small type sizes, you can do yourself, on any day, on any bus, train or street. Look at all those folks busily texting on their mobile phones. Tiny type, but no one seems to be finding a struggle in reading it. Of course, there will be those whose physical or intellectual shortcomings preclude them from being able to use a mobile phone, including those who temporarily are unable to do so because they have left their glasses at home, but of those who are using one, it’s fair to say that they are of all sorts, including some who look to be less than high achievers.

You can experiment with different fonts in different sizes on this page by switching on the font changer which then appears in the leftmost column. Or you can look at fonts side-by-side and see how they look to you, at TypeTester though when I last looked, this sets type sizes in pixels not points. There’s sense in doing this, but of course won’t help very much to convince those people who see type sizes in the word processing software in points (a point is one 72nd of an inch (0.0353 centimeters), while a pixel is whatever size it is on your monitor, there’ll be a number of them to an inch). Fun to look at TypeTester in any case.

There are some comments on type sizes on screen at The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard. This argues for using the default font size for the browser, stating that while it might look big at first, you soon get used to it and come to love it, though it stresses that the way you make a passage of text most comfortable to read is by using an airy layout, and that the font size and type are of secondary importance.

You will find that the professionals – those who’ve given careful thought to this – consistently back this up: that the font size and type have to be looked at in context, they are not of themselves an answer to readability (repeat that final clause to yourself over and over).

A small experiment shows the big-is-better theory to be hard to support. I’m rather long-sighted, so if I take my glasses off, I can’t read the text on this screen. I can increase the size of the text. But in order to increase the text size to a point where I can read it, I have to make it so large that I still can’t read it, for though the size of the text increases, the size of the screen does not, so the number of words on a screen becomes so few that reading is unrealistic. With my glasses on, there isn’t a problem.

There is the issue of poor readers, though I have my doubts about the extent to which a poor reader reads significantly better with larger text. I’d be much more convinced by the use of simpler language.

And then there’s dyslexia. Do people who confuse letter shapes, confuse them less when the text is larger? Some people argue that certain people with dyslexia find that discernment of letters improves when the letters are made larger. I daresay it does, though does that mean they can read a passage of text easier? Depends on the volume of text I suppose.

But surely, newspaper headlines are in large type, and it’s much easier to read a headline than it is the body text, and surely poor readers find this especially so? Yes of course that’s true, and a written piece presented entirely as headlines, if it can be done, is an excellent way of communicating information concisely. It’s like they tell you, write it all as bullet points. But a whole block passage in headline text wouldn’t be easy to read at all, can you imagine it? It would be quite the contrary.

I found this paperback book quite hard to read. Not the content: that was easy, it’s very well written, rather there are so few words to a line, and I read it in bed, I felt I spent more time turning the pages than I did reading them. It was quite disconcerting and distracting until I got used to it. Can you imagine what it would have been like with 14pt text? That would be bonkers wouldn’t it? Oh, no, wait a minute, I could have read it faster, for those clever people tell me I could.

You might point to something like the research indicated at http://www.unc.edu /~jkullama/ inls181/ final/font.html headed, ‘In search of the perfect font’ that says

“Research shows that larger font size increases readability, especially reading speed. Bernard, Liao, and Mills(2001) found that older adults read both serif and sans-serif fonts faster with 14 point font than with 12 point font. In a later study, Bernard and Mills(2003) found that their study participants, who were not segmented by age, preferred 12 point to 10 point font regardless of whether it was serif or sans-serif. In a later study by Bernard’s research group, the evaluators found again that the smaller the font, the slower the reading time (Bernard 2002).”

Now you can take all the research you like but that’s just nonsense. There’ll be an optimum, which will be related to the size of the page on which the text is to be found and the circumstances under which it’s being read. You can’t believe a word these researchers say, believe you me. Notice that the references don’t say how long the passages being researched were, and this is in fact highly significant. Again it’s the headline versus block of text issue. It can be a problem with research, of people applying the results of one circumstance to a much wider range of circumstances. And really they should know better.

There is the ecological question to consider too when a page might be printed, as larger type uses more ink. Studies have shown this can be quite significant.

You should also see my page about the theory behind the Guardian newspaper’s choice of font and type size. For optimum readability, 8 point on 9.5, said their research (for a newspaper, being read on a train).

One circumstance where large text makes considerably more sense than small, is in public notices, where a message needs to be got over concisely and quickly. Akin to headlines in a way. For readability, the type size needs to be related to the size of page on which it is located.

When you hear "font size should be a minimum of 12 point", or whatever, please do just ponder a while. Sometimes that might be true, at other times it is quite simply dumb thinking.

Next page in this set: Letter Ambiguities, a Readability Conundrum .

Letter Ambiguities, a Readability Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Certain Typefaces Have Similar Letter Shapes

From the BBC News website, 29 December 2013. The word that begins the title of the article is ‘ill’ with a capital i, i.e. Ill. The font is Arial, which as we are all told by those experts who know these things, is the most easy-to-read typeface ever invented. Capital I and lower-case l in Arial are of course easy to distinguish from each other, for the experts assure us they are.

But note . . .

The photo to the left is of the nameplate from a railway engine, and railway enthusiasts are of all sorts, including, it’s fair to say, a sprinkling of the slowish-witted (one has to be very careful here, but I think I can say that without final contradiction). Has anyone, from this range of abilities including the less able, said they find this difficult to read? I’ve searched on the web but can’t find any indication of anyone saying they do. In fact the nameplate doesn’t look ambiguous at all, does it? It says illustrious dunnit?

But hold your hand in front of the final eight letters and try and read just the first three. Eek! All those theories about sans-serif fonts being so much easier to read, dashed – veritably dashed!

I don’t know what typeface is used for the nameplate – it’s one of those high x-height sans-serif ones.

There are some comments about the letter i and the letter L on my Arial and Comic Sans page.

Nothing whatever to do with typefaces or readability, but on the topic of railway enthusiasts, my observations tell me there is a railway enthusiast ‘type’, at least in the UK. Not all people with an interest in railways necessarily conform to type, but a noticeable number do, and I found a website where certain people who do conform to it have kindly posed for the camera. The website is especially useful for those who might otherwise feel themselves alone and unloved in their study of the topic of Closed Railway Stations in the UK. That is to say, railway stations that are no longer open.

There’s a picture on that site’s front page where the people of pattern are posing. Isn’t it wonderful? One of my favourite pictures on the entire web.

Irlen Syndrome

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:45:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability and in particular the issue of readability of text for people with reading difficulties. This page is not really to do with fonts, it comments on the issue of Irlen Syndrome.

Evidence, see www.irlen.com, seems to indicate that many people, not just those with dyslexia but also others who find reading to be a harsh experience, find a passage of text easier to read through a coloured filter or coloured spectacles. This is especially associated with a perceptual condition known as Irlen Syndrome.

Those who treat reading problems using coloured filters or glasses consistently report encouraging results, though it seems that no one yet knows why it should work. One effect of the filter will be to reduce the relative brightness of text against background, and it may be interesting to know whether text in a shade of grey, as opposed to text in black, on white paper has a similar effect, or whether black text printed on grey paper, or even on coloured paper, is equivalent. So far I can find no indication that anyone has asked the question, it’s all believed to be due to colour.

There is an academic study on the use of coloured filters for reading at Ophthal. Physiol. Opt. 2002 22 55–60. As with many academic studies, this one is obsessed with the results of the trials and on being academically rigorous, without seeming to be able to to stand back and ask the question: why?

The assessment for the coloured filters is sometimes done by adjusting the background colour on the computer screen, but looking at text through a filter will adjust the foreground colour too, which adjusting the background colour on the computer screen will not. You can (with modern web browsers) simulate a transparent overlay. You should be able to do that on this page by switching on the font changer which then appears in the leftmost column. That is not doing exactly the same thing as placing a filter in front of a printed page, though the perceptual effect is fairly similar. Of course with the overlay simulation on screen you won’t get any ambient light reflection, which with a physical filter, however anti-glare, there will always be some. More questions then.

All this seems to point to a relative brightness issue, more than one that is specifically related to colour, though obviously if you are a questioning digger like me more research is still to be done.

As anyone knows who has sat and read a newspaper under a tungsten or fluorescent lamp – ie just about everyone – adjusting the colour of the ambient light is something we soon get used to and don’t perceive as especially different from daylight conditions. So the reading through coloured filters is awash with questions. Obviously if it helps, then that’s good, and perhaps it’s only mean logical teeth-grinders such as me who want to question the science.

Non-pc Guidelines

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:54:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Arial and Comic Sans are White Elitist, June 2011

Much is questioned and written about ‘What is the easiest font to read’, and some people express quite determined views about it. But are those with strong views being culturally non-inclusive? It does seem so.

In the easiest-font-to-read debate, there is the assumption that what is being read is in western script. What about those who read a different script, Arabic for example, or Hindi or Urdu? Are they literarily disadvantaged, because they cannot use Comic Sans? Maybe they are.

I’ve no idea what this means as I don’t read Arabic, but whatever it means, I think it is beautiful just as a design. Beiteddine Palace, Lebanon.

Possibly a plaque such as that shown in the picture would be read only with great difficulty by an Arabic-speaker with a reading disability, as it is not in Comic Sans. Unfortunately I do not have access to the wherewithal to test this hypothesis.

Though even if it were a great struggle for some, it should never be altered as it is so beautiful. Stuff the folk with reading difficulties. I can’t read it either.

Once I Was Happy But Now I’m Forlorn. But it’s in Arabic, so reads from right to left. Though the telephone number is in English, so reads from left to right. An ad for hair transplants, where the images follow the Arabic convention, or at least we hope they do. Taken from a moving bus in a polluted street, next to a power station north of Beirut.

The ad for the Berlusconi Barnet is a bit intriguing as the Arabic text goes from right to left and the English text from left to right. The images follow the Arabic. Presumably people read this OK. Admittedly, anyone who can afford a Berlusconi is likely to have a few pounds available and so might be expected to be a proficient reader, though you can never be sure, there will be some rich dyslexics I’ve no doubt.

Also there’s this article. It would appear that certain young people can find they are effectively dyslexic in one language but not in another, even when both languages use the same script.

Next page in this set: The Typeface of Danish Railways .

The Typeface of Danish Railways

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:46:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Typefaces of the Danish Railway Company (DSB)

Danish railways use a stylish typeface for their station signs and passenger info. In particular it has a very distinctive lower-case g.

This might freak those people who would argue that in order to be read easily, g should look like that which comes with the Arial font; see what I have to say about this on my Typefaces for People with Reading Difficulties page.

It’s especially significant because the Danish Railways font was designed for, what else but . . . legibility – see the typophile discussion on this font.

I am pretty sure that if a British railway company were to introduce such a typeface for its public information signs, there would be a raft of experts insisting that it was not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act. But so far as I know there are no complaints from people in Denmark. The people of Denmark have a reputation for being rather sensible.

As I allude to persistently on these pages, the individual features of the typeface are of minor significance in readability, if they even have any significance at all. The only people who might have problems with it are the self-appointed experts. Oh, that the experts be poked in the ear with an overcooked cabbage.

The Danish railway signs are very stylish and distinctive aren’t they?

More pics on my Railway Typography page on Flickr.

Next page in this set: Typefaces (Fonts) on the Web .

Typefaces (Fonts) on the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:12:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

You can be as ‘easy-to-read’ as you like, but if no one is going to read it . . .

On the BBC’s flagship morning news programme Today on 6 March 2010, John Humphrys interviewed some teenage students at a school in Birmingham about what they did and did not watch on television and internet.

One boy talked about the BBC news website. ‘It’s too boring’, he said, it’s in a ‘standard font’ (the BBC news website is in Verdana) and you immediately want, he said, to switch to a website that gives you the news in a more exciting format. Unfortunately he did not say which sites he preferred.

Beginning of the end for the ‘easy-to-read’ font, perhaps?

One of the fun things about creating a web page is that you cannot be sure exactly what typeface the viewer will see. For while the design may specify, say, Arial 10pt for the font, this will be rendered by the browser of the person who’s looking at the page in whatever way it does. Chances are they’ll have Arial on their machine, but they might not, and the 10pt will almost certainly be rendered at different sizes on different monitors.

This, of course, gives something of a problem to those who want to know, ‘What is the best font for readability?’ for if you cannot predict the font that someone is going to see, the question becomes a bit redundant. Well, sort-of.

The fi glyph that you see in the word ‘specified’ above, is a ligature. A ligature is the running together of two letters to form a single entity, and the reason it was done by the old fashioned typesetters was – aha!, to improve readability. It prevented too wide-looking a gap appearing after a letter f in particular.

These days, no one seems to bother too much about this, nor about laying out the page so there aren’t rivers of white space running down it, nor about finishing a line with the indefinite article a, nor about beginning a line with a numeric so it looks like part of a list. Nor even in some cases I’ve seen, running the final line of a paragraph onto the next page. Readability now, for some people, is all about finding the perfect font. Barking up the wrong tree, or what?

Actually, most fonts including Arial and Verdana and, yes, even Comic Sans, do have ligatures for fi and fl, but these don’t work very easily on a web page, you have to use Unicode characters FB01 and FB02 respectively and then only with certain fonts, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unicode, and for an example of it happening http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographical_ligature.

You will notice that I have used drop caps on some of the paragraphs on this page. Drop caps have the effect of breaking up the monotony of the text and in that way add to readability. This applies less to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer than to the better browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc) where the drop caps format correctly. On IE they don’t; IE is not kind to those who want to lay out their page for readability (it’s considered by designers and programmers to be rubbish in other ways too, of course, drop caps is just one of them).

On the issue of whether text as graphics will be found by search engines (see comments relating to text as graphics above), of course it won’t as such, but it could be by naming the images as something you want to be found, and by use of the alt tags. For example, you may be able to find this page by typing ‘’ into a search engine’s (for example Google’s) search box. That text doesn’t appear on this page except within a graphic, and within that graphic’s name and its alt tags, yet it seems to be found OK, certainly by Google.

Next page in this set: Readability and Legibility .

Readability and Legibility

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Which is it?

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

On these pages I use the terms Readability and Legibility pretty-much interchangeably. Strictly, legibility should mean you can read it, and readability that you can read it and understand it or feel comfortable with it, I think that’s right anyway, it being what some people maintain, for example see the Wikipedia page on Typography and I Love Typography.

If you don’t speak any English then for you this page is legible, but not readable.

And more relevant to these pages, a block of text set in Microsoft’s Comic Sans font in a smallish typeface (8pt) as in the leftmost example below is legible:

But not what you’d call readable, certainly not if you can imagine that spread over a whole page, whereas the passage next to it (in Bookman Old Style 8pt) would on paper be both legible and readable, it doesn’t render so well on screen because of the thin letter shapes and serifs. The third example is Bitstream Vera font 8pt, the most readable of the three on screen, but would probably be less readable than Bookman on paper, in a passage of text of this type I must stress.

“The most terse comment on legibility is attributed to Eric Gill: ‘Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.’ Although humorous, it has been confirmed by research. Familiar forms are more legible than unfamiliar ones.” From Balancing typeface legibility and economy by Victor Gaultney.

There’s a page about legibity in type design at About Legibility by Adrian Frutiger.

And for a discussion on the laying out of type, of designing a page for readability, there’s an excellent article at The Typographer as Reader on the Linotype Font Lounge pages. Notice as you read through that article that there’s no guidance on which font or type of font you need for optimum readability, the advice is all about It ain’t what you do it’s the way how’s ya do it. That’s what gets results.

Next page in this set: A Fonty Conundrum .

A Fonty Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:30:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Researchers Get Their Solutions in a Twist, Font-Wise

On other pages, I have commented on how the question of ease of reading of typefaces or fonts raises more questions than the people who think they have the answers think it does. Now The Economist chips in with an article.

In The Economist of 16–22 October 2010 there was an article titled Learning difficulties in which the first paragraph said: ‘A paradox of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better’.

Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University and colleagues recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three “species” of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge. [I’m quoting here from the article]

Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read. [The article does not say which tests these were that showed Arial 16pt black easier to read than Comic Sans or Bodoni 12]

[Still quoting] Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as “What is the diet of the Pangerish?” and “What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?” The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time.

[Still quoting] The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom? It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier. (End of quote]

Now we know that researchers can find themselves barking up the bonkers tree from time to time, and one has to be careful therefore with taking the results of research at face value. This particular piece of research, at least as it is reported in The Economist, is pregnant with questions that would need answering before we decide upon its worth.

The first question is whether Comic Sans and Bodoni are actually harder to read than Arial, for if they are not, if the reverse is the case, then the conclusions of the research will be the exact contrary.

Similarly with type size. I would have thought that 12 point in blocks of text was easier to read than 16 point, but perhaps the experts know better (ahem).

And similarly with greyscale. Many people say they find black on white too harsh. Possibly the 75% greyscale was a defining factor in making the text in Comic Sans and Bodoni actually easier to read not harder.

And then there’s this: if we accept that people remembered better the harder-to-read font, is this not a justification for making the fonts that we use harder to read, on the basis that we want what we write to be better noticed?

On the topic of whether Arial 16 point is actually easier or harder to read than some other typeface and size, the actual answer is that it depends on context. I can categorically say, whatever any researcher may seek to prove with experiment, that if you went to the bookshop and picked up a paperback novel set in Arial 16 point you would find that very hard to read. As a mini-display, a leaflet or ad say, you could find Arial 16 point very comfortable. One does not need academic experiment to prove this, you just will, you know you will.

Is Mr Oppenheim barking up a wrong tree altogether? Or just barking? Could be both I suppose.

Next page in this set: The Academic Evidence Base for Typeface Readability .

The Academic Evidence Base for Typeface Readability

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:45:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Some academic studies on typeface readability.

This page gives a summary of some academic studies on typeface readability. It is related to my Typeface Readability page.

First, someone has done a much better job of this than I ever could: The Science of Typography by Ellen Lupton. As Ellen Lupton says, ‘Science leaves the designer more or less at sea in terms of font choice’. Quite so.

In addition to the studies identified by Ellen Lupton a number of academic studies have been undertaken on font readability and legibility over a range of reader age and abilities. These include:

University of Wichita Department of Psychology

Experiments with children aged 9–11 on font readability (see http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/31/fontJR.asp)

bizarre research from the University of Witchita

The experiments found that Comic Sans and Arial were the easiest to read and most preferred by the children taking part in the experiment. However this experiment can fairly be treated with extreme caution, not to say derision, because:

1. The researchers compared Arial and Comic Sans with only two other fonts, Courier and Times New Roman. The source data was therefore extremely limited. Something would no doubt come out on top.

2. The experiments were done using a computer screen and then extrapolated to print. Unforgivable.

3. The children taking part in the experiment all had 20/20 vision were 96% familiar with reading text on screens.

There are a number of readability-related research papers from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University that can be found at http://www.surl.org/ usabilitynews/az.asp and scroll down to ‘Font Type/Size’. They’re all a bit kind of weak-bridge in nature, like when you’re driving along and you see a sign that says, Weak Bridge, and you think, I wonder what I’m supposed to do with that information.

The University Of Calgary Department of Psychology

Legibility and Readability of Small Print (www.psych.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/gkconnol/Thesis.html)

A thorough and detailed paper, looking at the legibility and readability of small print.

Summary of the conclusions of this research (with my comments in [] brackets):

University of Calgary – young see better than old & serif fonts better on small print

1. Elderly participants required larger letters than the young to achieve legibility.

2. Reading difficulty approached a significant relationship with clarity of type for elderly readers, but not young ones.

3. Serif fonts, eg Times Roman, proved easier to read than sans-serif fonts [this accords with the general typography principle that large areas of small text tend to be easier to read in a serif font]

4. Condensed fonts should be avoided for blocks of text.

The University of Reading Department of Typography & Graphic Communication

Typography for Children ( http://www.kidstype.org/The project/Testing typography/Typefaces/typefaces.html)

Thorough research from the University of Reading (ie city of Reading, UK) into the readability and preferences of reading age 6 on text styles.

Quoted from the research, except for my comments in [] brackets:

Research – real research

1. There’s not a lot of difference in font readability but slight preferences for non-serif fonts with ‘non-infant’ characters. [eg the children prefer the printer-font style ‘a’ compared to the ‘infant’ ‘a’ of, for example, Sassoon and Comic Sans]

2. We acknowledge that there are many kinds of children’s book and that there could never be any one children’s typeface. It is likely, however, that the following typeface characteristics will be helpful to young children’s reading:

• tall ascenders to help emphasise the word shape

• a clear distinction between characters so they are not confused: a’s and o’s are an obvious example

• no unusual or quirky letters

3. Does it matter whether reading books for young children are set in serif or sans serif type?

• there is no research that says that either serif or sans serif typefaces are intrinsically more legible

• teacher opinion, generally, favours sans-serif typefaces because of the simplicity of the letter shapes

• but children encounter a wide range of letterforms in their day-to-day environment

• publishers tend to listen to teachers because they influence the book-buying policy in schools

• children are seldom asked what they think about the typefaces in the books they read

4. In finding out whether children found serif or sans serif typefaces easy or difficult to read the Typographic Design for Children project took into account:

• expert opinion, designers and publishers’ tacit knowledge

• performance testing use of miscue analysis to see how many and what kind of errors children make when they are reading

• children’s opinions, what children think about typefaces, and what words they use to describe them

5. Our findings suggest that there is little significant difference in children’s reading performance when Century (a serifed typeface) is compared with Gill (a sans serif typeface).

The Micro Foundry

Experiments on foggy text (www.themicrofoundry.com/ss_read1.html)

Experiments suggest that pronounced modularity and diminutive ascenders [as in typefaces such as Avant Garde, Futura, and Comic Sans] render a word ambiguous when it isn’t seen clearly.

University of South Australia, Design Research Group

An analysis of letter shape identified in letter groupings (no longer available on the web, written by Stuart Gluth with reference to the typeface he designed called Roxane):

According to this research, legibility is enhanced by:

1. making the differences in the negative spaces as great as possible in the spaces inside the letters

2. maximising the differences in size and shape between left and right, between top and bottom and between open and closed spaces

The ‘optimal’ typeface for legibility from this research forms part of the recommendations of the research and comes out looking rather like the font that is called Frutiger.

Next page in this set: Newspaper Typography Strategies .

Newspaper Typography Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:47:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

The Real-World Evidence Base

See an analysis of the use of newspaper headlines on a single topic, on my Newspaper Headlines page.

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability. In the use of font readability for people with limited reading skills, the red-top tabloid newspapers are probably more practised than anyone, and they are pretty much united worldwide in what they do:

never mind the eggheads, what’s the real world out there doing?

1. Serif fonts for close-set blocks of text.

2. Sans-serif fonts, usually, for large headlines.

3. Sans-serif or serif fonts for airy (ie not close-set) sections of text.

4. Break up the page by using a variety of font sizes, font weights, and capitalisation for different readability focus-points on the page.

5. Use fonts that have strong ascenders and descenders.

6. Use fonts with clearly-identifiable letter shapes. eg ‘a’ rather than ‘a ’, ‘g’ rather than ‘g’

7. Use ‘fancy’ fonts very sparingly and only for occasional quirky effect.

Different newspapers have different house standards for the exact typefaces and layouts they use.

If you look at the way The Daily Mail in the UK uses typefaces you could think that the typographers have been to the pub before work – that’s if you believe what you’ve been told when you went on that expert’s training course, and they said you must use no more than one or two fonts on a page. The Mail uses a number of fonts, some serif, some block serif, some sans-serif, and it doesn’t strictly allocate them to headings, text or sections. Possibly the only ‘rule’ it sticks to is to use a Roman serif font in multi-column blocks of text. You need to remember that the Mail is Britain’s second biggest selling newspaper, and they wouldn’t be using amateurs to do their typography. What they’re actually doing is using the different typefaces to break up the page and separate out each little paragraph-bite, to grab the reader’s attention. The overall page may look a bit dense and impure to some, but it does its job, which is to look like a serious newspaper for people who’d regard themselves as serious, while at the same time presenting in sensationalist soundbites – very clever. Next time someone tells you that this or that font is categorically the easiest to read, buy them a copy of the Daily Mail and ask them, are five million-odd of the great British population complaining? (ie about not being able to read their newspaper, we know they’re complaining, but not about that). Then when you’ve done that, you can use it to whack them on the head.

Or take a look at the UK newspaper, The Sun. The Sun is famous for being aimed at a low-reading-age reader. What typefaces do they use? The Sun currently (2009) uses a serif news Gothic font for body text, and two main fonts for headlines, both sans-serif, one with a high variation in stroke width, and the other of more uniform width, which is sometimes in italic capitals to break up the page-look a bit. What! italic capitals for low-ability readers? Yeah, course, don’t you believe what those experts tell you, take a look at The Sun (if you can bear to?)(or should that be bare to?)(no, no, bear to, even though it is The Sun).

See an analysis of the use of newspaper titles in stylised Old English fonts, on my Newspaper Titles page. That page shows some fonts with complex letter shapes, that many people see on most days and certainly don’t complain they’re hard to read.

Fashion plays a big part in newspaper design. The change of house style by The Guardian newspaper in September 2005 gives some insight into this, and you can read my observations on this on my Guardian 2005 page.

There’s a website about newspaper design at www.newsdesigner.com

A history of typography

There are references to articles on the history of typography at http://www.typeculture.com/academic_resource/research_directory/?L2=tcrd2_45#tc_2, which will be worth following-up if you think that this or that font is the easiest to read.

Next page in this set: A Page of Newspaper Headlines .

A Page of Newspaper Headlines

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:31:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

from September 2007

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability. A good place to look for real practical evidence on the readability of fonts is the newspapers.

There’s a real-world readability experiment taking place every day, where newspapers, and especially newspapers aimed at the less erudite readership, fight to grab people’s attention. And if a front page is in any way hard to read, you can be sure that few are going to bother to read it. (See also my page on Newspaper Typography Strategies.)

The Guardian newspaper in the UK, on 7th September 2007, published across its centre spread a selection of front pages from different UK newspapers, all on a single topic: the disappearance in Portugal of an English child. The centre spread looked something like this:

There are some consistencies in approach among the different publications to be seen here.

1. The high-brow and middle-brow papers all use a black-ink serif font for news headlines.

(High-brow includes The Independent, The Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian, middle-brow includes the Daily Mail, Daily Express and London Evening Standard)

The Daily Mail and the Daily Express, ie what I’m calling the middle-brow papers, use a serif font for the main news headline, though often a sans-serif font for other headlines. This is very clear on the Daily Express example to the right, you can also see it on the Daily Mail sample on the main spread, alongside the picture of Cherie Blair. This is consistent with the market positioning of these papers, which present a simple, quick-bite technique in their typography to people who would regard themselves as non-intellectual, but thinking and intelligent. (I think that’s a fair analysis – tell me if you think I’m wrong). Though, looking at the banner at the head of the Daily Express example, where it says, ‘Free Sweets’, you do wonder, but anyway . . .

2. The low-brow papers all use a sans-serif font for front-page headlines. This may be in:

black on white

white on black

or a bordered typeface where the background varies from light to dark, for example:

The Daily Mirror does this quite a lot, where the text has a border round it so it stays readable over both a light and a dark background. And it is perfectly readable, clearly it must be even by those of low-to-moderate literary accomplishment. So there you are, is it easier to read black text on white or white text on black? What was the question again?

The lowish-brow Scottish Daily Record has an interesting typeface as part of its headline. Not sure what to make of this from a readability point of view. Certainly challenges those theories about Arial and Comic Sans doesn’t it?

Notice that the middle- to low-brow papers all use quite a condensed font for their headlines. In some guidelines it tells you to avoid using a condensed font for low-ability readers, but then they’re guidelines, we don’t need to take any notice of them, the low-brows wouldn’t succeed if they were difficult to read.

The broadsheets, by contrast, have their serif headlines in a much less condensed font, this is especially true of The Guardian I think. Mainly this will be because they don’t need to condense quite so much, perhaps, though if you look at the sub-heads on the Daily Express example, above, and at the Cherie Blair headline in the Daily Mail example in the main spread, they’re quite condensed yet of a similar sort of height to a headline in a broadsheet.

So what are we to learn from all this? That less-accomplished readers read a sans-serif headline more easily than they would a serif one? And a condensed font more easily than non-condensed? And highbrow readers the reverse? It’s possible, though I wouldn’t be too sure of that, especially given all the quirkiness and jumble shown by the more popular papers, I’d be more inclined to suspect straightforward style and fashion.

If you look at the display of front pages as a whole, there’s a general consistency about them. It’s a mass of red and black. Black and white and red all over, like what we know the definition of a newspaper is. Nothing deviates far from a general norm.

We need to remember always, though, that these examples come from a snapshot in 2007. Techniques will change as time goes by.

But apart from and addition to this, the strongest message that comes through, particularly taking into consideration all those ads for giveaways etc that fill the edges of the pages especially of the red-tops, must be something that backs-up the research from the University of Reading about child-friendly typefaces (see my Typeface Readability page): it’s that people, all people of all ages and levels of ability, are used to seeing around them such a variety of typefaces, that they don’t have much trouble reading most of them. More, the trick is to break up the text into small bites, so nothing looks too daunting for the assumed intellectual level of the readership.

Agreed?

Next page in this set: Newspaper Titles .

Newspaper Titles

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:43:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Title Banners from Newspapers

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

What on earth is this? Is it a Chinese pictogram? Answers on a postcard to . . . Of course, we know what it is, it’s a capital letter I. Seen in context as below, that’s obvious.

The typeface is called Engravers Old English, it’s a font of the Blackletter type and this particular example is based upon the Bitstream version, see myfonts.com.

The Old English typeface has some letters that, looked at in isolation, make rather stylish designs that may not be immediately obvious what they are, but when seen as part of a word are widely recognised as perfectly readable, and I can state that so confidently because Blackletter fonts are used by a number of newspapers for their title, and so far as I am aware you don’t hear people complaining that the titles are hard to decipher.

Newspapers that have an Old English Blackletter title don’t necessarily use the Bitstream version of course; in fact probably none of them do. They’ll all be slightly different from one another; here are some examples, all current when I last looked:

New York Times. Note the capital T, which is quite different from the other examples on this page.

The Washington Post. See the difference between the capital W and that of The Westmorland Gazette, below, and also compare the lower case g with that of the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Telegraph and Il Messaggero.

Chicago Tribune. Notice the lower case g and compare it with that of Il Messaggero below.

Los Angeles Times. Another design of lower case g.

Daily Telegraph (UK). The typeface is quite stylised. It looks traditional at first sight, but compare the T and the a with the other typefaces on this page and you can see that it is much less fussy and more modern and lively-looking. All the letters are like that, for example look at the D.

Daily Mail (UK). Look at the a and the M which are relatively simple and stylised, but the typeface has a very fancy y and a somewhat fussy D. The overall effect is simple while looking solid and traditional at first sight, which fits with the tone of the paper exactly.

Le Monde. Stylish, eh?

Lapin Kansa, a Finnish newspaper. Has the double-line look like Le Monde and the Los Angeles Times, but notice that the jiggedy-jaggedy L is different from either of those, and that the capital K is interesting, for I think that if you did not know that the newspaper is called Lapin Kansa, you'd probably think it was Lapin Ransa. But then once you get to know the typeface, you get it right no trouble.

Fredriksstadt Blad (Norway). Double s and the wonderfully elaborate capital B, though if you compare the lower case a with other examples on this page the letters are not so fancy and fiddly. Strictly this is not an Old English font but a Gotisch Fraktur – roots are in old German rather than old English.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). Another Gotisch Fraktur made stylish, very stylish, especially those Z’s, though also the N and the curly lower case g.

Il Messaggero (Rome). One of my favourites, not least because the Italian masculine singular definite article il begins with an I and a capital I is what we started this page with. Il Messaggero has stylish body text too. Details about the design of Il Messaggero at Sergio Juan Design Studio.

Ethnos (Athens) (Ethnos is the Greek word for nation). Another favourite, I like the stylish lettering. Simple equal-weight sans-serif. Handily the word has an N as its middle letter, which anchors the two letters on each side that can be made into circles. The word Ethnos in a more traditional font is ΕΘΝΟΣ, or in case that didn’t render correctly:

This is the only title on this page that is all-capitals. Had it been in title case it would have looked something like Εθνοσ – which might have opened completely different possibilities for a stylish banner.

The Westmorland Gazette (UK). This is definitely, definitely one of my favourites because of that capital W. Put that by itself and you’d really begin to wonder what it is. But in context you can read the title OK, no? Here it is by itself, below:

^ top

Next page in this set: Guardian Newspaper Change of House Style .

Guardian Newspaper Change of House Style

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:53:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

The Guardian Newspaper Change of House Style, September 2005

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability.

On Monday 12th September 2005, the Guardian newspaper (UK national daily) changed to a new size and typeface. Kindly, on the preceding Saturday, they included a supplement in the newspaper which gave a rationale for this, which appears to be no longer on their website, though there was, the last time I looked, something about the typeface they chose, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theberliner/story/0,,1566047,00.html (I hope it’s still there.)

I’ll comment here only on the typeface and layout, based upon what they said in their supplement. They also changed the page size at the same time.

The previous design change

The Guardian previously changed its house style in 1988. At that time they settled upon using Helvetica bold for the headlines and a serif font named News Miller for the body text. At the time this was considered quite revolutionary and it apparently generated nearly a thousand letters of complaint in the first five days of its usage. It is now, as the Guardian puts it, ‘oft-imitated’. Nothing wrong with it, but after nearly twenty years it begins to look tired, and a change can give a bright modern image.

The Latest Design

So they’ve changed their typeface to a newly-designed one that is of the family known as Egyptian, a slab serif font, and they’re using this in various weights for nearly everything, including body text and headlines.

Slab-serif fonts aren’t of themselves at all new, it’s more the change to something no one else is doing, that gives the fresh new look. That and the decision to go for a light, open version of the typeface for headings.

The size of the body text is 8 point on 9.5 point leading (leading is the distance between the lines), this being decided upon after an amount of real-life simulated trialling, in particular they seem to have been looking for readability on crowded underground trains.

The size chosen, in the selected typeface, is said to ‘soak up text’, by which they presumably mean that you get a lot of words in the space and the words stay eminently readable; a bigger type size would make the paper unwieldy and the articles spread over too many pages.

8 point on 9.5 appears to provide the optimum readability. (Notice, too, that the red-top tabloids tend to use about this size for body text.)

Right-jusified or Ragged-right?

The Guardian’s write-up didn’t mention text justification, though it did say the layout has changed from eight columns per page to five, albeit on a narrower page width, but still giving wider columns.

With wider columns, you have less need to right justify the text, and by not right justifying the text you shouldn’t need to hyphenate words across lines.

Hyphenation of words across lines interferes with readability, at least it does for me, and surely at the very least it can’t help with it.

In the new-style Guardian they seem to have not defined a house style for this, sometimes there’s justification and sometimes there’s ragged-right. Maybe this has been left to the individual typesetter, or are they trying both ways and hoping for reader feedback?

What they still do though, to my irritation, is continue to hyphenate words even when there’s ragged-right text. Why do this?

The UK weekly magazine, The Economist, is even worse at this. The typesetters hyphenate words across lines on half-page ragged-right columns.

But by contrast, The Financial Times is a joy to read in this respect. I think they’re the only UK newspaper to avoid unnecessary hyphenation.

Next page in this set: Save the Planet, Font-wise .

Save the Planet, Font-wise

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:18:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

Font Ecology

Related to my Type face or font readability page, different people have their views on what is the best font to use for readability. Personally I think they are barking up the wrong tree for the most part, but many are firmly fixed in what they believe.

So how about this then, from the University of Wisconsin.

‘The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article on Wisconsin public radio: “Diane Blohowiak is the school’s director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school’s five-year plan to go green. It’s great that a change that’s eco-friendly also saves money.”’

Well that throws the favourite-font proponents into a difficulty doesn’t it? In the trade-off between optimum readability and saving the planet, which should you choose?

In my case the problem is not a serious one, since I believe that the mostly-standard fonts are all equally readable. I just need to bear in mind consumables usage.

Of course the best way to be ecological with your printing, is to say what you were going to say in half as many words, but I suppose for a university that would be a hard rule to impose.

And another way of being more prudent with ink usage is to tend towards the smaller type rather than the bigger. Oh dear, all these theories about readability and there are these ecological busybodies out to wreck them! What is one to do?

Next page in this set: The Fonture of Futes .

The Fonture

noreply@blogger.com (Collimost) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:22:00 +0000

This page has now been moved to some thoughts on which font is BEST.

The Fonture of Futes, according to me – February 2011

This is part of my pages on Typeface or Font Readability, pages where I give some views that relate to the question that this site picks up dozens upon dozens of each day: ‘Which font is the easiest to read?’

Typefaces are like lots of things, they go in fashions, and you can often tell from looking at some text, pretty much when it dates from.

Sacrario dei Caduti translates as Shrine of the Fallen

The example in the photo is from late-1920s or early- to mid-30s Italy, and even if it isn’t, for I do not know exactly its provenance, it still is.

And the Swiss- or Helvetica-style fonts, of which Microsoft’s Arial is one, already look soooo 1980s and 1990s.

So what is the font of the future to be? Incidentally you can read the words ‘Sacrario dei Caduti’ in the photo wihout any trouble can’t you? Despite their very stylised letterforms? For readability, that font is fine then. What is to be the fashion of the future?

I don’t know, of course, but I do know what I would like it to be, so I shall predict based on that. My feeling is that with the advent of digital and low-cost type, everything has become very mechanical, very uniform. We’ve lost the human touch of hand-drawn letters, wherein there are slight variations that give the text life. It’s all become rather sterile and dull.

But with the introduction of vastly increased computing power, surely these tiny imperfections can be synthesised. Random-variation typefaces, that is what I would like to see appearing. I haven’t seen any yet, though some of the script fonts are moving that way especially with their ligatures. That is my prediction in February 2011 in any case. If I turn out to be right, that would be very nice and humanoid.

You still do see hand-lettering about now and again and it can be very refreshing to behold.

Travel agents’ windows are a good source. This one is from the Co-operative Wholesale Society travel agency in Manchester in north-west England. I’m fairly sure this is hand-lettered, but even if it isn’t, it has the life and human quality as though it were:

I think this is absolutely wonderful, even down to the 15% OFF ON . . .

I saw the next one in the Marienkirche in Rostock, East Germany. It may be a typed font that has done this, rather than a hand and pen, but seeing as I’m not sure which, I think it is quite terrific.

The Dream of Another Germany. If you look at the word Greifbares about half way down, those two e’s are surely not identical. There are one or two other examples if you look carefully. But whoever did this is a brilliant letterer, if it was done by hand. And if it’s a font, then it is surely die Zukunft (the future).

Of course not all hand-lettering is quite so classy.

This photo was taken in a poor district of Sheffield town centre.

But the odd thing is, that where you see this jumble of letter shapes, it is quite often aimed at those who almost certainly have low to very low reading skills. Where does that leave the readability theories? I suppose it depends on which theory. My view, which is that people get used to reading all manner of type, it sits very well with. And if this potato(e) stall were to display its wares in, say Arial, I suspect that might be less appealing to those who buy from it, though I’m guessing, since I didn’t see anyone buy at all, during the time that I stood there and watched.