Comments on: Readability

By: Gareth Barnard

Gareth Barnard — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 12:01:34 +0000

In reply to Robin Turner. Interesting Robin, I'd been taught that serifs were there to aid readability, as a sort of means of replacing lines. But I prefer sans-serif fonts in general, they don't seem to be so 'harsh' on the eye. Will definitely have to check out the 'Computer Modern' font.

By: Gareth Barnard

Gareth Barnard — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 11:58:46 +0000

In reply to Stuart.

Thanks Stuart. I think that reading is a whole pipeline of processing, initiated from the brain interpreting an image as containing text as a part of the general pattern recognition as we decipher the world to identify elements of interest, then we process the elements and link them as fast as possible to what we know as if they are a threat, then speed is important to survival – at least that’s how I think is what is happening in relation to what we’re discussing and observing, thus trying to make sense of ‘Why is that?’ :).

By: Robin Turner

Robin Turner — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 08:12:36 +0000

Interesting – I’d read a number of studies of fonts and readability, but none of them dealt with cursive fonts, just things like serif vs. sans serif. Incidentally, some oft-quoted studies are not very rigorous. For example, a study that gets cited in favour of sans serif fonts only compared two fonts, Times New Roman and Arial (which were the defualts in word in those days). It’s likely the reason Times New Roman was less readable had nothing to do with serifs and everyting to do with compression – it’s based on Apple’s Times font, which in turn was based on the newspaper of that name, so it’s designed to be read in narrow columns. Other studies have indicated that compression is a negative factor (which might relate to your observations on letter spacing) so it would be interesting to do studies with a broader font like Georgia.

Readability issues aside, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern font still rocks my world!

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 02:24:33 +0000

Interesting post !
My initial training was as a graphic designer, and it was exactly at the time that typesetting fundamentally changed in the printing industry, although second year at art college I did learn to construct pages using metal letters and putting it all in backwards!
Something related was learning to render (draw) typefaces – and I can still (fairly accurately) draw about a dozen fonts (typefaces).
So I have quite an eye, and interest in the way we read letters, and words, and even the psychology behind how our eyes actually just read the first few letters of a word, and our brain guesses the rest 😉
Fascinating stuff.