Do typefaces make a difference?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Sorry, but I go back to when a font was a specific subset of a typeface, and I’ll poke you with a pica stick if you try to convince me otherwise. But, time, and language, marches on and yes, I know the meaning of “font” has become corrupted over the years.

Anyway, do they matter?

Apparently the gentle reader has never felt seething rage upon viewing a memo written in Comic Sans, usually complete with gratuitous capitalization and scare quotes.

“Please”
Do not Throw used
“Tea bag’s” into the Sink

<shudder>

How about weaponized typography? Need to provide information to someone and you really don’t want them to read it? Set it ugly and give them a headache! I did this once before: (gratuitously swiping from the original column linked above)

“Nor did it stop there. Gill Sans, the font used in British railway signage until the 1960s, was designed by an apprentice to Johnston, and the creator of the ‘Keep calm’ font was clearly aware of both. One senses in all three typefaces a steely Churchillian resolve coupled with a nod to the practical: We shall never surrender. Mind the gap.”
Fierra rolled her eyes. “You’re too hard on Americans. They may have been oblivious to typography years ago, but that’s less true than it used to be. Look at the 2008 presidential campaign. The Obama campaign was praised for using the recently designed font Gotham in its graphics, which was seen as fresh and bold, emblematic of a new generation, in contrast to the dated typefaces of the McCain and Clinton campaigns, which suggested they were mired in the past. I don’t say Gotham was entirely responsible for Obama’s victory. But it reinforced an impression carefully crafted by an organization that, where image was concerned, seldom took a step wrong.”
Little Ed now stirred himself. “I’m not especially observant, but I notice fonts,” he said. “The old typeface used on signs on the interstates, commonly called Highway Gothic, is being phased out in favor of a new one, Clearview. The project was begun years ago without publicity, but the change has been obvious to anyone who looked, and so was the reason for it: Clearview is easier to read.

It’s perfectly legible, but the readability absolutely sucks, especially as a six-page document without paragraph breaks. Just walls of black… :smiley:

MODERATOR NOTE: Let’s please have this thread focused on fonts and their impact. Criticism of this style of column, please go to the other thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17443176#post17443176
Thanks – Dex

2

Yes, fonts make a difference.

I wish I had the cite right here (and I know you all will not like it that I do not), but I had this debate years ago and I was given a study that showed that sans-serif is able to be visually scanned and read significantly faster than typefaces with serifs.

When you are describing, say, an “S” shape, you wouldn’t normally do so with the serifs. Trace an "S in the air with your finger or on the dirt with a stick or whatever. No serifs, unless you’re being obtuse.

An “S” , and an also an “S” Shape:
S

An “S”, but not really an “S” shape:
S

Our minds recognize letters just that way, and serifs are additional “noise” that slow down letter recognition ever so slightly. It adds up however, and eliminating the “noise” allows for faster and easier reading.

Also, the example of the font above in the eralier response clearly shows how a visually poor or at least less familiar font can really slow things down.

Certinaly, the use of sans serif fonts allow one to use a slightly smaller font and still maintain easy readability. This allows one to fit more words onto a page. When this was frst pointed out to me, I found that I could take 12 point serif font and reduce it to 10 point sans serif with no loss of readability. More information on fewer pages means less paper and printer ink used.

I am somewhat fluent in German, but I find reading anything --even something as familiar as the Bible-- in the old Fraktur font quite difficult. I would think that if I had been raised from childhood reading it, I might find it easier, but I still do not believe that it would be anything as easy or as fast as reading a simple sans-serif font where no one leter could be easily mistaken as another.

As an aside, the supposedly “modern” font/handwriting system Sutterlin seems to have been very deliberately desinged to render the written word absolutely incomprehensible. Try to find a German under 50 who can easily read it.

I give it to the British for recognizing the advantages of sans serif fonts a long time ago.

3

And I have read exactly the opposite, that serifs made things easier on the eyes and speed recognition.

(And I’m with the OP, “font” is not a synonym for “typeface”)

4

Yes. But the vast majority of people think it’s about as significant as the kind of paper.

5

I hate to be the one to say it but this column has got to be one of Cecil’s worst. It’s hardly informative at all and completely fails to answer David Powell’s question. Do they affect a reader’s perception of written material?

Where are the statistics? Where are the cites to some actual scientific papers on the subject based on actual research by actual scientists?

I was expecting something like:

  1. According to a study commissioned by the US Postal Service in 1972, labels printed in sans serif fonts were read an average of 22% faster by postal workers, compared to serif fonts. Presumably this would translate into letter carriers being able to complete their routes faster.

  2. Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University in 2004 used polygraphs to show that the emotional response of readers varied by as much as 18% when the same story was read in different fonts.

  3. A study by researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands found that using a specially created font call Dyslexie reduced the likelihood of reading errors for dyslexics.

Mind you, I just made up the first two items; they are complete fiction. I’m just giving examples of the kind of informative answers that I expected to see in the column but were completely absent. But the third one is real. Instead, we are treated to a ramble about whether the British deserve their reputation for being stoic. I’m very disappointed.

6

Big difference. I’ve got multiple copies of The Razor’s Edge, as it’s arguably my favorite book. I have one version printed maybe 80 years ago, found in a used bookstore for next to nothing. Since I re-read the book a lot I bought s more recent version, maybe Penguin. If I’d encountered the Penguin version first, I doubt I’d ever have finished the book - bland typeface, ssmaller print, and paragraphs run together (I guess to save pages). Pre-Kindle, that experience really made me think about how text is presented and look for a better, used version of something that seemed unreadable in mass market paperback.

Nothing has helped with Gravity’s Rainbow, though.

7

That’s okay. Everything after page 300 or so is just greeked anyway. Hardly anyone ever notices.

8

It depends on whether we’re talking about print or raster displays. I believe serif fonts are fairly universally acknowledged as better for ease of reading in large chunks at small sizes. But on a raster display (such as the one on which you’re reading this), the serifs (at a small point size, at least) can’t be rendered in the correct proportions and you lose most of their advantages. That’s why most web sites use sans-serif for prose (and often serif for headlines, ironically).
Powers &8^]

9

I was kind of surprised there was no mention of the whole film about the Helvetica font: www.helveticafilm.com/

10

Well, font or typeface substitution certainly makes a difference.

I wrote the OP on a Windows PC. The face I used for the “weaponized typography” was Impact, and the memo was obviously Comic Sans. An iPad has neither of these, so right now, I’m seeing both of them in some flavor of Times. A pity, since Impact is UGLY at ten points as it’s skinny with a huge x-height and is meant for headlines.

11

In my line of work – cartography – fonts and typefaces are crucial. Not necessarily the exact choice of typefaces, but rather the contrast among them. You need to choose between two and five (more than five is just a mess), and assign each one to a well-defined category.

For example, recently I had to make a map in which the names labeling counties, states, and national parks would have been hard to distinguish without using different (yet aesthetically compatible) fonts or typefaces.

12

So I don’t have the time right now to try and track it down, but there was a study I read about several years ago - I’m going to guess 2008ish.

It was examining previous studies on serif vs. sans serif and their methodology, and the big conclusion of the study as I recall (sorry no cites) was that serif vs. sans serif value and use was entirely dependent on the font.

Whether legibility or artistry or emotion was the goal, some serif fonts were far better than some sans, and vice versa. Seems like Helvetica was one of the fonts that knocked out most other common fonts for legibility but that’s a pretty vague memory I’m relying on.

Anyway, I’ve got no good cites for it but I can vouch that there was some sort of article in a legitimate print media that had that conclusion.

13

Not merely a subset, but the physical expression in metal or wood of a particular size and weight of a typeface. I will go to my grave arguing the distinction. Unless my wife is in the room. I don’t want to go to my grave that soon.

14

This guy is probably the closest thing to an expert on the subject that you’ll find with a freely accessible page on the internet. In his review of the available studies, he finds that there’s not a big advantage for either.

As long as the font is appropriate for the situation, it will be readable. Using a font meant for headlines or posters (like Impact) as body text was appropriately described as “weaponized” typography by an earlier poster. Probably the only ways to be more obnoxious would be to choose several different incompatible fonts, subtly screw with people’s minds by mixing very similar fonts like Arial, Helvetica (which can be fairly easily distinguished from Arial), and flavors of Frutiger and Grotesk, or futzing with kerning and leading to make everything look somehow “off” (or turn tweaks up to 11 to really fuck things up).

Fonts do make a difference in perception, particularly in branding. Seeing some logos set in Papyrus would make even people with no particular interest in typefaces think something was seriously weird about the match between the desired image and the presentation.

In print, I find that serif fonts “chunk” the words into gestalts better for me. Reading long passages of sans-serif text is perceptibly more fatiguing and might even be slower, though I haven’t done anything like time myself to check that.

On screens with lower resolution, sans-serif fonts survive better. With “Retina” level resolution, it doesn’t make as much of a difference. I find screens in this class to have close to paper levels of legibility, even at quite small font sizes. Because I prefer serif fonts for longer reads, I Instapaper multipage articles and use Palatino or Hoefler Text for the presentation font (Baskerville is too thready for my taste on any screen, though it looks quite nice in print, probably because of ink bleed).

15

The first thing that came to mind while reading the article:

**KEEP CALM

AND

CARRY ON**

16

**keep calm

and

carrion**

17

I have done A/B testing of different fonts on text based internet ads involving hundreds of millions of impressions and millions of dollars in ad revenue.

It absolutely makes a difference - and not a small one (for my company) either. However most of the winning combinations I came up with weren’t some super secret font and it varied sometimes on different factors.

So I don’t know about readability stats, but as far as sales/clicks/conversions - yes it does. Although keep in mind some of it appears to be size related and it was a little harder than you might guess to have two fonts appear the same size.

A little off topic - I used to do usability testing on my mom (I highly recommend anyone making a website use an older person for usability testing - and usually you can get your mom for cheap!) - and she was the first person I ever had as a guinea pig (for a website). The very first thing I learned took about three seconds - as she took out her glasses and struggled to read (the very easy to read for me screen - font size had never occurred to me).

18

Very interesting commentary so far. For now, I just want to say that the biggest distraction and detriment to reading things in Kindle is all the. Darned. Rivers. It’s like monster faces popping out of the book, especially when I read at night.

In general, I find that serif typefaces are much easier on the eye for long texts…sans serif for short, bulletin messages. I don’t think that’s an outlier perspective.

19

Which in the digital world is paralleled by the software that allows you to use the typeface. But what you see when you use it is the typeface not the font.

20

carrion, my wayward son

All the factors need to combine properly. Times New Roman is perfectly readable at 12 pt but an ugly mess at 9 pt. Verdana is my choice for packing as much as can be readable onto a draft page at 9 pt but at 12 pt it loses the eye because of the distance between characters.

I’m doing a website in Georgia now because the font runs larger than Times and is easier to read on screen. The sans serif fonts don’t have enough heft. They work fine for quotes, though, which are short and need to stand out from the main blocks of text. I even use Impact in one place, but for its intended purpose as a title font that draws the eye with a word or two.

Satirist S. J. Perelman once mocked the use of tiny type as “4 point Myopia”. He was joking, but I just came across a paperback that limited pages by using the smallest font I’ve ever seen in a professional publication, with an x-height of a millimeter. That’s 2.5 pt. It’s close to totally unreadable and an object lesson in proper font use.