I think DSeid’s link does a good job of showing those common opinions to be highly questionable.
In print I find serif and sans serif equally readable. The font, x-height, leading and weight seem more important than the presence or absence of serifs. There are also issues of familiarity and tradition, but they fade fast once the reading begins.
“Always been taught…”
I’d be interested to know where you were taught about typeface. Is this part of a particular field of knowledge? Where does this information typically reside where someone would be taught it?
Well I did point out stroke weights, etc., as well as the serifs themselves, and agree that leading and X-height are also important. The new serif fonts meant to be used onscreen take all that into account. It’s just that a lot of the traditional serif fonts that had been used for centuries in print were poorly suited to the task for a number of reasons, whereas many of the sans serif fonts did not have those problems.
Newspaper layout and design classes, graphic design classes, and fontography. It’s quite a fascinating field (to me, at least), and the art of fontography is perhaps an underappreciated one.
Fontography??? I’d be interested in learning the first use of this word. I’m fascinated with this thread and the direction it has taken. I’ve been struck in recent years with the public conversation about fonts - a topic that would certainly strike some (me, for example) as enormously trivial and barely relevant. I saw several conversations about campaign bumperstickers and etc. and their design, always including reference to the emotional impact or readability of the various fonts. When did people start caring about such things? Where is this in people’s educational experiences? Is it becoming part of high school curricula?
I know you’re settling for those, because you must not be familiar with a little font called Comic Sans.
I’m a visual artist (photographer), so any aspect of visual culture fascinates me. Since my background is newspapers, I’ve always had a particular affinity for the role of typefaces in design and effective communication. Basic font usage and history was taught in my newspaper design class in college. I believe I may have also been taught basics of fonts in high school yearbook, but it wasn’t part of my standard high school curriculum.
As for when did people start caring about such things. Well, I would say since man learned how to write and use it as a means of communication. Look at the inscriptions of old Roman structures, for instance. They weren’t haphazardly chiseled in there. People put a lot of time and effort in developing letterforms that were both elegant and readable. Look at the art of calligraphy. Or just general penmanship. We have a very long history of caring about not only what we write, but how we write it.
Well, of course the eye scans phrases (the average in English is three words in an instant) but the small still adds up to the whole. I personally find Times New Roman more difficult in smaller fonts. And of course people or publishers aren’t thinking about typographic history when they choose a font. I mean that there are all kinds of fonts which are equally as “readable” as Times New Roman, but the default–both figuratively and literally in a lot of word processing software–seems to be Times, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s simply a matter of tradition, which at one point long ago, for printers, was more of an aesthetic consideration than anything else.
To go back to the original question, I think it’s important to look at what we lose when we go all caps. It isn’t just a matter of being hard on the eyes or creating different shapes than we expect. Specifically, we lose easy ways to spot:
So, for example, “See Spot run to the US.” contains a lot more useful information than “SEE SPOT RUN TO THE US.” This is especially true online, where acronyms are plentiful, you can’t be sure writers have proofed their work and people may still be learning English.
(And if you fix the acronym problem by adding periods (U.S.) you make it even harder to spot the beginnings of sentences).
I should also add that the word I was looking for was actually “typography” not “fontography.” There’s a program called “Fontographer” that was swimming around in the back of my head when I wrote that post.
Anyhow, a number of typography classes should be a part of any graphic design curriculum.
If you’re interested, most introductory books on graphic design will at least touch on the basics of type. Robin Williams’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book has a pretty good section on it, and lays down some simple guidelines for how to pick fonts, how to format text, and how to combine different text elements. It’s very simplified, but still good knowledge.
Yet engineering drawings are all caps. They abbreviate like crazy too, yet they are easy to read.
They aren’t continuous text that you read (or even skim) at many hundreds of words per minute, so different considerations are in play there.
I’m not enough of a design historian to speak authoritatively, but…
The Romans cared a lot about type, and the Roman alphabet is seen as one of their greatest aesthetic achievements. Often they played second fiddle to ancient Greece, but not in letter forms.
When I entered the work force (as a designer), it was just getting interesting for secretaries because the IBM Selectric typewriter had interchangeable font balls! (Does anyone remember Orator?) No more just choosing between pica and elite (big or small type).
Then when laser printers arrived, you could play with 20 or 30 typefaces (If you count bold and italic as separate faces.)
Now of course, everything is WYSIWYG (an acronym that is becoming obsolete) and anyone can spend all day trying to choose the perfect typeface for their Powerpoint show.
So, typography is now something everyone can play with, not just designers.
Generally I’m not as concerned with individual typefaces as much as I am with mixing styles of type. A page might have headlines, body type, subheads, pull quotes, enlarged initial caps, sidebars, web links, logotype, disclaimers. Making all these elements work together often involve using serif and sans serif in regular, medium, bold and italic, as well as script faces and display faces (fonts that are too idiosyncratic to work for blocks of text.)
I can spend six hours looking for the perfect lowercase “g” for a headline, but it rarely is really worth doing that. Another designer might glance at it and think: ehh… it should have been on the other side of the page.
There’s a saying in design that’s something like “Good design is the design you don’t notice.”
You think of design elements (of which typeface is a significant one) as trivial because they’ve been pored over and refined to a point where you usually don’t notice them. But I doubt you have trouble telling a professional design from an amateur one, because those small elements add up.
Things like legibility, emotional impact, eye-catchingness, etc. are more significant than you might think, especially for small designs like campaign logos. People make decisions very quickly about these things; first impressions are very important.
I’d recommend checking out the documentary “Helvetica” if you’re interested in the topic – you’ll see just how much impact a single new typeface had on 2D design in general, and I think you’ll immediately appreciate how important that typeface is to the modernist look of the 60s and on.
snork
Touche, my friend, touche.
I was just going to post this. If you have Netflix, you can see it via Watch Instantly. Lordy, I love that movie, esp. where Michael Bierut discusses the change in Coke ads. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDLPAE9wLEU
I am aware that typeface and fonts have always had their significance. What is striking to me is the public conversation about these things that assumes that most people are conversant with the ins and outs of design, typography, and the like. It’s not an unimportant aspect of culture, and clearly there are folks - look at this thread - whose life work involves these things. But I’d think these folks are a pretty small portion of the public. It would be similar, I guess, to coming across a number of conversations in the various media about the growing use and attendant controversy regarding the metalic alloys they’re now using to build catalytic converters. I’d be surprised to find that on two or three tv programs over the course of a couple weeks. Just my own little observation.
A lot of people have to design publications, signage, etc., as a part of their job or as a hobby. In my case, my first involvement was as a student when I spent some time editing the student newspaper – and read books from the university library on typography so that I could do the layout part reasonably well. What I learned there, with a combination of hands-on experience plus book learning, but without any formal training, has been useful in various parts of my work where I’ve had to design newsletters and PowerPoint presentations. I don’t think that’s so unusual in a professional career.
Slightly tangential: A bit of typographical humor.
To expand a little on Giles’s post, I don’t think it would be similar at all. How many of us dabble in metallic alloys? Not many, I’d bet. However, with the advent of the computer age and desktop publishing, web-page design, etc., quite a substantial portion of us have become amateur designers. So, with so many people these days designing and printing or web-publishing their own materials (everything from wedding invitations to personal home pages to creating their own photobooks, etc.), it’s not usual that there would be a lot of non-professionals for whom conversations about design and typography is interesting.