RE: Online fonts and sizes -- a bit long

["walden miller" <wmiller -at- vidiom -dot- com>]

Bruce writes:

... on-line viewing is a special case for typography, but no
more so than many other design restraints are. Many of those who
designed on-line fonts, such as those offered by Adobe, are equally
skilled at designing fonts for the page. They don't require a major
adjustment in their thinking.


Yes and no.
When designing fonts for billboards, signs, and online viewing, legibility
is often a factor of distance between the font and the viewer.  These are
special cases in design.  Books, magazines, etc. have a built-in distance
factor. Most fonts are designed for being optimally legible at 1-2 feet.
Highway sign and billboard fonts must be tested at much larger distances and
must be legible at a glance.  Very different design constraints.  Most
computer display fonts are designed to be legible at a specific point size
at the same reading distance as books. But because you can usually change
the zoom size of any document or change the display of your monitor, you can
adjust the font size (without screwing with the metrics) for legibility.

Unfortunately, Television fonts and computer fonts are not similar and you
do have to adjust to a completely different set of constraints when thinking
about them.  The physical display (square pixels versus rectangular pixels
for NTSC) makes using the same fonts somewhat painstaking.  The viewing
distance is also a consideration (7-9 feet is the norm, but different sizes
of TV screens even make this problematic). Finally, television resolution is
poor (an understatement).  Even though Television has been around for a long
time, typography for television is poorly understood and not very well
mined.  Each company I have worked with in this industry develops their own
fonts or attempts to create a filter to change postscript and truetype fonts
to TV fonts.  What makes the development of these fonts worse is that they
are developed on computers (and TV fonts look awful on computer displays).

Anyway... font usability studies of all kinds usually are unable to explain
how two factors affect their studies: context and medium. Font legibility
(as subjectively selected in a study) is generally context dependent (phone
bills vs books, vs advertising vs academic text, etc.) and physical medium
dependent (for online: monitor size and settings, distance from screen, type
of chair provided, color of background, ambient light, etc. for hard copy:
page color, page width, binding, peripheral clutter, etc. For both: white
noise or absence of noise, etc.)  There was a very cool study on matching
fonts with occupations that showed how much baggage we bring to reading
(things written in Times are more "TRUE" or more "SERIOUS" than those
written in other fonts because all newspapers are in Times ;-).

All of these factors are compounded by cultural backgrounds and familiarity.

And then there is the actual font itself (which everyone has chimed in about
already).

I love to read font studies, but never take them as gospel.  They are just
more fodder in the design mill of the technical writer.

walden




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