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Re: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces

Subject: Re: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 21:02:57 -0700


Ned Bedinger wrote:

I see this as a
design/usability issue, characterized by strong opinions and
beliefs, and it seems to break along the lines of people who
know versus people who don't.

This is a much trickier question that you seem to assume.

You can generalize that, all things being equal, because of the relatively low screen resolutions currently in use, sans serifs are more readable because less can go wrong with their rendering. You can also generalize that a North American audience finds serif texts more suitable for body text.

However, I doubt that anyone with any typographic knowledge would want to go farther. To start with, all things are rarely equal. Leading, font size, and other font characteristics can make a serif font perfectly readable on-line and a sans serif unreadable.

Secondly, there are some serifs - notably slab serifs like Joanna - that work on-screen very well without tweaking.

By the same token, there are some sans serifs, such as Gill, that could do very well for body text.

There are studies that claim to have reached definitive conclusions on these subjects, but those I have seen are are uniformly flawed. None of them take culture into consideration. Nor do they make sufficient effort to keep all things equal (this is called controlling the variables in scientific circles). These studies are a large part of the reason why I find usability studies next to useless. They remind me of the studies of pschic phenomena that are made without magicians: they're far too sure of themselves, they ignore the advise of experts that could help them to structure their studies properly, and their conclusions are invalid.

--
Bruce Byfield 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield


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References:
Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces: From: Ned Bedinger

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