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Re: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces?

Subject: Re: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces?
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 07:12:39 -0400




Bonnie Granat wrote:




It is the serifs themselves that aids reading by guiding the eye
almost subliminally to the next letter and acting almost as a frame
(like a picture frame) for a letter.



Urban myth. Put it out of your mind. A competent typographer (there are as many young competent typographers as there are old competent skateboarders) can achieve equivalent readability with serif or sans serif text faces ("text faces" is a term of art). A given reader may read one faster than the other in any given comparison, but overall speed and comprehension over a statistically significant sample can be the same for both categories of fonts when they are both used skillfully.

As to why European magazines tend to be set in sans serifs, I think the main reason is that magazines hire graphic designers rather than typographers. Graphic designers schooled in the Bauhaus and International traditions of the early to mid-twentieth century are going to gravitate toward sans serif fonts. Book publishers (the kind we're talking about here, not coffee table art books) tend to hire designers who come out of the older typographic tradition.

As a practical matter for the working tech writer, though, most who are not schooled in any aspect of typography end up using canned templates and default software settings, which are selected by programmers, not typographers. Consequently you are faced with the choice between badly composed default Times Roman and badly composed default Arial, both of them rendered on low-resolution devices. In that situation, you're not going to gain much in terms of readability whichever way you go, so do whatever feels good to you. Or delegate to someone who cares.


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Follow-Ups:

References:
RE: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces?: From: Solena . LEMOIGNE
Re: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces?: From: Bonnie Granat

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