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> Another interesting tidbit: dyslexics, according to some
evidence, find
> that serifs make it harder for them to tell one letter from
another.
> Could this fact be taken to mean that sans serifs are more
readable
> because they are more legible?
>
> Understand that I have seen no evidence to convince me that
either
> serifs or sans serifs are to be preferred over the other. I
mention
> these facts only to play devil's advocate. The fact that you
can build a
> plausible-sounding argument for preferring either one actually
> reinforces my tendency to think that any differences are small
or
> non-existent.
About reading disorders and the effects of design, dyslexics
report that the words on a page seem to jump around, and that
some environmental stimuli seem to aggravate that. I am not
diagnosed dyslexic, but as a reader I benefit from some of the
remedies that dyslexics employ to overcome that problem, such as
colored (yellow for me) eyeglass lenses and incandescent
(non-flickering) lighting. I think I tend to feel like reading
serif fonts is a little bit exhausting--the clean, uniform lines
of a classic sans seeem to have a streamlined personality that
gets to the point (i.e., facilitates my reading to the point),
whereas reading serifs has me schlepping so much of the serif
baggage of their lithographic amd calligraphic artifacts
(stone-carved serifs, varying line widths of the calligrapher's
pen). While I readily compensate and can read serifs all day
long (and I actually prefer serif designs for their classic
allusions), I do feel a little bit taxed by them.
I suspect that there are a lot of people who have similar
perceptions about refined aspects of typography, though there do
not seem to be many respondents prepared to articulate a concious
response. Adrian Frutiger ("Univers") explained:
"...the most important thing I have learned is that legibility
and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its
restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader."
His is probably a prime example of the inner life of the ice age
cave painters whose bison and deer bear mute witness to the
genius for elegant comunication. There are aboriginal paintings
all over the place, and most have obscure messages if a message
is discernable at all, but some (and they're well known today,
rightly so) capture real "qua" without which the paintings are
uninhabited matchstick figures. Likewise, some fonts seem to
capture "communicativeness", while other fonts are just following
orders, doing their job, commiting words to media and possibly
obstructing communication.
Diverging from Frutiger's purely artisal dedication to font
design: A couple of decades ago there would have been very few
people who could identify themselves as "visual" learners, but
now a full 50% of all people are thought to be so, and there are
many who are aware that visual information serves them best.
Given the progress in that area of cognitive research, I don't
expect these other persistent, intuitive questions about design
to go away--they seem to be gathering some momentum and may
eventually be decoded into useful strategies for enhancing
information transfer through text.
What I think I have learned is that for most of us, sans serif is
a fashion, perhaps an enduring one, like Danish Modern furniture.
Fashion isn't something I am comfortable in dismissing as
irrelavant to usability! I think it helps to tap into whatever
motivation a reader has, even if it is as simple as being
attracted to fashionably-designed text. And given the ephemeral
lives of most of our documents, it shouldn't take a major fashion
revolution to inflect our choice of fonts. I'll admit that I
don't have a talent for, or strong sense of graphical design, but
I do feel the requirement to produce attractive text designs, if
only to secure a place as an employed tech writer. But my bottom
line in documentation is information design, with text design a
distant second. When someone finally designs a font optimized
for speed reading, it will mirror my information designs, and
these dark ages of being buffeted around by the arbiters of taste
and fashion will give way to a real renaisance for writing.
(BTW, sorry for the arcane use of "lithographic", I rummaged
around my vocabulary for a word meaning "carved in stone" and
that's what I came up etymologically, as a reasonable candidate).
My fontasy, your usability may vary.
Ned Bedinger
Ed Wordsmith Technical Communications Co.
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com http://www.edwordsmith.com
tel: 360-434-7197
fax: 360-769-7059
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