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Typeface vs font chris do1/15/2024 ![]() ![]() "Besides the formal qualities of the typeface, the structure of the letters, a lot also depends on how the fonts are employed, and for what purpose." He continued: Plus some shapes of serifs might actually hinder readability if they are too prominent or draw too much attention to themselves," Alexander Tochilovsky, a design instructor at the Cooper Union School of Art, told me in an email. "There are many very readable sans serif typefaces out there. (User-interface designer Alex Poole pored over 50 empirical studies for his master's thesis if you're interested in learning more.) Online, it's commonly understood that serifs, or fonts with a tiny line tailing the edges of the lettering, like Times New Roman, help influence the horizontal flow of reading. Ī lot goes into typeface design that we tend not to think about. Maybe there is a slight difference in how they are rendered in PCs or laptops that causes the starch in Computer Modern to be a little softer than the starch in Baskerville. And there can be a number of explanations for that. ![]() I would have expected that if you are going to have a winner in Baskerville, you are also going to have a winner in Computer Modern. Computer Modern is a little bit more tuxedo and Baskerville has just a tad more starchiness. It seems to me that Georgia is slightly tuxedo. There are some fonts that are informal - Comic Sans, obviously - and other fonts that are a little bit more tuxedo. The word that comes to my mind is gravitas. Why was Baskerville more believable? Dunning had a theory: The fact that font matters at all is a wonderment." "That advantage may seem small," Dunning told the Times, "but if that was a bump up in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it. īaskerville's weighted advantage wasn't huge - just 1.5 percent. But is there a typeface that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.īelieve it or not, the results of this test even show a disparity between Baskerville and Georgia - two apparently similar serif typefaces. The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes - at least among some people - contempt and summary dismissal. Roughly 40,000 people responded to the quiz, and the results were weighted to evaluate which fonts inspired more confidence in the research, and which fonts made the information appear less believable. When readers came to the site, the story was presented in different typefaces: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, and Trebuchet. In part two, with the help of Cornell psychologist David Dunning, Morris designed a quiz to evaluate whether the Times' readers found the study's conclusions believable. Part one was an ordinary article about a scientific study concerning optimism versus pessimism.
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