Arial and Comic Sans

You sometimes hear ‘expert knowledge’ that this or that font is the easiest to read, and this or that often seems to involve Arial or Comic Sans. This fashion for pedantry appears to be waning a bit now though, thank goodness, though it’s still about. (eg see How to write clearly by the UK Literacy Trust.)

On 28 April 2009 The Guardian newspaper in the UK printed an editorial piece called In praise of . . . Comic Sans and it generated a large number of comments on its web page; clearly Comic Sans is something that some people have strong views about.

The ‘evidence’ for the assertions about Arial and Comic Sans being the most readable of fonts is probably the University of Wichita whose results are highly skewed (see my Academic Evidence Base for Typeface Readability page)

Some people believe that Arial is definitely NOT the answer that some others would have it to be:

Mark Simonson gives a rundown on the history of Arial and concludes, ‘ . . . a professional designer would rarely—at least for the moment—specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable. It has what you might call a “low-end stigma”.’

www.mimeartist.com/helvetica, is a kind of game where Helvetica kicks Arial out of the way for, as the site says of Arial, ‘We don’t need its type round here’.

http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html, tells you how to spot the difference between Arial and two fonts it is based on, ie Helvetica and Grotesque 215 .

And why not take a look at www.cafepress.com/72dpi.1368492 which is not actually Arial but Helvetica (upon which the Arial font was based) and as it says on the page, ‘Annoy the crap out of your type-snob friends!’ – so I thought it was germane to include that one.

Arial and Comic Sans are designed for use on your desktop computer. Neither of them was ever intended to be a printer’s font, so they don’t have many of the features that a font that is designed for print is likely to have, though of course not everyone knows that there is such a distinction and so will demand their favourite font – that which they have heard about as being so perfect – for everything including sometimes uses that are inappropriate.

Personally, I believe in horses for courses, so I don’t take a stand on this in the sense of believing any one to be being better or worse, my view is that in the right place either could be quite comfortable to read, and in the wrong place (especially for example blocks of text for a quirky font like Comic Sans) either could be considerably less comfortable to read than a whole host of alternatives.

Some issues with Arial and Comic Sans, for your interest maybe:

The Arial font, like many sans-serif fonts, makes little or no distinction between an upper case i (I) and a lower case L (l). So in a word like Illegal, set in Arial like that, the first three letters are pretty-well indistinguishable. The Verdana font distinguishes upper case i from lower case L clearly, viz Illegal, as does Comic Sans, (Illegal), though in Comic Sans the a and o (a and o) can be hard to distinguish, especially in smallish point sizes, in a word like goal (goal).

But there’s not many people know that. Lots of typefaces have these similarities between two or more letters and no one notices most of the time.

As an indication of that (that just about nobody notices what you might think would be a reading ambiguity), look at the photo on the right. It’s the nameplate from a railway engine, and railway enthusiasts are of all sorts, including, it’s fair to say, a sprinkling of the slowish-witted (one has to be very careful here, but I think that can be agreed upon). The point is, has anyone, from this wide range of abilities, said they find this difficult to read? I’ve searched on the web but can’t find any indication of anyone saying they do. In fact the nameplate doesn’t look ambiguous at all, does it?.

But hold your hand in front of the final eight letters and try and read just the first three. Eek! All our theories about easy-to-read sans-serif fonts shot to pieces. Oh, no!

I don’t know what typeface is used for the nameplate by the way – it’s one of those high x-height sans-serif ones.

Arial and Comic Sans are generally fine to read, though Comic Sans is an eccentric font and can look rather daunting and rather garish, and the number of websites that try to use it for body text is mercifully diminishing. One example still extant at time of writing is http://www.peoplefirst.org.uk, a website maintained by people with learning disabilities, unfortunately. For an example of how Comic Sans can look poor on readability in comparison with a font of more uniform letter shapes, see my Fonts for People with Reading Disabilities page.

There’s a page of discussion on whether Arial or Verdana is a more preferable font (that’s Verdana, not Comic Sans), at Signal vs Noise. No comment!

No typeface is wrong in every circumstance. The picture to the left is an information sign in the village of Ravenfield near Rotherham in the north of England. Comic Sans is used for the body text (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what the font is) and in my opinion it works really well. I think it’s the concise text in combination with the light-touch drawings that makes Comic Sans look so comfortable. (You should be able to expand the pic by clicking on it, so you can read the type.)