Typeface or Font Readability

Which typeface (or font if you prefer it that way) is the easiest to read, especially by less-accomplished readers?

There is no ‘best’ or ‘easiest-to-read’ font or font type or font size. This page and its related pages give some background and support to why I am able to state this so categorically.

You frequently hear and read ‘evidence’ that such-and-such a font, or such-and-such a point size, is required for optimum readability. It’s nonsense, but you try telling the person who knows all about it that! After being presented such bar-stool wisdom so often I decided to give some thought to it and write this page and give some links.

 

“The most terse comment on legibility is attributed to Eric Gill: ‘Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.’ Although humorous, it has been confirmed by research. Familiar forms are more legible than unfamiliar ones.”

From Balancing typeface legibility and economy by Victor Gaultney.

This page talks about readability issues of fonts in terms of widely-held perceptions—it’s more psychology than typography. If you want info about designing a typeface, maybe a better place to look would be About Legibility by Adrian Frutiger.

Typefaces on web pages require different techniques from typefaces in print. See my page on Typefaces (Fonts) on the Web .

Whaddya know? Fonts predate computers!

Arial and Comic Sans – some people say they’re the best

Serif v. Sans-serif

Dyslexia – should we design for dyslexia?

Type sizes, what makes you think that bigger is better?

Capital letters, what’s wrong with capital letters?

The academic evidence base

The real-world evidence base (the newspapers)

And now for something really sensible

And in Colour? (You really should see my text colour readability page)

Fonts Predate Computers

Typefaces in the sense that we know them have been around for something in the region of 550 years. Books have been written on how to lay out type, one of the best-regarded being The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, about which, in relation to web pages in particular see The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. That book and others like it will not tell you which is the best font to use, it’ll give you guidelines on how to lay out a page – much more significant. There’s a web page discussing the issue of layout for readability (not fonts note, but layout) at The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard.

If someone says to you, ‘It’s been categorically proved that such-and-such a font is the easiest for people to read’, the first thing to ask yourself is whether it is a Microsoft font they are proposing and then consider Microsoft’s forgotten monopoly . Though whether the favourite font is from Microsoft or not, to think that we have recently discovered the typeface of universal optimum readability is, er, rather arrogant, or let’s be kind, innocent.

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Serif v. Sans-serif

One place to look for further information on the argument over whether serif or sans-serif fonts are easier to read is www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html. Alex Poole has taken a thorough look at research on this issue and time-after-time the same conclusion has been drawn from studies: there is no difference.

There is no difference, though . . . having said that . . . see my Arial Creates Optical Illusions page, which demonstrates quite clearly that there can be a difference, in favour of a serif font, in some circumstances.

And this notwithstanding those authoritative-sounding ‘experts’ who say categorically that you should use sans -serif (eg see How to write clearly by the UK Literacy Trust. The people there obviously haven’t seen my Arial Creates Optical Illusions page, have they? Not so expert after all, then.)

You should also look at my Font Readability Experiment page, to see how certain fonts, especially the sans-serif ones, can create an optical illusion of uneven lines with some text.

You need to remember, though, that with typefaces, no rule or guideline is going to apply to every circumstance, and to demonstrate this, take a look at the comments about reading a novel on my Fonts for People with Reading Disabilities page, and my comments on type sizes on my Type Sizes page.

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Capital letters, what’s wrong with capital letters?

Sentences entirely in capital letters are another piece of sometime wisdom. They’re supposed to be hard to read. That may be right sometimes, but not always. Have you ever seen a comic book? Hard to read? Surely not. (Comics are traditionally done with upper case in the speech bubbles.) The use of upper case in comic strips is not so universal as it once was, but looking at the picture on the right, you can see the sense of it. Here I’ve used Comic Sans to look rather weak and pathetic and it works quite well in that way. The gangster’s speech bubble is in a traditional, strong, comic book face, and if I hadn’t told you that, I’ll bet you wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. I find the all-upper much easier on the eye, though again I must stress, in this circumstance.

The other thing to consider, when someone says to you with such absolute confidence that passages written in all upper case are nigh-on unreadable by young people, is whether 140 million-odd Russians can be wrong. For while Cyrillic script does have a lower case, it’s conventionally written in books looking much like what we who are used to Western typefaces would call small-caps – from a readability point of view the lower looks quite like the upper, as in the example. (Click here and some text should appear giving more details about this.)

The example shows Russian lower case letters, consider especially the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ Some characters do not exist in an uppercase variant in the Cyrillic alphabet. Refer to line 3, word 1, last character: it is a so-called ‘soft sign’ (мягкий знак), which only exists as lowercase in the common alphabet. This is comparable to the German ß, although there is an uppercase variant for it now.

my thanks to Tobias Pape for furnishing this information

Do Russian children find it harder to learn to read than do Western European, Australian or American children? I dunno, ask your teacher. (There’s a technical discussion about Cyrillic lower case at http://www.typophile.com/node/16550).

The idea that passages in all upper case are harder to read than those predominantly in lower probably stems from the observation that passages in all upper can be slower to read than those in all upper. Slower is not the same as harder, as slower is only an issue where speed of reading is of significance, and will be of no or minimal significance in very short passages such as you find in a comic strip. For the references to experiments that show that lowercase text is read faster than upper, see The Science of Word Recognition from Microsoft Typography, under the sub-heading ‘Model #1: Word Shape’.

However, I also quote from that same paper, sub-heading ‘Evidence for Word Shape Revisited’:

‘The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kohlers & Perkins, 1975).’ (The Science of Word Recognition by Kevin Larson.)

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The Real-World Evidence Base

In the use of font readability for people with limited reading skills, the red-top tabloid newspapers are more practised than anyone, and they are pretty much united worldwide in what they do:

never mind the eggheads, what’s the real world out there doing?

1. Serif fonts for close-set blocks of text. 2. Sans-serif fonts, usually, for large headlines. 3. Sans-serif or serif fonts for airy (ie not close-set) sections of text. 4. Break up the page by using a variety of font sizes, font weights, and capitalisation for different readability focus-points on the page. 5. Use fonts that have strong ascenders and descenders. 6. Use fonts with clearly-identifiable letter shapes.  eg ‘a’ rather than ‘a ’, ‘g’ rather than ‘g’ 7. Use ‘fancy’ fonts very sparingly and only for occasional quirky effect.

Different newspapers have different house standards for the exact typefaces and layouts they use.

If you look at the way The Daily Mail in the UK uses typefaces you could think that the typographers have been to the pub before work – that’s if you believe what you’ve been told when you went on that expert’s training course, and they said you must use no more than one or two fonts on a page. The Mail uses a number of fonts, some serif, some block serif, some sans-serif, and it doesn’t strictly allocate them to headings, text or sections. Possibly the only ‘rule’ it sticks to is to use a Roman serif font in multi-column blocks of text. You need to remember that the Mail is Britain’s second biggest selling newspaper, and they wouldn’t be using amateurs to do their typography. What they’re actually doing is using the different typefaces to break up the page and separate out each little paragraph-bite, to grab the reader’s attention. The overall page may look a bit dense and impure to some, but it does its job, which is to look like a serious newspaper for people who’d regard themselves as serious, while at the same time presenting in sensationalist soundbites – very clever. Next time someone tells you that this or that font is categorically the easiest to read, buy them a copy of the Daily Mail and ask them, are five million-odd of the great British population complaining? (ie about not being able to read their newspaper, we know they’re complaining, but not about that). Then when you’ve done that, you can use it to whack them on the head.

Or take a look at the UK newspaper, The Sun. The Sun is famous for being aimed at a low-reading-age reader. What typefaces do they use? The Sun currently (2009) uses a serif news Gothic font for body text, and two main fonts for headlines, both sans-serif, one with a high variation in stroke width, and the other of more uniform width, which is sometimes in italic capitals to break up the page-look a bit. What! italic capitals for low-ability readers? Yeah, course, don’t you believe what those experts tell you, take a look at The Sun (if you can bear to?)(or should that be bare to?)(no, no, bear to, even though it is The Sun).

See an analysis of the use of newspaper titles in stylised Old English fonts, on my Newspaper Titles page. That page shows some fonts with complex letter shapes, that many people see on most days and certainly don’t complain they’re hard to read.

See an analysis of the use of newspaper headlines on a single topic, on my Newspaper Headlines page.

Fashion plays a big part in newspaper design. The change of house style by The Guardian newspaper in September 2005 gives some insight into this, and you can read my observations on this on my Guardian 2005 page.

There’s a website about newspaper design at www.newsdesigner.com

A history of typography

There are references to articles on the history of typography at http://www.typeculture.com/academic_resource/research_directory/?L2=tcrd2_45#tc_2, which will be worth following-up if you think that this or that font is the easiest to read.

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And now for something really sensible

If you have read this far, you should have come to believe that there is no such thing as a ‘best’ typeface. And to prove it to your boss, who probably knows for sure that there is, you can show him or her the demonstration of typestyle in relation to fashions in clothing, that you can find at www.linotype.com/2258-16895/fashionandtypeface.html. Now does your boss still believe that only Comic Sans will do? Oh, well, you’d better use Comic Sans, then. That dumb boss.

And further reading about legibility? You can’t do better than this: www.linotype.com/ 2258-16905/ aboutlegibility.html

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And in colour?

There’s also the issue of readability of different colours of text on different hues and shades of background. This complicates the subject rather, and I’m in the process of building up some pages on this. You can make a start with my text colour readability page and you can accompany this with experiments using TypeTester.

Essentially, when looking at colour readability, the hue (eg red, green, blue etc) is of minimal importance; far more important for readability is the relative brightness of text against background. That is to say, that red on green is perfectly readable (despite what your teacher said) provided it’s a light red against a dark green or vice versa. You really should see my text colour readability page. Have fun!

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