Readability Experiment
Arial Font Creates Optical Illusion
This page is related to my Typeface Readability page, where
I run through some of the evidence on the readability of typefaces.
One of the chestnuts that keeps on coming up is the frequently-made assertion that sans-serif typefaces are
‘easier to read’ than serif typefaces. You can see some research that looks at this issue (and disputes it, while acknowledging that it’s a widespread view) at www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html
On this page, I will clearly demonstrate that the reverse is the case – this page enables you, with
someone who asserts very authoritatively that sans-serif is clearer for reading, to look at their backside,
then you can tell them how clever they are to talk out of it.
There are two samples on this page, one in Arial and the other with identical text in Times New Roman.
The Arial sample looks like the lines of text aren’t straight. They are, but there’s an optical illusion that they
are not. In the sample with the serif font (which is at the same point size) the effect is much less marked –
the text looks OK and not climbing hills and descending valleys. With Arial it looks misaligned. The two samples you see here are in thumbnail,
click on them to see the full-size samples and how the sans-serif version is much harder to read.
Arial
Times New Roman
So there you are then, that settles it, a serif font is much easier to read, right? Except of course that this is a rather contrived experiment, for who would lay out lists of countries like that?
Here you can experiment for yourself with different fonts, and with more regular-style text. What this all tells us is not to be pedantic with guidelines, for to do that just shows we aren’t as expert as we thought we were.
A pattern of text, with roughly even-length words and a numeric percent in parentheses, in certain fonts gives the illusion that the lines are not level. More marked the wider the window. Sans-serif fonts seem to be especially prone to this.
Serif fonts suffer from the distorting effect much less seriously.
(Because this page does not ask for anything to be downloaded to your machine, it has no way of knowing what fonts are present on your
machine, so it cannot give you a full dropdown list. Therefore you have to type in a font name and click ‘Set’. Some Microsoft fonts are in a default dropdown list, as most people have these. If the font in the font box is not
found on your machine, the font from the default list will be substituted.)
If you uncheck the incl.(n%) checkbox, you'll see that without the numeric percentages in parentheses the distortion illusion is much reduced,
so it seems to be something to do with the parentheses, or the parentheses, numbers and percent sign, that aggravates the effect.
Making the font size bigger reduces the distortion, as one might suspect, since there will be fewer words on the line.
A word about Comic Sans. There are still some people who maintain that Comic Sans is an easy-to-read font of merit. Not on this page it isn’t, though
– it’s a feast for sore eyes (it makes them sorer). Another strange observation about Comic Sans, that you will notice on this page. If you look at the country
name, United States in Comic Sans, and compare it with, say, Morocco, or Lithuania, or Slovakia, United States looks altogether much bigger and wider. Of course it is much bigger and wider than those
countries, as a place, but that’s no excuse for Microsoft to be so brazen about it. No wonder that some people have a downer on Comic Sans! (If you cannot see
United States on the page, click on the Recalc button, which recreates the countries list using a randomiser.)
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