Choose your font carefully
Many factors affect readability of text including sentence length, line spacing and fonts, but recent research published in Cognition suggests there is more to fonts than meets the eye.
In preliminary experiments at Princeton and Indiana universities, some students were given Powerpoint slides with changed fonts, and handouts produced on sub-standard photocopiers, with the intention of seeing how much this impacted their usefulness. The surprising result is that when the documents are harder to read, the students found them easier to recall, a result that was repeated for five of the six subjects tested, the exception being chemistry. This study was far from rigorously scientific, but the counter-intuitive results are interesting enough to warrant further investigation.
The researchers hypothesise that text which is hard to read engages a different part of the brain to text which is easy to read, and may cause us to remember the information in different ways. If true, this could cause us to completely rethink how we design documents.
Fonts are often misunderstood, especially on websites. Typically, people these days believe serif fonts are "old fashioned" whilst sanserif fonts are modern and easier to read. This is not what the research tell us. In print, numerous studies have shown that serif typefaces like Times New Roman are easier to read at small sizes, whilst the sanserif fonts like Helvetica come into their own in larger sizes and in short bursts, like headings and sub-headings. When the same studies are carried out on screen text, the results are never so clear cut, but there is evidence that the serifs make text harder to read on screen. This is probably a result of the poor resolution and rendering quality of today's computer screens, meaning that serif fonts blur into each other whilst sanserif fonts have clean edges. At the same time, larger serif fonts can look very elegant on a screen whilst the sanserif fonts look chunky and heavy.
Interestingly, serifs are not restricted to the Roman alphabet. Chinese characters, for example, can also have serifs at the ends of letter strokes, and readability studies in China come to the same conclusions as western researchers.
As a final comment, when we talk of fonts as being old fashioned or modern, we should remember that printing originated around 1440. The Times New Roman font was designed in 1932, and Helvetica, that other staple of computer fonts, was designed in 1957. The ultra modern looking Futura font is older than both of them, and was created in the 1920s whilst the ancient-looking Courier dates from the mid-1950s. Courier was the standard font used in the US Department of Defence until 2004 when it was replaced with Times New Roman. The reasons given for the change was that the DOD wanted a more modern and more legible font.
28th January 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.