According to researchers we remember best what we find difficult to read. I’m not talking about grammar or syntax but about the particular typeface or font used. Thus, a beautifully clear and elegant font may not actually be the most effective means of communication precisely because it is so pleasing on the eye.
I am typing this post using a font called Comic Sans MS which researchers at Princeton University have found to be one of the more “difficult” typefaces in terms of the effort required to read it. You should therefore have less difficulty remembering it. Of course there is always the possibility that you are so put off by the font that you don’t bother to read the contents at all.
You might be interested in this podcast. -lesle
ReplyDelete---
http://www.wpr.org/book/091101b.cfm
The Internet is a free flow of ideas where everyone can say whatever they want. But for all its splashy graphics and Flash animation, there's one thing that makes the Internet looks the same. Its name is Verdana. And it's a font. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll talk with Matthew Carter, the designer of Verdana, the Internet font. Also, the creators of Obama's font, Gotham -- The font of Hope and Change.
SEGMENT 1:
The style of type used by the Obama campaign is called Gotham and was designed by the team of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. They tell Anne Strainchamps how they feel about having designed the font of Hope and Change and where the design originally came from. Also, Novelist Nicholson Baker reviewed the Kindle, Amazon's electronic reading device, in The New Yorker in an article called "A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve the Book?" Baker tells Anne Strainchamps that e-readers have some advantages over the printed book, but the Kindle isn't his favorite.
SEGMENT 2:
Matthew Carter designed Verdana, the internet font, and co-founded Bitstream, the first digital foundry. He co-designed Helvetica - the most ubiquitous font family in the world. He even designed Bell Centennial, the phone book font. Carter tells Steve Paulson his career in fonts began very traditionally, at a printing factory.
SEGMENT 3:
Tracy Honn, director of the Silver Buckle Press in Madison, WI, takes TTBOOK's Charles Monroe-Kane and Caryl Owen on a tour of this working museum of letterpress printing, and its star, The Trolley: a Golding Official #6 from the late 1800s. Also, Kitty Burns Florey is the author of "Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting." She says handwriting is the original font and talks with Jim Fleming about practicing Palmer method.
===
Personally, I prefer and use Arial narrow/11 point/bold: clear, straightforward, legible, easy to read for old eyes, and!, more words on one page.
Fascinating. I've always been interested in the "style" of different websites. one of my favourites is www.theatlantic.com.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I like the array of fonts offered by Adobe's Buzzword processor.
In terms of the general appearance of sites, I'm afraid that the French suffer from what Steve Jobs calls "featuritis". Very cluttered!