lowercase sans-serifs for statistically-worse readability
I’m finishing up reading Edward Tufte’s canonical The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and the following quote about typography seemed postable:
With regard to typography, Josef Albers writes:
“The concept that ‘the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading’ was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by ‘modernistic’ typographers…. Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading. Without going into comparisons and details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult reading — because of their equal height, equal volume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.”
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963, revised edition 1975), p. 4.
The message should speak for itself, but I found it striking in particular given the now-cliché trend of lowercase sans-serif company and website names. This was printed over 25 years before the era of flickr, digg, facebook, and mint.
Mind you, this trend in part tends to only apply to logos and images, leaving websites’ copy properly capitalized. However, it takes actual effort to find a modern web service brandishing serifs in body content. If your product’s brand is trying to convey a sense of easy-going, friendly, hipness, then you’re more likely to eschew statistical readability for the cool finnesse of helvetica, lucida grande, and tahoma.