lowercase sans-serifs for statistically-worse readability

February 20, 2009 at 2:51 pm

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.

Design

  • John Bressoud
    Evan, I too have just finished reading The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I was fascinated by the quote by Albers that sans-serif text shows neither historical nor practical competence. This seems to be a claim made without proof, hence my desire to research it further. In doing so I found your blog (in sans-serif font no less). I must say, and I am suprised at this, that I react emotionally to font. For whatever reason, Microsoft products use TImes New Roman as the default font for Word, Outlook and other products. When I see this font used it tells me the author has not taken the time to choose a more modern font. Needless to say I had to overcome this reaction to font when I started to read Tufte's book. It reminded me of the classic Physics text books I studied as a freshman in college. But if Edward Tufte thinks use of serif font is important, I need to pay attention to it.
  • I like your summary of the situation, Detrus. The Albers quote I pulled is over 40 years old, so I wasn't using it as a direct call to current action, per se. However, it's interesting that his insight on the readability of screen fonts is still the norm after all this time.
  • There were plenty of readability studies comparing serifs, sans-serifs, on screen and off. They weren't conclusive about the difference between serifs and sans-serifs. They do show that a combination of factors affect reading speed. On screen, the color of the fonts, text background color, monitor, background lighting, line-spacing all had a measurable effect on reading speed. Some combination of text settings worked better on certain monitors than on others. Some types of content were easier to read in sans-serifs because the average word length was shorter.

    It's very difficult to nail down the perfect text setting. Reading speed may also be a stupid thing to measure, information recall seems to make more sense. What's the point of reading something too quickly and then forgetting it?

    Recall study - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6894/is_2...

    It seems Josef Albers is talking about a time decades ago when sans-serifs became popular and many people assumed they were more readable. There were many attempts to scientifically study readability since then. Unfortunately it is not standard practice in the design field to understand results of experiments, so the debate continues without scientific literacy.
  • Thanks for the constructive criticism, Chris. I'd argue that the essence of sans-serif fonts and mankind's ability to read hasn't changed much at a fundamental level since 1963. The medium may have changed to a large degree, but we're still reading letters on a page. Thus, his writing is still relevant.

    Albers may not have been an authority on readability, but his insight is still worth noting. The overall message of his writing resonates with contemporary research and continues to be relevant in our culture of the printed word. Someone doesn't necessarily need to be an established "authority" to deserve their views to be respected and mulled over.
  • Chris Lozos
    Albers was hardly an authority on readability. Also, his comment was dated in 1963 which makes it out of date for todays fonts, audiences, and objectives.

    Chris
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