On 10/15/2010 4:26 AM, Liviu Andronic wrote:
Dear all This is very off-topic. Yesterday I read a slightly disturbing article on the Economist ('Learning difficulties', [1]), which suggests that making textbooks (and presentations, I suppose) harder to read makes the audience better understand the material. For example, one should strive to use 'difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale)' instead of a '16-point Arial pure-black font'.Does this make sense to any of you? Should I start preparing my presentations in grey colour? Regards Liviu [1] http://www.economist.com/node/17248892?story_id=17248892
It seems counterintuitive to me. There might be some argument for not making the font too large or too easy to read, in terms of forcing the reader to focus. Other than that, my feeling is that making the document harder to read causes the reader to spend too much mental energy recognizing the words and not enough recognizing the concepts. Metaphorically, if you make the trees difficult to recognize, nobody will see the forest as a forest. But I may be biased by the fact that my eyes are getting old, and people keep shrinking fonts on everything. :-) /Paul
