>Lastly, can I point out something which graphic artists and page
>designers have known for decades: when reading large blocks of text, the
>easiest to read fonts are serif fonts (the ones with little tiny feet on
>them) like Times/New York.
To go a little further OT with fonts...
The following cites HI studies done on fonts and readability. The bottom
line is this study found no performance difference between serif vs san
serif fonts, nor did antialiasing improve reading speed. Aesthetics
might be another story...
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SCREEN FONTS -- A study of fonts designed for screen
display, Boyarski, D., Neuwirth, C., Forlizzi, J., and Regli, S.H.,
CHI 98 Conference Proceedings, 87-94 (1998).
It is very difficult to improve reading performance. Historically,
one way to improve performance has been to create newer,
clearer fonts. Most fonts being read on computer monitors
were designed to be read from paper. This study evaluated
two fonts that were specifically designed for use on computer
monitors. The new fonts were Georgia and Verdana.
After designing the fonts, they conducted a study to examine
people's speed of reading with the new fonts. Participants in
the studies were people from Carnegie Mellon University,
including faculty, staff and graduate students who ranged in
age from 20 to 53.
All text was set at 10 points with 13 points leading and an
average line length of 10 words. Subjects read the text on
a 17-inch screen with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels.
They compared the following:
- Georgia (serif) vs. Times Roman (serif)
- Georgia (serif) vs. Verdana (sans serif)
- Verdana vs. Verdana Italic
They found no reliable performance differences in reading speed.
Next they evaluated aliased vs. anti-aliased fonts. Anti-aliased
fonts use levels of color in selected pixels to eliminate the
appearance of jagged edges (the "jaggies"). In these studies,
all text was displayed at 16 points (a character must be at least
14 points for the anti-aliasing to show).
They compared the following fonts:
- Adobe anti-aliased vs. Microsoft bitmap
- Microsoft anti-aliased vs. Microsoft bitmap
- Adobe anti-aliased vs. Microsoft anti-aliased
Again, they found no performance differences in reading speed.
The screen fonts that have been used successfully for the past
few years seem to work as well as newly designed fonts.
There seems to be no reliable differences between serif and
sans-serif fonts, or between aliased and anti-aliased fonts.
If reading speed is to be improved, it appears that it will not
come from making changes to the fonts.
Improvement in reading speed when using computers will
require more drastic alternatives.
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Regards,
__________________________________________________________________
Scott Rossi Tactile Media - Multimedia & Design
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: www.tactilemedia.com
