Legibility Implications of Embellished Display Typefaces
Authors
Sofie Beier
Katrine Sand
Randi Starrfelt
Abstract
By subjecting participants to brief exposure of single letters in the peripheral visual field, we investigated 1) hemispheric differences in reading of embellished display typefaces, and 2) the legibility difference between different kinds of embellished display typefaces. The test typefaces are designed for the purpose of controlling for the variables of swashes, stroke contrast and drop shadow. The results show that all fonts are processed more accurately in the right visual field (corresponding to initial processing in the left hemisphere), and this is mainly evident when exposure is very brief (Experiment 1). This is contrary to the expectation that embellished typefaces should have an advantage when presented to the right hemisphere /left hemifield. There was also a clear difference in overall performance between the different embellished typeface styles, suggesting that legibility is more affected by swashed features than by a reversed letter stroke, or by a drop shadow.When choosing between different styles of embellished display typefaces, it is therefore recommended to choose typefaces where the letter skeleton is not too complicated to decode.Keywords: legibility readability type design fonts perception typeface style
Author Biography
Sofie Beier
Sofie Beier is a type designer and associate professor at the School of Design under The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where she is the head of the MA program in Type & Wayfinding. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London and is the author of the book "Reading Letters: designing for legibility". Her current research is focused on improving the reading experience by achieving a better understanding of how different typefaces and letter shapes can influence the way we read. Several of her typefaces have been published through Gestalten Fonts, among these the Karlo and the Ovink families. The typeface Karlo received a Creative Circle Bronze Award in 2015. Katrine Sand is a master's student of psychology at the Department of Psychology at University of Copenhagen. Her studies have mainly been focused on neuropsychology and cognitive psychology. She has conducted research within the field of visual word recognition, with particular focus on psychophysical methods for studying letter and word recognition.;Randi Starrfelt is associate professor in neuropsychology at the Department of Psychology at University of Copenhagen. She conducted her Ph.D. and a post doc at the Center for Visual Cognition at this Department. She also has certification as a specialist in clinical neuropsychology. Her research is concerned with visual recognition in various groups of neuropsychological patients, as well as normal subjects. In particular, she has focused on understanding the cognitive and cerebral processes underlying visual word recognition by combining psychophysical methods and traditional experimental (neuro)psychology. Recently she has extended her research to the area of face recognition, in particular focusing on people suffering from developmental prosopagnosia, or "face blindness".
Because Visible Language is the oldest design journal, we support scholars by making PDFs of all back issues available. The full catalog of back issues is now available!
