The use of the serif – in lower case type especially – is a relic from broad nibbed pen techniques. I don’t know of any mediaeval bookhands that didn’t use serifs. The first type faces copied the bookhands of their day, and then in their own turn evolved to cater for the printing technology of successive eras. It’s amazing in some ways the serif survived for as long as it did.

Even though I have a 1680×1050 monitor in front of me now, in standard 11pt type, a serif type face has an x height of 7 or 8 pixels, and the serifs are blobby and indistinct; a printed letter of the same size would be much crisper, so I am sure that even with current higher resolution screens, sans serif has the edge. On paper – well I still appreciate a well set and printed book in serifs.

Overall though – I am pretty sure that familiarity with any script is the greatest aid to legibility!

Thanks for this column. Its nice to see someone passionate for typography and design.

I am relieved to learn that using sans serif does not detract, and in fact, may enhance legibility and readability. Thank you!

The response was overwhelmingly positive and very emotional. However, when I asked these same reviewers about the font used to convey the story, their reaction ranged from tepid to negative. (About the same as the Bradley font reviews I’ve read online)

So I published the story in a more “suitable” book font (Garamond). Although the book won an award for interior design by literary critics, the story itself never received the accolades first experienced with those five simple pages scrawled in Bradley Hand.

It reminds me of a study of viewer acceptance of Calibri and Cambria when those fonts first replaced the web standards of Times Roman and Arial. Reportedly, viewers were negative toward Cambria, and yet Cambria was the “stickiest”, holding viewers the longest, compared to all other serif fonts presented.

I don’t know how to interpret all of this. I now plan to publish my short story online, but I’m at wit’s end trying to decide which font to publish it in. I think I’ll stay glued to this forum for awhile.

Thanks for your insights
Gary

I believe familiarity, and the impression to be made on the reader, to be the keys.

At one time, the decorated scripts used in handwriting may have been far easier to read than we find today, else copperplate and its ilk would have been merely tiresome (rather than impressive), and who could have tolerated hand-written german? Old scripts require practice, and some require specialists, to read simply because we’re no longer familiar with them.

Serif fonts (such as TR) ape the text inscribed on monuments from an earlier age. Their function is to imply gravitas and worth.

But for half a century or more we’ve been surrounded by sans-serif fonts, specifically Helvetica and all its cousins, especially in signage. Their function is to imply clarity and modernism.

There’s some merit to the tools arguement too. My handwriting is essentially italic, learned with a fountain pen, and to you probably scratchy and difficult to read. If you’re ten years younger than I am, your handwriting, learned with a crayon, probably looks more like comic sans-serif, and to me faintly juvenile.

Applying a similar progression to the tools we use for writing, we go from Times Roman (what we want) to Courier (what we can do with a type-writer) to IBM Golf-Ball (Choices! All those bl.stupid double-spaces can vanish along with mono-spacing! Let’s be modern and use sans-serif!) to the Arial or Verdana we use today. OK, I’ve missed several stop-offs, such as those machine-readable typefaces, along the way, but you get it: The font conveys the idea; the readability comes (as much as anything) from familiarity with the tools and their product.

So it should be no surprise the comparative research on fonts should be at best inconclusive or deliver in shades of grey.

You may like to try to dig out some work the UK’s Ministry of Transport did on Motorway (Freeway) signage not long after WWII. We ended up with Helvetiva, albeit at a slighly larger size than many of our European cousins, in white on dark-green or blue, or black on white. Why? Legibility from a distance and optimal contrast, as I recall. So I bought into the notion that sans-serif worked best on screens because they were effectively read at arm’s-length, rather than up close in the manner of a good book.