Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Fonts have both an expressive and a functional role in graphic design. On one had fonts are part of the aesthetic and visual language aimed to give a personality to communication artifacts, on the other, they guarantee the comfort to the user when reading a text. According to a concept of usability, it’s possible to identify two parameters to evaluate fonts performances in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction: legibility and readability. Legibility refers to perceptual properties of letters and hyphen shapes and directly influences readability. It means how easy to read is a character, how its single glyphs are distinguishable from each other. Readability, instead, implies how easy to understand is the meaning of a text. Complex syntax or unknown vocabulary can make a text obscure, however, the text is still highly legible. The paper presents a set of two experiments aimed to understand how to measure the font legibility and how to compare font families and if the results can suggest a scientific way to improve type design. The experiment focuses on the ability of users to recognize words and no-meaning-words to exclude readability processes. Three different fonts were tested to have a comparison among font traditionally considered good: Verdana, optimized for screen performance, Times New Roman, a print classic, and Futura created according to the geometrical and abstract principles of Bauhaus culture. Beside them, Pastiche a new font explicitly design according to Gestalt principles has been tested and compared with others.