Thursday, 21 November 2013

Design Principles, Readabilty Vs. Legibilty

We were asked to bring in 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' in upper and lower case in the four different font categories.

Using these we decided which were easiest to read down to hardest, individually, then as a table and finally as a class.

I decided that script was hardest to read and gothic was the easiest.



  • Gothic was easiest because they have wider letters, no serifs, easy clean curves, wider letters and larger gaps between the letters making them easier to read. 


  • Script is all joined up and too close, with decorative or serifs.


  • Block is thick and close together, which makes it hard to read.


  • Serifs are in the middle, when type with serifs are used in body copy it becomes a lot easier than when they are on a larger part of text. 
  • Bigger bowls and counters make it easier to read, this is because we naturally look at those to recognise the letter rather than the stroke.
  • Roman fonts can be defined after a while whereas gothic fonts can be muddled up.
  • Serifs work better in lowercase and sans work better in uppercase
What makes something readable

  • Tracking, contrast in glyphs, kerning depending on font, size of bowls, counters and x height.
  • Gothic and Roman fonts are normally body copy, easy to read on a small scale
  • Counters are the most important part of the text
Legibility is the degree to which glyphs in text are understandable based on appearance

  • Kerning - space between two letters, it affects legibility of individual letterforms
  • Leading - space between lines above and below
  • Tracking - spacing letters out
  • Readability - ease in which text can be understood/read

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