How Typography Can Save Your Life
propublica.org
propublica.org
They came up with two fonts expressly for ease of readability that stand the test of time remarkably well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_%28typeface%29 and Motorway (font).
They also standardised many of the pictograms for use on warnings, colour schemes and iconography. They also did the rail and airport alphabets.
http://designmuseum.org/designers/jock-kinneir-and-margaret-...
The UK government's Traffic Sign Manual[0], and in particular Chapter 7 (The Design of Traffic Signs)[1] are bizarrely interesting reads. Maybe that says something more about me than the documents though...
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs-man...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
In the case of brahmic scripts (disclaimer: I only learned the Marathi alphabet as a child) you don't "read" the characters any more than you do in English, but rather look at the word shapes.
There is continual evolution: in high school we studied Greek with word spacing just like modern English; I was shocked at hard it was to read original inscriptions without word spacing (and some old texts that were boustrophedon). I also thought it would be really hard to read German highway signs, but after a while (less than a year) I started to automatically break the compounds into meaningful chunks while zooming down the road.
We have an end result of a process of: consistent writing direction > spacing > punctuation > increased discrimination of letterforms (introduction of the minuscule) > regularization of spelling
Typography matters in all these languages. It's not just letterforms: word and sentence spacing varies among English, French and Russian, for instance.
Reading really exploits some deep structures in the brain. Articles like these, to me, implicitly say more about neurology than culture.
双飞机会带着几个人
to:
雙飛機會帶著幾個人
Both are actually the same set of characters, but the first one seems much easier to distinguish at a glance. I'd suspect this would Be true even for native speakers/readers, though I've never seen a study on it.
I wonder how this plays out handwritten on paper?
German Fraktur used to have lots of ligatures, and eg differently shaped s depending on context.
(Under an excerpt from a legal disclaimer.) I think legal disclaimers are written in all caps exactly to make understanding more difficult, while still conveying the 'I told you' feeling.
This kind of "cute" comments is killing this site.
A happy customer is a returning customer.
A customer accidentally breaking an agreement is not a happy customer.
Ask someone that works health care records about it sometime.
> When specifying font height, or accessing graphs to determine the size of a lower-case character, the distinction between “x” height and overall size should be made.
> As a general recommendation, the “x” height of a font used for important flight-deck documentation should not be below 0.10 inch.
> The recommended height-to-width ratio of a font that is viewed in front of the observer is 5:3.
> The vertical spacing between lines should not be smaller than 25–33% of the overall size of the font.
> The horizontal spacing between characters should be 25% of the overall size and not less than one stroke width.
- "x" height refers to the height of the mean line of lowercase letters, e.g. the lowercase letter "x". Ascenders (on letters like l, t, k) will exceed this height.
- height-to-width: seems straightforward: wider fonts may often look more modern (see e.g. the Eurostile vs. Frutiger comparison in the article), but are harder to read.
- spacing: allow for enough whitespace vertically and horizontally. This, again, improves legibility compared to condensed fonts.
Floating around, emotional state, perhaps some brain dysfunction due to air composition and lack of sleep. You don't want the type too small.
Apple have enough experience in typography and certainly haven't bowed to tradition in that arena. There is no reason they would suddenly start doing it for T&C unless it suited them.
No.
>> Sans-serif fonts are usually more legible than fonts with serifs.
>>Avoid using dot matrix print for critical flight-deck documentation.
The serifs on fonts make it easier to distinguish letters and ligatures. It is the reason nearly every textbook and journal article is written in serif fonts.
Because serif fonts dominate in print, you eventually train mostly on this font and therefore you can read text in a serif font faster than sans-serif.
On a dot-matrix printer (see Nasa guidelines) and low resolution monitors, sans-serif is a better choice. But that era has ended.
Serif fonts are dead, long live serif fonts.
Of course, depending on font we have issues with all caps as well, especially when mixed with numbers: "Z" and "2", "O" and "0", "Q" and "O" etc.
Typography is not an easy subject.
I would say this is true and for one line or two lines only. For blocks of text, readability is improved by a mixture of upper and lowercase.
As an example, it is dead easy to spot common speed limit signs, mainly because there are so few speed limits. Even when my sight was failing, I could make out the speed limits at a distance with little trouble. Not because of some magic of the text, but simply from familiarity.
So, in an age where most of what we read is mixed case, it makes intuitive sense that we would be better at reading it. I fully realize intuitive sense doesn't translate to an explanation and is why I'm asking the question.
The Quick Brown Dog Jumped Over The Lazy Fox
-or-
Tha Quiek Brawn Deg Junped Ovar The Lasy Pox
... if you're expecting a certain phase, your brain can error-correct quite well.
Obviously this might not work where letters are important (say a 24-character software license key), but where words or prose is concerned, what matters is the whole.