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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in this. As someone who doesn't pay that much attention to typography (beyond the obvious 'Papyrus is bad' stuff) what makes individual typefaces preferable over a standard typeface for all similarly structured content?

(Besides branding, that is.)

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Edward Tufte's forum has some good discussions on type

This one is short

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

but see the collection of additional threads at the bottom of that thread.*

Also, Bringhurst: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

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*I like the "local masters" concept Tufte has (full disclosure, I helped prototype it), and Wikipedia does something similar.

Don't worry about it too much. Most people don't care. I am the kind of guy that walks into the Google offices and immediately thinks "What the fuck is this place, a daycare center?" Most people disagree, and think the Google decor is wonderful. My opinion is likely not mainstream.

Every font is designed for a purpose. Serif fonts are designed to help the brain recognize the different letters. Comic Sans was designed to be used informal. Helvetica was designed to be used in signage. Verdana was designed to be readable from (72dpi) computer screens. And so on.

So as screen resolutions increase a serif font can help the brain to recognize small letters increasing readability.

Serif fonts are designed to emulate Roman inscriptions, which had serifs to help water drain out of them without wearing them out (and thus reducing maintenance costs). The brain stuff is at best speculative and not backed by any data (and in any event is a post hoc rationalization).

In general, readability tests (per the original article) have produced equivocal results which seem to show mainly that people prefer the fonts they grew up with.

It's pure marketing. There's no objective, measurable difference.

Yes there is. Certain typefaces are objectively easier to read than others, and some work better for certain content than others. Some are best for body text, some are best for headlines, etc. Some are optimized for low resolution screens, some for print (and as such work well on high resolution screens).

A great recent example that appeared on HN was the typeface designed for road signs, which the designers then put through Germany(?)'s test suite for legibility at distance in various road conditions and determined the new font was objectively legible at greater distance than all previous standard road-sign fonts with which it was compared.

[By request, I found the original article: http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signag... ]

Do you happen to have the link to that? Must have missed that and I'd like to read it.

http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signag...

I remember reading a post several days ago, mentioning that particular font face could help a paper score higher.

This is from very long back. In school, I once passed an exam on grace marks given because of my graceful handwriting (this was writing in the 'Devanagari' script, which even naturally allows for more calligraphy than the Roman script).

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