Typophile - legibility vs. comfort - Comments

I think it would be

Eben Sorkin — Mon, 4 Feb 2008 08:41:17 -0800

I think it would be interesting to divert this thread back to “comfort”. Because I am thinking about Urbana these days I thought I would suggest that one reason Urbana works as well as it does is that it has a nice balance of soft & sharp shapes. It is neither soft and amorphous nor does it sparkle. Getting a nice balance between these is one aspect of comfort.

Got other variables that contribute to comfort?

my thoughts are that i still

paul d hunt — Sun, 3 Feb 2008 17:07:54 -0800

my thoughts are that i still have a lot of reading to do... the second part of the seminar is coming up, i’ll see if this article is on the agenda...

Paul, what are your

Eben Sorkin — Sat, 2 Feb 2008 12:48:04 -0800

Paul, what are your thoughts?

Paul, to go back to the

enne_son — Sat, 2 Feb 2008 05:47:10 -0800

Paul, to go back to the begining I wonder if you or the other participants of the Reading seminar are aware that my 2004 Thessaloniki presentation “Lateral Interference, Response Bias, Computation Costs and Cue Value: Perceptual Processing Touchstones for Typedesign and Typography; or Why Strategic Construction, a Well-Motivated Contrast Scheme and ‘Space Craft’ Still Matter,” was a direct response to Kevin’s “The Science of Word Recognition?” Both were printed in the Czech design magazine Typo along with papers by Mary Dyson and Hran Papazian.

Essentially the paper questions the “science” of the “science of word recognition.” and in doing so draws inspiration from Ole Lund’s Reading PhD on legibility studies.

My focus was and is neither legibility studies per se nor human measures testing, but perceptual processing in reading, that is perceptual mechanics. It is meant to address the typographer or type designer’s pre-understanding of what they are manipulating in the context of their making.

the results of

Nick Shinn — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 20:04:05 -0800

the results of typography’s affect on comprehension and retention.

Right Steve, retention is the concept.

Related to that is re-reading.
I often reread text, for varying reasons. It could be a software manual, and that makes it painful. However, I’ll also reread a passage that explains a new idea perfectly with a clever turn of phrase, just to enjoy the writing. I read several parts of Understanding Web Design by Jeffry Zeldman more than once, especially the section The Sustainable Circle of Self-Respect, man that guy can write, and I share his sentiments. If you find writing that puts your own thoughts or feelings into words, the clarity is worth wondering at. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ll usually skip bits of novels I find boring. When reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a novel written in the person of an autistic child with a penchant for maths, I must confess I didn’t read a single one of the paragraphs containing mathematical formulae, which the author had tried so hard to integrate into the story.

“this work will hopefully

dezcom — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 17:02:03 -0800

“this work will hopefully appear in Eye Magazine.”

What a perfectly named magazine to publish this subject matter in :-)

ChrisL

I agree with the sentiment

kevlar — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 16:39:22 -0800

I agree with the sentiment of other posters that there are many way to misuse the data from studies, and care needs to be taken to not overgeneralize from the results of any study. Our goal shouldn’t be to develop a marketing/advertising literature, but to understand what makes a good (legible, readable, comfortable, pleasant, and engaging) reading experience.

Peter makes a very interesting point when he points out that the metrics that scientists use like reading speed, comprehension, eye movements, distance threshold, and preference don’t precisely match our intuitive understanding of a good reading experience. And the Sheedy study didn’t detect reading speed or distance threshold differences between the five versions of ClearType, but did find that version 1 had a higher preference with the 10 point text and version 2 had a higher preference with the 12 point text. People are able to see and prefer differences between the ClearType versions, but they didn’t result in measurable performance differences. In several other studies researchers were able to measure both reading speed and preference differences between ClearType and black & white rendering.

My intuition is that there is a (complicated) relationship between reading performance measures and a good reading experience. Of course I could be wrong. There is much still to be discovered, and new measures likely need to be developed. At ATypI 2006 and in Typo Magazine I talked about one measure we developed looking at affect and measuring the corrugator (frowning) muscle. At ATypI 2007 I talked about research into measuring eye fatigue – this work will hopefully appear in Eye Magazine.

there is a greyscale

kevlar — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 14:18:51 -0800

there is a greyscale rendering of Verdana as well in the same graphic i mentioned above, i don’t think the PDF article reproduced the distinction well enough in the illustration, but maybe it’d different in print?

The text being tested in this Sheedy article are five different forms of ClearType. ClearType figures out which sub-pixels should be turned on ignoring color, and then tries to diffuse the perception of color. The different forms are using different degrees of color filtering. At one extreme is nearly unfiltered text, which is very sharp, but very colorful. At the other extreme is a grayscale, which has no color but is less sharp. This is not a traditional grayscale as it doesn’t use a box filter, but a rectangular filter. The default form of ClearType that we’ve been using is the middle selection of the five options.

Unfortunately it’s very difficult to show these differences in print as they are dependent on LCD subpixels. The best way to see the differences between these text samples is onscreen using MS Reader. Three of these options are now available as tuning preferences in WPF.

Cheers, Kevin

will fetishise scientific

Eben Sorkin — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 12:30:12 -0800

will fetishise scientific data in a way that weights it inappropriately

THis is well put. And I agree when that happens it is very clearly a mistake. It isn’t that Scientific inquiry is better or as you beautifully put it “more wonderful”. It’s that it is differently wonderful. There is no reason that one kind of inquiry has to take up the space of another. Maybe when it comes to funding, but intellectually, no way.

That access to the benefits Science is not evenly or equitably available is on the other hand a legitimate gripe.

...about scientific data becoming indistinguishable from anecdotal data at the point of usefulness. Maybe. We won’t know until they try though. Init?

Eben: But if [reading

John Hudson — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 11:47:27 -0800

Eben: But if [reading science] was useful at some point, and you could actually make use of it to make a clearly more comfortable engaging design, then I think we would also agree that would be wonderful.

It would be exactly as wonderful as anything else that contributes to good typography — that’s the measure of usefulness after all — and that takes me back to what I wrote, in the other thread, about scientific data becoming indistinguishable from anecdotal data at the point of usefulness. There is a risk that we — or someone else, e.g. a customer, which I think is Nick’s concern — will fetishise scientific data in a way that weights it inappropriately, that treats useful scientific data as somehow more wonderful than other kinds of experiential data.

Eben: Also I would be very

John Hudson — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 11:32:28 -0800

Eben: Also I would be very interested in even a very short description of what you think make typography or even just letters/writing compelling, delightful, and significant.

I like reading.

But Peter they can’t

Eben Sorkin — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 11:16:37 -0800

But Peter they can’t really be “fully” investigated. That suggest thats as a scienetist you might run out of questions. You won’t because every result you get has potential to raise new questions & hypothesis’. Moreover it is that false sense that Science could be used to swallow up a field of interest & somehow answer all questions that seems to motivate the seemingly fearful reactions we have seen. Or that’s what I think anyway. What do you say?

David, in another place I

enne_son — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 10:13:26 -0800

David, in another place I tried to relate legibility and readability to affordance. This means that legibility and readability are ‘for us’ values. Perhaps instead of saying it should be fully understod, I should have said affordance ranges and thresholds, across what dimensions, and how much they vary, should be fully investigated.

Maybe it’s time to drag

Renaissance Man — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 09:45:41 -0800

Maybe it’s time to drag The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible out of the closet.

Nick - It’s pretty rare that I see mention of Colin Wheildon in this forum. I was fascinated with the results of typography’s affect on comprehension and retention.

David, I don’t think

Eben Sorkin — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 09:37:07 -0800

David, I don’t think anybody is say “fully understood”.

legibility vs. comfort

paul d hunt — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 06:15:40 -0800

Today at Reading, we had the first part of a series of seminars looking at typeface legibility. In it we presented two papers and discussed them, the first one being Kevin Larson’s “The Science of Word Recognition” and the second being “ClearType sub-pixel text rendering: Preference, legibility and reading performance” by Sheedy, et al. The Sheedy paper is the one that sparked my interest. In it 5 legibility studies on CT are discussed and if I understand correctly, the results have thus far been inconclusive as to whether legibility is improved with the aid of CT technology. However there was 1 study that asked subjects to self-rate factors of comfort of reading. It occurred to me that comfort may actually be a more important factor to consider than legibility or speed when speaking of reading. It seems less important to me to discuss whether people can read something as opposed to do they want to read something based on the degree of comfort or discomfort created by the type. Of course, there are some situations (such as highway signage) where legibility and speed of reading is important, but I believe that in a majority of situations these factors are less important. When focusing on the factor of comfort, the problem as it seems to me, is that it may appear to be a soft target when compared to legibility/reading speed. I have heard talk of studies that are looking at the effects of patterns created by type and certain patterns actually creating discomfort, even at the level of causing stress and fits in the reader. Personally, I think that this aspect of reading is the more interesting one. If any of you have opinions or can shed more light on this topic, I would love to hear what more can be said in regards to the comfort or discomfort caused by type.