Is there any reason not to use it?

just wondering how and why its lasted so long? what kept it going?

The need of spreading old good books, for example, so that Giggles can read them ?

what have you got against the poor serif, miss g? it seems that you’ve got a vendetta against the poor thing!

Paul you read my mind. Miss G seems to be on a personal mission to do away with the serif. And didn’t she already ask this question (in one way or another)

Easier to read, more formal, classic. Reading a novel or a newspaper in sans would make your eyes hurt. No matter how beautiful the font.

Miss G, in addition to defending the serif which you seem so eager to consign to the dust heap of history, I’d also like to recommend you acquaint yourself with another archaic throwback to an earlier era, the Shift key. It’s just to the left of the z on your keyboard. Like the serif, it can make your text more reader friendly.

missgiggles seems to suffer from seriphobia.

I keep wondering why I still use my voice.

I type much faster than I speak. There are excellent synthesizers out there with much better diction and volume than I manage. I’d be far more effective if I sounded like that “in a world” guy from the movie trailers. Why am I still using my voice?

> Easier to read, more formal, classic.

Triple bingo.

On the other hand:
1) Some people use it out of pretension (although the same applies to sans).
2) We should find out as much as possible concerning why it helps reading.

Long live the serif!

hhp

Kristen,
Just keep singing instead of talking :-)

ChrisL

Why am I still using my voice?

It has the most unique personality?

On the other hand, clients and their users are not really interested in the designer’s personality (at least not explicitly) which is fine because if they are I’d worry. We have enough problems with the cult of personality in the west without obsessing about it in the design of useful things.

hhp

Why do we keep taking the bait?

Miss Giggles, if you could articulate all of your thoughts into one cohesive statement — even if it is several paragraphs long — we might understand where you are coming from.

The serif isn’t a problem. Heaven forbid the day when we only have sans to choose from. I for one, as a graphic designer and typographer, would lash out and rebel should this happen. I relish have choice, even if it is a subtle choice between serif and sans.

personality

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, not a bare neck prompting axe grinding.

okay Tiffany, the whole point of asking thsi question was because i am trying to figure out the development of the serif from the Romans to the Runaissance and beyond to this day and trying to analyse the whole developing process ofit and how its been expanding etc. i have major events that i have pin pointed which are very important to the serif development like:
- Roman inscriptions,stone chiselled serif letters.
- Trajan column
-Roman numerals
-Tory Geoffory (student of Leonardo da Vinci and Durer) who designed serif with great precision.
-Classical fonts like Garamond, Bembo, Caslon, Didot, Baskerville, Times, Bodoni and trying to understand how they expanded into the type families they are today but i’m missing information beyond Renaissance so i’m wondering what happened between then and now? What major developments took place? and why and how the serif is used today. thats all. i guess i should have said all this in the first place rather than ask separate questions. sorry people.

I don’t actually get from miss g. that she wants the serif gone. They are questions. It sounds like she wants to understand why the tradition is so strong.

So, Miss G, here are some clues: Tradition?, “Who Kept Them Alive”, and “For What Purpose”.... Those are your best questions to ask. Unfortunately none of us can rattle off textbook answers. It’s easier to explain where they came from and how they changed over the centuries, but this question of “why” is kind of unanswerable.

Worth noting: there were those in the early 20th century who predicted it would be the century of the sans serif. They were correct. Look at the type from 1900-2000. However, if they also said or implied that the serif would go away forever, they were wrong. Look at the type of 1950-2006.

The pluralism of graphic options could be seen as biodiversity; users of type tend to want a lot of variety once they realize they can have choices. Even if we can’t explain the purpose of serifs, they seem to satisfy something very basic for us; you’d have a revolution on your hands if you tried to ban serifed type. Clearly they are not “vestigial” or unnecessary as some have proposed. If they are, then it’s tradition keeping them alive.

Expecting only the “most functional” type to survive is probably misguided.

> Runaissance

Ah, new satirical term: Renuisance Man. :-)

hhp

crossgrove, i dont want a ban on serifs. why would i want that for? its probably the tone of voice that i have conveyed in my question that made you think that. is liek you said: who kept them alive and for what purpose is what i am really after. how come it is still living strong after so many centuries, tahst all. sorry for the misunderstanding.

No, I don’t think that. Read the thread; everyone else seems to think that. I’m trying to answer your questions as you’ve asked them. Is there static on this line?

Miss Giggles that is such a broad question! Simple answer: the serif still alive because people like it and it’s easy to read. And appropriate, visually, to a broad range of applications. Sometimes the sans is simply too hard edged, cold, or modern to work properly. Why overthink?

Not to mention that design - like everything else - is cyclical. Things fall out of fashion, get revived and dusted off and have a new life. The trends that endure are those that are timeless and not too tied to a specific era or movement. Like the good pair of boots that you wear year after year because they are comfortable and durable and go with everything.

But of course there’s also room for a pair of pink sparkly pumps to liven things up on occasion.

untested hypothesis: serifs produce better boumas.

Designing anything that is meant to be read is necessarily conservative. The reading public has little tolerance for innovation, and besides historically most innovations have owed as much to changes in technology as to the desires of type designers to express their personality, if not more.

Different type styles, different letterforms, or different writing systems altogether may be vastly superior in readability, but the reading public comes with a strongly built-in bias towards what it is accustomed to.

So if serif faces have been used in setting Roman text for centuries, the question to ask is not why is it still used today, but why innovations are introduced at all. The history of type for immersive reading really is about these little innovations that somehow defy the staticity and inertia of the reading public’s preferences, whatever the reasons behind them might be.

So in short, it is not that people have worked hard to keep the serif alive all this time. It would have been much, much harder to force people to abandon the serif.

I think the conservativeness of the reading public is generally over-stated, and it’s entirely possible to deploy innovation that “flies under the radar” of possible conscious layman rejection.

hhp

...type designers to express their personality...

What I meant was the personality of the typeface, eg its individuality.

With serifs, it’s possible to also incorporate stroke variation in a type design, without getting excessive sparkle. Stroke variation, not necessarily for reading functionality, but as a means of providing variety of personality in at typeface.

So, serif faces have more personality than sans serifs, more options for variety — which can be use by typographers to match the variety of uses, the different personalities of products, of typographers, and of different media.

Of course, if you’re a really good graphic designer, you can use Helvetica for everything and make it look brilliant all the time.~

Miss Giggles, have you happened to read any of the suggested books yet?

Renuisance Man.
Thanks hrant, that put me into ... helpless giggles.

yes i have but origin of serif is on it’s way but they all make me cinfused coz i’m reading too much and forgetting what goes where and i cant relate things together and link them coz there’s just too much history to read. i’m trying my best though.i have 7 books im reading all on typography and history and they got different dates to somethings though so i dont know what it should be but i do my best. am i asking questions that are unreasonable? is that why u asking?

Why do we keep taking the bait?

Because there’s nothing good on TV, at least not until Inside Washington at 8:30. I can’t decide what’s funnier; Krauhammer’s insanity, Totenberg’s outfits, or Miss Giggles baiting people into a conversation about the worth of serifs.

yes i have but origin of serif is on it’s way but they all make me cinfused coz i’m reading too much and forgetting what goes where and i cant relate things together and link them coz there’s just too much history to read

That’s not hard to identify with. I find reading design books one at a time has become a necessity.

am i asking questions that are unreasonable? is that why u asking?

I don’t think it’s necessarily the questions you ask, but the way you ask them. They tend to be written like above-average text messages, which makes them rather offbeat for typophile, as well as a little confusing.

Miss Giggles, when I have done historical writing and I needed to track a timeline I used small postcards and would write the date (year) at the top large, and then the event smaller underneath it. After a while I was able to see a timeline form because of these dates. You might try that. You can tape them to your wall, move them around, add more information as you find it. Very useful.

Post-it-notes work well for me with convoluted project management timelines, why not type history too?

ChrisL

Good answer, Dez.

Why do we keep taking the bait?

Because some people have a pathological need to respond to obviously stupid questions.

Giggles is wasting time and bandwidth, folks. Do what most of have done: ignore her....

LOL

Is she really that bad?

hhp

Sure her questions are naive, but that can be refreshing. I found “Are there movements...” quite thought-provoking.

For your purpose question I would suggest that you try carving some characters in stone, explore in a physical way why serifs might be practical to a carver, you don’t have to be skilled to reach some conclusions. You also can’t discard the aesthetic, it needn’t be entirely practical that a character is shaped the way it is, despite the base shape having an established form. Also don’t assume that all Roman writing used serifs, stone is not indestructible but it has longevity advantages over other mediums.

Perhaps you should look at your question from another direction, why did sans come about; what purpose did it serve; were there any technological advances that might have contributed to it; also why, if you have a choice, would you remove one of your options &c. &c.

For a timeline you could look here
http://www.xs4all.nl/~knops/timetab.html

btw Geofroy Tory are you sure he was a student of both da Vinci and Dürer or do you mean he studied their work?

Tim

>from the Romans to the Renaissance and beyond to this day

>“Who Kept Them Alive”, and “For What Purpose”

Maybe there is a textbook answer, if there can be such a thing outside of the existence of said textbook.

It’s not just the *serifs*, but the forms of serif designs which bring a unique thing to type. This unique thing comes from the details of designs of the serif -ed type which allow the differentiation of features between characters more broadly than most sans serif designs are capable of, (without looking like you just cut serifs off;). And thus, it is thought by this uniqueness in detail that serif designs aid the reading process for some people in some documents.

The serifs in particular, and for the most part, are part of our familiarity with the rest of the serif forms they are attached to, so, for the most part, we *kept* them for reading purposes. But then, as time went by, broader uses of the serif style came along as signage and book work sought timeless and classical appearances.

>Renaissance and beyond to this day
My milestones are:
1. Design of Romans suited for letterpress.
2. Design of Romans for mass and personal mechanical composition.
3. Legibility Series by Linotype.
4. Democratization of the Romans by PostScript/Fontographer.

Er@least that’s what I think. Cheers!

Giggles is wasting time and bandwidth, folks. Do what most of have done: ignore her….

Ouch, Linda! :) But as James said, its not so much what questions she asks, as how she asks them. However thought provoking the questions are, many are not complete thoughts, or complete sentences. Asking questions is not a stream of consciousness writing exercise in a chat room. There have been way too many good, intelligent well formulated questions that have been asked on Typophile that have been virtually ignored.

I don’t understand why many of you are so patient with someone who doesn’t even attempt to capitalize or punctuate sentences properly, while many great questions and good portions of the critique section get treated like a red-headed stepchild. There are too many people who come on Typohpile who work hard at finding the answers, before they ask them.

I think this is a terrific and fundamental topic. It’s incurious to dismiss it.

I agree with others that the Catich’s The Origin of the Serif is a worthwhile book. He makes a compelling argument that serifs did not come from stone cutting. My two sentence summary is that serifs are a result of reed writing. The reeds were cut at a slant to allow a writer to have vertical stems that were thicker than horizontal stems (to compensate for a visual perception illusion). Serifs on the left side of a letter were necessary for even ink distribution across the reed while the right side serifs were needed to keep the ink from smudging.

No matter what the origin of the serif, I think it’s an interesting question to ask why it’s around today. Some propose that it improves word recognition, though I have not seen compelling evidence that serifs help or hinder word recognition. Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text. I agree with Nick that the most plausible explanation is to convey personality differences.

Cheers, Kevin

>The reeds were cut at a slant to allow a writer to have vertical stems that were thicker than horizontal stems (to compensate for a visual perception illusion).

I don’t think this can be correct as the Aramaic script, now used for Hebrew, is very ancient, is pen written, and has thick horizontals and thin verticals, the opposite of latin script. It also has serifs, though they are generally vertical. I agree that serifs are a natural result of writing with a pen.

>Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text.

I agree with this, an important point to me.

>With serifs, it’s possible to also incorporate stroke variation in a type design, without getting excessive sparkle.

Yes! I never liked Optima that much…

Serifs can reduce the “gap” between the letters or in other words, helping to connect the different letterforms and at the same time, helping to separate the letterforms from eachother – don’t know if somebody can follow me – ok, i’m far from being a scientist or typedesigner. I just love antiquas and love to read it!

>if somebody can follow me

Yes, I have argued a similar point here before. My argument is that serifs can achieve adequate space between letters while achieving even color. With a sans, you tend to have to tighten the spacing to get even color—to the point that it hurts readability, expecially in faces with wide counters, like Helvetica. (The ratio between the space within counters and between letters is important to readability.)

I suspect that there are other benefits as well, such as defining the line of text clearly, and others.

I

“Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text.”

This is what I’m calling logicalistic; It sounds like it’s logical but it’s only a convenient supposition that is generally accepted in place of an explanation. It isn’t an explanation at all.

Has it occurred to you that the line of text itself, the alignment of the typeface and its spacing draw your eye across? Look at a page of text. The letters aren’t all in a jumble, equidistant from each other in every direction. They’re in lines already. What about your lifetime habit of reading left to right? Could that help “guide the eye”? Or Notan, gelling letters into words? Could any of these obviously functional realities have any more bearing on reading than this fantasy rightward momentum? Finally, How about the fact (!!) that we read in saccades? If that’s true, and we have space between lines of text, and the typeface is well-spaced, then why would we need serifs to “guide” our eyes?

This is too much like the persistent human tendency to anthropomorphize animal behavior, because it’s convenient. Since an ostrich can’t tell you their real motivations and impulses, you can conveniently project your own neuroses and blindnesses on it. Since there isn’t a dazzling scientific factoid to replace it, we can continue to chant this silliness about serifs guiding the eye.

“With a sans, you tend to have to tighten the spacing to get even color—to the point that it hurts readability, expecially in faces with wide counters, like Helvetica.”

Bill, Helvetica is badly spaced. Other grotesque sans designs are not. Then there are the other categories of sans. The lack of serifs doesn’t compel a type designer to space a typeface tightly. This is more paralogic, something to say that fills the space where a real explanation should go. When you design a sans typeface you can revisit this idea.

“With serifs, it’s possible to also incorporate stroke variation in a type design, without getting excessive sparkle”

Hogwash. Optima isn’t the only sans with contrast. Another logicalistic leap.

I am perfectly willing to believe that serifs have a function, but hearing people parrot the same, logicalistic idea is just more hot air at this point. Kevin, who is a reading scientist, has already pointed out that nothing supports these theories. If he’s not convinced, why are you? I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but people need to think harder about this.

Hogwash. Optima isn’t the only sans with contrast. Another logicalistic leap.

Not at all. Perhaps I should have qualified “incorporate” by “easily”, though.

Why there are so few sans faces with contrast, compared to the masses of serifed faces with contrast? The fact is, the combination of serifs with contrasted strokes provides a huge canvas for creating all kinds of stylistic variety.
Sure, contrasted sans faces are possible, and can be effective (as you have demonstrated with Beorcana), but the genre is small because it is problematic. It is difficult to make an effective contrasted sans, but just add serifs, and it makes things a lot easier. There is nothing “logicalistic” about this line of reasoning, and it has nothing to do with reading science, as sparkle is a phenomenon which predates that considerably (going back at least to Ben Franklin’s Caslon-Baskerville prank). My observation is “practicalistic” and based on typology and type culture.

The smallness of the slab serif genre also bears this out: there is not so much design room in the genre for stroke contrast between the main stems and the serifs, because the serifs are already substantial. So again, lack of stroke contrast = small genre.

Adrian Frutiger makes some interesting associations regarding the development and acceptance of sans serif designs in his article, The History of Linear, Sans Serif Typefaces:

It was not until the birth of modernism that architects ventured to introduce a naked column, made of concrete. The fear that a line without boundaries might flow on forever gave way to a worldview defined by rationality – heralding the beginning of widespread use of sans serif typefaces

But for my part, I believe the sustained use (and further development) of serif and script designs have more to do about humanistic sensibilities much in the same way we relate to “practical” versus “fashionable” choices in clothing (or as Hrant would point out, shoe styles).

@crossgrove

If something displays in a horizontal direction (serifs) on the same line (in vertical position) over and over again – to what effect can it lead to?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - is this a line?

If something has a lot of horizontal direction, that doesn’t make it type. Type is made of more than serifs. What are you talking about?

>Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text.
About this

Please explain your point clearly. It sounds as if you think a series of dashes is a sentence, or that horizontal serifs are more important than any other feature of a typeface, or than the mechanism of reading.

>Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text.

But it could just as well draw the eye in the other direction? I have no idea if serifs perform a readability function or if they do, how they might work. I have yet to see any convincing evidence one way or the other. I have seen conjecture and leaps in logic from counting eye movements, nothing more.
I don’t find it to be a problem though and like both sans and serif faces if they are well done. I don’t feel a need to ether “kill the serif” or crown it as omnipotent king.
I think that human perception and adaptability are quite amazing though. Humans can read such a broad spectrum of seemingly disparate forms and actually make sense of them. Multilingual readers are particularly interesting to me—especially when they can read different scripts, not just typefaces and poorly rendered handwriting. I find it hard to believe that the serif plays that big of a role in any of it other than they have been around for 2000 or more years. Before the attacks start, I might clarify that I am not saying it is not possible, I am just saying that I find it hard to believe and would need far, far, better proof than has come to light so far. As I said in another similar thread—we have to look in more places than where someone has conveniently placed a light to find the answer.

ChrisL

>The lack of serifs doesn’t compel a type designer to space a typeface tightly. This is more paralogic, something to say that fills the space where a real explanation should go. When you design a sans typeface you can revisit this idea.

I don’t do ’logicalistic’—whatever that is :)

I make hypotheses, guesses. In this case they are inspired by what I have read and tried to learn by looking. I’m sure if and when I try a sans design, I’ll learn a lot more. Also I think you have done new stuff with Beorcana that has helped readability, and I’d like to learn from you. So tell me where the following go wrong, which are the sources of my inspiration and guesses.

In his famous chapter on spacing, Walter Tracy says:

“The serifs at the four corners of the H make a linking effect with adjacent letters. Because they are absent in a sans-serif type the side-spaces of a sans-serif H have to be narrower than those in a seriffed face.”

Maybe Tracy is a ’paralogician’, and wrong, but he did know both from his own and other’s experience in drawing and producing both sans and seriffed types.

Tracy also recommends that the spacing be proportional to the width of the counters in the H and n. My observation is that narrower fonts, like Meta, seem to work better in text. Hence my hypothesis that the need for tighter spacing in a sans throws evenly spaced, wide sans faces off, as far as text goes.

On the issue of “defining the line,” I base this on the common view, confirmed by my own experience, that generally sans need more leading. Here for example is Bringhurst: “And unserifed faces often need more lead (or a shorter line) than their seriffed counterparts.”

The reason for the need for more leading or a shorter line, according to my hypothesis, is that the serifs help the reader more easily keep his eye to that line, rather than jumping to another line by mistake. The longer the measure and less the leading, the more likely it is that this will happen to the reader. Serifs, it seems, help prevent this in that you can go generally further with the measure and tighter with the leading without getting problems.

I don’t know that these are right, but they seem to have some plausability. There isn’t yet good testing, but there will be soon, I hope.

If you counter-examples to my hypotheses, by all means I’d like to hear them, and learn from them.

“The serifs at the four corners of the H make a linking effect with adjacent letters. Because they are agbsent in a sans-serif type the side-spaces of a sans-serif H have to be narrower than those in a seriffed face.”

This is true because of the affect of proximity of the serifs to each other. The lighter mass of a high contrast serif face makes for less darkness, therefore gives the illusion of more open space. The dominant sans faces are tightly spaced more likely because they were developed in the tight spacing era. Also, possibly because they were used for situations where tight fit was neeeded and serif faces overlap when spaced tightly. Besides, Tracy (in your quote) did not say anything about readability, he was just describing the mechanics. Think of the serif as needing overshoot sideways.

ChrisL

serifs help the reader more easily keep his eye to that line

Concerning the serifs on extenders, this is certainly a principal that I apply to news text, where the leading is often tight. I find it works best when the descenders have wide serifs (p, q), a wide bottom (g), and a curl or ball on the y and j. This forms a deterrent to ascenders and descenders forming vertical quasi-ligatures (“islands” — a similar phenomenon to “rivers”). With the exception of the f, ascenders don’t have such wide serifs, which maximizes clarity in the inter-line region.

> people need to think harder about this.

Indeed. Like that “guide the eye” business makes no sense at all.
Try making your serifs arrow-shaped and see how far you get...

And some people need to get their philosophies straight even before they begin to think about this at all. Statements like “I have yet to see any convincing evidence” are usually trench-digging tactics, and symptomatic of “you can’t get there from here” in terms of understanding readability.

> This forms a deterrent to ascenders and
> descenders forming vertical quasi-ligatures

Interesting, and seemingly valid.

hhp

I’m not convinced that the most plausible explanation for why serifs are still in use today is the added opportunities their presence affords for gestural-atmospheric (’personality’) variation, though they do indeed afford that, or so it seems.

My own feeling about why they are still around is that, in the western script tradition, the presence of serifs contributes significantly to the optical-grammatical integrity of the word-object. In Gerrit Noordzij’s terms, they support the consolidation of the word image. Serifs, I’ll suggest, make the word-object less susceptible to what I’ve called letter-level ’componential abstraction’ or ’slot-processing.’ Less susceptible to ’response-bias collapse.’

(It is my theory that the supercession of ’slot processing’ is foundational to the aquisition of fluency in reading.)

I suspect serifs make the word-object less susceptible to componential abstraction by giving greater definition to the whites between the letters than these whites receive in sans serif contexts, and by off-setting the visual formal self-enclosedness of letters within themselves. Remember, from my perspective, the whites inside and between letters inside bounded maps—which is what word-object are—are not ’ground,’ they have con-figural status, as information for the visual cortex.

On my account, sans serif typography requires greater attention to perfect spacing to inhibit ’slot processing.’ This is not an argument for or against sans serifs. Just a fact, or so it seems to me. To resist the collapse of the integrity of the word-object, the san serif is dependant either on rhythmic spacing or on tight spacing. Rhythmic spacing implies a synchronicity between the spaces inside and the spaces between letters. Tight spacing implies areas of strong lateral interference or crowding between letter parts that compromises their proper cue value, so is counter productive. I don’t think tight spacing produces even colour either. The serif is more forgiving of less-than-perfect spacing. This is my experience, and fits my theory.

So I suggest looking at the persistence of serifs in the western script tradition from the point of their practical contribution to visual wordform resolution first, and the theoretical opportunities for gestural-atmospheric tuning they provide as a fringe benefit.

I meant to add: there is no empirical evidence for these claims—just craft knowledge, everyday experience with texts and my own—hopefully adequately disciplined—intuitions about how perceptual processing works. Studies of how the Word Superiority Effect plays out in different spacing contexts with and without serifs, and for begining and experienced motivated readers might bear this out.

The actual quote reads; “I have yet to see any convincing evidence one way or the other.”

Tactical omission of parts of quotes or taking them out of context “are usually trench-digging tactics, and symptomatic of” a very biased opinion.

ChrisL

I don’t propose to disprove anyone’s hypothesis, or show Walter Tracy to be wrong. I’m not saying I have answers or that I can teach you. I want you to reconsider comfortable assumptions, and maybe advance the study of reading. As I said elsewhere, my goal isn’t a final, case-closed answer, it’s just improved understanding. Our understanding of reading and the role of type in reading is stale and impoverished.

“With a sans, you tend to have to tighten the spacing to get even color—to the point that it hurts readability, expecially in faces with wide counters, like Helvetica.”

This is not what Walter Tracy is saying. He makes the excellent point that the serifs act as implied connectors, a sort of glue. I consider this to be an important ingredient of “Notan”. It doesn’t necessarily follow that any sans face has to be spaced tightly. Look at Legacy Sans. Very broad letterforms (based on Jenson), spaced adequately. ’Narrower’ is a subjective thing (as is ’too tight’). What Tracy means surely isn’t that it’s impossible to space a sans correctly, just because it has no serifs. And the fact that Helvetica is spaced badly doesn’t support Tracy’s comment at all. Helvetica is just spaced badly.

Bill, I think your observation about narrower sans designs being more readable is a very good place to look. This idea deserves more attention. This might prove to be meaningful, and we should pursue it. I think we can agree there’s an ideal width, with serif types, that’s the most comfortable. Maybe the ideal width of Sans designs is narrower. Intriguing. Could it be connected to reduced contrast? We do know that bold sans lowercase looks small if the x-height isn’t increased. Interesting to pursue.

I don’t think you can credit serifs with keeping our eyes on a line, and not also acknowledge all the other factors, some of which I mention above. Again, there are many, many other things at work when we read. I contend that serifs are a much less important factor than is generally thought. Or, put another way, the other factors are all, each, equally important, if not more important, to the function of reading. You can’t discount the way readers are trained to read (John Hudson’s ’readerability’). You can’t pretend that the text is splattered at random across a page, and serifs are the only, tenuous method we have to keep our eyes following the text.

it’s been proven that we read in saccades. Whatever way you interpret this, it clearly reveals that we read words, even multiple words, and this is the way we’re trained to read them, and all of that is a very, very strong habitual pattern we all use while reading. With all that in place, why would serifs, (the most visible of the variables), be more important than stroke contrast, for example. If that were true, digital Bodoni would be easier to read than Syntax at the same small apparent size. I doubt that’s true.

What John H. calls readerability is probably a complex of these factors that allow us to understand a lot of different marks as the same thing (A=a), from serif to sans, to handwriting, to bitmaps. Surely serifs aren’t the first, most important factor? Since the literature doesn’t show a very large difference between serif and sans (a conflict, in fact, between preference and performance), we have to assume serifs are not that crucial to reading.

If you step out of the bubble of the Latin alphabet, and move to other writing systems, you realize that humans can be trained to read a variety of different ways. In Arabic, or Kanji, are “serifs” the most important thing to reading? Is Greek lowercase inherently more difficult to read, since it has so few serifs to “guide” the readers’ eyes? Only a native Greek reader can tell us. We’ve also discussed how capitals and lowercase were evolved together from disparate writing traditions. Don’t we have to acknowledge that serifs on lowercase are pretty recent, and derive from a need to stylistically match lc with UC?

There’s no need to feel defensive about this. I just think the standard line about serifs is not good enough anymore.

visual wordform resolution first, and the theoretical opportunities for gestural-atmospheric tuning they provide as a fringe benefit.

Your theory makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s quite good historically, because the variety really only began to emerge 175 years ago.

However, few designed things are merely practical, and the “gestural atmospheric” element, viz styling, is loaded with meaning and a necessary part of cultural functionality, not a fringe benefit. In fact, I suspect it was the teutonic otherness of Sweynham & Pannartz’s type-without-much-serifs that mitigated against it — “we don’t write like that round ’ere, mate” — rather than any lack of integrity of word objects. So they produced a more serifed type, and that’s how the Montane roman evolved into Jenson’s definitive version, as I understand that part of the Incunabula.

Interestingly, the diversification of serifed forms occured at the same time as the initial development of the sans serif, around the 1830s, so they are perhaps part of the same phenomenon.

”...the “gestural atmospheric” element, viz styling, is loaded with meaning and a necessary part of cultural functionality, not a fringe benefit.” [Nick]

You’re absolutely right; my choice of the words “fringe benefit” was unfortunate.

“Our understanding of reading and the role of type in reading is stale and impoverished.” [Carl]

I think that’s by and large accurate when it comes to the broader typographic community, (though I think the intuitive foundations of a better understanding are quite robust and widespread). But my sense is that the scientific community (and the pedagogical science policy making community it feeds) badly need a typographical-craft-attunements-inspired paradigm shift. There is a lot of good work and data out there, but, as I’ve seen written by a member of this community over a decade ago, the science of reading is still in a pre-Mendalevian state.

Now the king told the boogie men:
“Serif? Don’t like it”

Carl and Chris, to clarify a couple of points:

1. In general I am not saying that sans are poorly spaced, but just that when they are well spaced for even color they are more suitable for display and short passages, and less suitable for extended text at small sizes.

2. My theory about the ratio between letter spacing and counters being too low in sans with wide counters is mine, as is my view that sans in general are less readable as text—though I think the latter is common. I wasn’t saying that this is Tracy’s view. I was saying that Tracy’s observation sparked my thinking on this issue.

However Carl when you say of Tracy that “It doesn’t necessarily follow that any sans face has to be spaced tightly,” I don’t think this is correct about Tracy. He says point-blank that the sans HH should be tighter than a similar H with serifs. Whether this is a problem or not is a question I am raising; I suspect it puts limitations on the readability of sans faces. There may well be other causes of the weakness for text of sans, but I suspect it is one. The problem is that if you space the sans more widely words don’t knit together in the same way as they would with a seriffed face of similar proportions. That’s what I am thinking is an important advantage of serifs.

>greater definition to the whites between the letters than these whites receive in sans serif contexts, and by off-setting the visual formal self-enclosedness of letters within themselves

Peter, I think this is an interesting new idea about the advantage of serifs. Giving the inter-letter spaces more visual closure may make their shapes more readily identifiable by the brain. Making the inter-letter space more similar to the spaces within letters might also, as you say, help knit a word together, and distinguish it from neighboring words, which are separated by word spaces that act significantly differently.

I think what Tracy might have said, to be more precise, is that one spaces a sans differently from a serif. Consider: the shapes inside sans letters are just as likely to be similar to their intercharacter shapes. That can’t be a factor in what you persist in calling “the weakness for text of sans”. There ought to be an ideal, or correct way to space sans designs so they produce the desired “knitting”. I’m not convinced that it’s categorically impossible, which is what I seem to be hearing. It is likely to require a different approach, and I think Peter put it well: “sans serif typography requires greater attention to perfect spacing to inhibit ‘slot processing.’” He, and I, don’t say that the lack of serifs is a fatal flaw of the word-object. It’s just more difficult. Nobody can say what the correct spacing of “a sans-serif typeface” is because the correct spacing for each sans is different, and it’s a very delicate balance. In addition, since photo and digital type, nobody has been making sans faces for specific sizes. They have typically been made to be adequate at a range of sizes, and as soon as you see a sans (Helvetica) used at an inappropriate size, you see the damaging effect bad spacing has on word-image. This does not tell us that you can’t space a sans well for small sizes. That’s not logic.

Bill, your language is colored by your conviction that sans is less readable. I have to raise a flag if it seems we are treating our biases and beliefs as facts. SInce nobody has proven this conclusively, we have to treat it as a theory, not a baseline fact. Otherwise it’s logicalistic, or “pseudoscience” if you prefer.

>we are treating our biases and beliefs as facts

Carl, you are doing me an injustice here.

In practically every sentence I have written, I have qualified it by saying ’in my view’, ’my hypothesis’, ’my guess’, etc.

And I said as a general qualifier, ’I don’t know that these are right, but they seem to have some plausability.’

And yet you accuse me of being dogmatic or ’logicalistic’ or ’pseudoscience’.

I don’t get it :(

Three non-mutually exclusive theories have been proposed here for the role of the serif: 1) They help word recognition, 2) They help eye movements by keeping readers from accidentally jumping to the wrong line, 3) They allow personality expressiveness.

Serifs help the eye move across the line
William has proposed two possibilities for testing this hypothesis. The first is to compare the optimal amount of leading in serif faces versus the optimal amount of leading in sans serif faces. William/Tracy are predicting that sans serif faces will need more leading in order to reach the fastest reading speed. The second proposal is that in a reading speed study there will be an interaction between serif/sans serif and the amount of tracking. Reading speed with sans serif faces will be faster with tighter tracking, while serif faces will be faster with looser tracking (there is a need with this second method to create some absolute measure of letter space).

Serifs help word recognition
I suggested that there was little evidence to support this because of the long history of research examining this topic, as reviewed in Ole Lund’s dissertation. But there could be new ways of investigating this theory. Peter is proposing an interaction effect between serif/sans serif and regular/irregular letter spacing, with sans serif faces performing relatively poorer than serif faces with irregular letter spacing (we’d have to either develop a good measure of regularity, or we could ask several type designers to rate of letter space regularity).

Serifs express different personalities from san serifs
Shaikh and Chaparro demonstrated this at ATypI in Lisbon, though I don’t think there is disagreement on this point anyway?

Are there other theories about the role of the serif or proposals for testing these theories?

Cheers, Kevin
This is in no way an offer to take on this project. :)

>proposals for testing these theories?

Yes, I think the advantages of serifs will show up much more clearly if they are tested using the measure I have suggested before: see how rapidly comprehension declines with extended time.

I suspect we have a large capacity to compensate for less than optimal conditions and maintain nearly the same reading speed. But the compensation is taxing, and creates mental fatigue, and this will lead to a sooner decline in comprehension—and probably reading speed as well. Decline of reading speed will probably be easier to detect, so maybe that will encourage you to try this measure!

This hypothesis about compensation and fatigue accounts for why many common beliefs of those who deal with type—such as that sans need additional leading—have not been found in testing, and suggests a way to make the differences show up in testing.

I suspect on the basis of Peter’s and Carl’s discussions here that sans, spaced more loosely than optimal, will break up the word images (the dreaded ’bouma’) sooner than if you loosen serif faces similarly. It may be more tightly as well. In other words, it is not only robustness in the face of irregularlity but also of tracking. And this will show up in measuring fatigue by loss of speed and comprehension sooner over and extended reading period.

ps. Tracy doesn’t discuss leading. The idea that sans need more leading to be optimally readable is pretty common; I have read it a number of places. In addition to Bringhurst, as noted above, it is also mentioned by G. Dowding in ’Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type’ (1954), p 13. It is maybe important to note also that there is an interaction between leading and measure: with a shorter measure you need less leading. So in testing it would be essential to normalize measure as well as, eg. x-height, among other things.

“This is in no way an offer to take on this project. :)”

Sounds like the typical “i am not running for President” comment always heard just prior to the primaries :-)

Can we twist your arm Kevin? :-)

ChrisL

Kevin, it might be possible to specify the notion of ’serifs helping the eye move across the line’ in ’parafoveal preview advantage’ terms, so that the parafoveal preview advantage interacts with leading, serifs or not, and tracking / regularity. It is well-known that parafoveal preview of text downstream in the direction of reading speeds up recognition. An advantage might be detectable using the boundary study protocol you recruited in your Science of Word Recognition paper or eye-movement studies. The theory would be that 1) indexing of the next item for fixation, 2) saccade planning or 3) the extraction of more criterial or more accurate ensemble statistics might be enhanced by serifs. How to dissociate these three possibilities would require greater refinements. Indexing might be helped by a clearer definition of the boundary of the bounded map defined by the word-object. In such a case less leading might be necessary to preserve this capability in seriffed forms for the reason Nick cited. Extraction of accurate ’ensemble statistics’ and saccade planning might be helped by a decrease in the susceptability to destructive interference or crowding (at prafoveal distances) in word-objects created by seriffed forms.

My proposals might also be tested using a masked priming protocol, where a short duration ’prime’ stimulus is introduced in the middle of a series of masks before the target word is introduced for identification or a word / non-word response. The prime could consist of only inter-letter shapes. The interletter shapes would be derived according to different serif and spacing conditions. This could determine two things: whether interletter shapes are ’calculated’ in perceptual processing, and whehter their closure is a factor.

But I agree with Bill, and implicitly Hrant, that the gains might not be detectable in simple priming and short duration boundary studies, but only become a factor expressing itself in fatigue and time terms over large texts with ’deep’ immersion. Except here isolating the variable one is interested in seems much more intractable a problem.

Are there other theories

4. Finishing the stroke.

At the smallest level, serifs prevent bleed, or to put it another way, enhance acuity, by finishing the stroke.

Bleed occurs in all media, because perfect sharpness is impossible.
So serifs compensate for the attrition the image suffers during reproduction.

It also occurs as “visual bleed” within the vision system. There are two aspects to this. The first relates to the quality of lens, resolution of the retina, transparency of the aqueous humour, and other visual equipment in the visual system. The other is during perceptual processing, although this is hypothetical.

Quite apart from mechanical reasons for finishing the stroke, there are cultural reasons, most fundamentally perhaps the traditional need that boundaries should be clearly marked, that pictures and doors should have frames, etc. There may be so many practical instances (eg, that fabric must be hemmed to prevent fraying) that unfinished things just don’t look right. Of course, modernism disputes this.

5. Derogating the substrate.

The varied linearity exhibited by classic roman type, with its combination of serifs and contrasted stroke, creates a different kind of textual image, en masse, on the page (or screen) than that of a linear sans or Egyptian type. The monolinear type image sits flat upon the page, suggesting a figure that is planar, forming a clear impression of the two planes of paper and type; modernist layouts exploit this. Varied linearity however, creates visual depth within the type image instead, dissipating the simple black/white, figure/ground, ink/paper duality, leveraging the complexities of notan.

“In other words, it is not only robustness in the face of irregularlity but also of tracking. And this will show up in measuring fatigue by loss of speed and comprehension sooner over an extended reading period.” [William]

This sounds right to me.

Nick, I like this ’varied linearity’ notion. I read today that “...constant stimuli produced unreliable or irreproducible spike firing patterns, but noisy input signals deemed to be more “natural” [...] yielded much more reproducible spike patterns...”

William,

I apologize if you feel attacked. Please don’t take my comments personally. Consider that what I am after is greater real awareness of the dynamics of the different aspects of typefaces on reading performance. To that end, I like to think we are trying to separate what is hopeful speculation from what is true, measurable, real. This last we can arrive at scientifically, and with enlightened, aware intuition. What I fear I am reading between your every line is that you have decided that sans type is less readable, and that you choose to interpret what you read as supporting that wish. Please make an effort to read Tracy, Goudy, Enneson, Larson, dispassionately. It’s not illegal to disagree with them or to acknowledge what’s missing, or vague in their statements. It’s also possible that we’ve surpassed their most advanced thoughts on reading. Most of what you quote of Tracy has to do with type design on a practical level, and for the intended purpose it’s excellent. I don’t think you can build an argument that sans is intrisically harder to read, based on a very general comment Tracy made about spacing type. Can you see how unscientific that is? You also say:

“This hypothesis about compensation and fatigue accounts for why many common beliefs of those who deal with type—such as that sans need additional leading—have not been found in testing, and suggests a way to make the differences show up in testing.”

The goal of such testing, I think, is to discover whatever effect or difference there is, no matter your starting assumption, not to “make differences show up”, and I pick that out because of your clear agenda to show serif type to be more readable. You presume the differences to be there, rather than considering all the possible results that might show up. Hoping for testing to show a specific result is not scientific.

If we want to make progress in discovery, it’s a clear hindrance to start with preferences, cling to them, and insist on basing other, illogical suppositions on them. Again, I don’t ascribe all this kind of thinking to you; the reason I’ve posted so passionately is that I’m hearing similar undisciplined ideas from all corners. I’m tired of going in the same circles, and for me, the way forward is more structured and more rigorous thinking. If you are only interested in approaching the matter from a philosophical point of view, that’s fine, but I’m interested in what we might find by scientific means. I have not disagreed categorically with everything you’ve said. I’ve pointed out when I think your train of thought is interesting to pursue. Everyone can have useful insights, and I feel it’s objective, purposeful, to examine each idea, each suggestion, with the same rigor. In the spirit of objective discovery, please re-read what I’ve posted, try to divorce the ideas from your ego, and consider the other factors I’ve mentioned. So far you have not addressed them.

>To that end, I like to think we are trying to separate what is hopeful speculation from what is true, measurable, real.

How do we separate ’hopeful speculation’—mine or yours—from what is real?

According to the late Sir Karl Popper, under whom I did my PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, progress in science comes from bold hypotheses and severe empirical tests of these imaginative theories. The most enlightening enpirical tests are those which are ’crucial experiments’: those experiments where different results are predicted by different theories. Then one of them is refuted, and we learn a lot from that.

In order to have good empirical tests, it is important to have well-developed competing theories, and to look for tests that might decide between them—including the possibility of refuting your own favored theory.

John Eccles, who was was a colleague of Popper’s in New Zealand tells a lovely story about what he learned from Popper. He had been working for years on a theory of the operation of synapses in the brain. One day he confessed to his friend Popper that he was really depressed, because it looked like the weight of evidence was going against his theory. Popper told him he should be happy, because refutation his how science progresses. He suggested that Eccles try to design an experiment that would refute his own theory. Then if he were to succeed in refuting his own theory, he should try to invent a better theory that would explain it and other data. Eccles did exactly that—and won the Nobel Prize for it.

My suggestions are in this spirit. My own hunch is indeed that seriffed type is superior for text, but what I happen to believe is quite unimportant to science, and I certainly may well be wrong. What is important is to try to test competing theories against observation. To do this it is important to develop the competing views sharply, and to look for where the differences in their predictions may appear.

Therefore I have tried to develop a theory of in what way exactly seriffed type might be superior, in order that seriffed type might be objectively tested for readability against sans type. These tests may refute the idea that serifs are better, and show that sans are better—or visa versa. Or they might lead elsewhere altogether.

You write:

“The goal of such testing, I think, is to discover whatever effect or difference there is, no matter your starting assumption, not to “make differences show up”, and I pick that out because of your clear agenda to show serif type to be more readable. You presume the differences to be there, rather than considering all the possible results that might show up. Hoping for testing to show a specific result is not scientific.”

I’m sorry, but I think you are really misunderstanding the nature of scientific testing. The point of ’making differences show up’ is to find evidence that will discriminate between theories—show which is superior, *without knowing the outcome*. The whole point of a good test is that you don’t know which way it is going to go—it may refute the pro-serif view, or the equality of sans & serif view, or may lead somewhere else altogether.

Let me emphasize that my suggestions above for empirical testing—which evidently Kevin Larson, a reading scientist, writing above thinks make sense—are not biassed in favor of proving that serifs are better. They are designed to find out whether OR NOT serifs are better. The result of experiments can go EITHER WAY. And I have been looking specifically for experiments that can potentially REFUTE the pro-serif view, because otherwise the tests will be quite uninformative.

Searching for tests that might refute your own favored view—which is what have done—is not dogmatic and closed minded. It is the essence of good, open-minded scientific method. That is why I have looked for a new measure, and found a potential one—fatigue as assessed by decline in comprehension and speed—that might decide for OR AGAINST a number of different theories concerning readability. If my measure turns out to be a good one, it will show a number of differences, and then what the results on serifs will be significant. Otherwise experiements using it will unfortunately be just more inconclusive studies.

Carl, your own view that serif and sans are equally readable is just as ’speculative and hopeful’ as my view that good serif types are more readable at text size. Instead of making irrelevant personal accusations about my ego, why don’t you develop your theory further, and suggest objective, crucial empirical tests, as I have tried to do?

You claim that I have a “clear agenda to show serif type to be more readable”. My agenda is crucially different: it is to FIND OUT whether OR NOT serif type is more readable.

I’m so glad you clarified your position, William. It’s been difficult to see.

“your own view that serif and sans are equally readable”

is not my stated or implied view. And none of my views are based much in “hopefulness” at all.

I have in fact discussed with Kevin specific test designs; procedures and controls. I’m keen to move forward with well-designed tests that advance previous efforts. I have never made irrelevant personal accusations to you. My criticisms all stem from a concern, understandably drawn from your posts, that you are not willing to consider evidence or concepts you do not favor. Perhaps that’s not what you meant to convey. I’m relieved. Thus, you are free (I hope you finally see?) to consider my arguments and what merits they might have. Do you wish to engage them? Shall I restate them?

{deleted as boring by the author}

Carl, your main argument, I believe, is this:

“I contend that serifs are a much less important factor than is generally thought. Or, put another way, the other factors are all, each, equally important, if not more important, to the function of reading. You can’t discount the way readers are trained to read (John Hudson’s ‘readerability’). You can’t pretend that the text is splattered at random across a page, and serifs are the only, tenuous method we have to keep our eyes following the text.”

The two sentences are really an assertion, and not an argument. You say that serifs are much less important than is generally thought. Ok, that’s your position.

What follows is an attack on a straw man. I have never said that other factors are unimportant. On typophile I have often discussed the importance of spacing and of even color, and even of good notan. I never said that “serifs are the only ...method we have to keep our eyes following the text.”

What I said is that serifs are one important factor, and that the lack of them will hurt readablity in a specific way: create fatigue in reading more closely leaded text, compared to similar seriffed text. In fact you do not address this specific claim of mine, or the arguments I have put for it—or rather for its being worth testing.

As to the point that sans may be more sensitive to spacing to get to an optimum—a point Peter and you made—I have already acknowledged it as an interesting one. However, ’optimal’ for sans does not necessarily mean that they are equally readable as optimally spaced serif fonts.

My judgment as a reader is that sans are generally less readable as text. This is a common view, shared and forcefully put by many, including Dowding, whom I mentioned earlier. The question is, are those who think that serifs are more readable in text simply reflecting a comfort with the familiar, and there is in fact no objective difference? To me because so many people do find seriffed type more readable that is an interesting question. I would like to see a test found that we could be confident gives us a good answer.

“My agenda is crucially different: it is to FIND OUT whether OR NOT serif type is more readable.” [William]

I have a resistence to this way of framing an agenda. I’m struggling to find a way to articulate my discomfort in ways that don’t appear cretin. Let me try this approach:

In terms of ’knowledge construction’ (Ole Lund / Knowledge construction in typography: the case of legibility research and the legibility of sans serif typefaces University of Reading Department of Design and Typography PhD thesis) in typography, I think the real value of your test is that it might be able to show a negative correlation between (variable a) a susceptibility to componential abstraction and (variable b) the sustainability of immersion with effective and effortless sense-following and maximal-comprehension grip. But I also think there might be a positive correlation between the (a) facilitation of slot processing and (b) ease of use of wayfinding mechanisms in unfamiliar contexts, or in captioning. This is because in way-finding contexts or captioning a quasi-letterwise dechiperment must often occur.

It is clear from our everyday experience and craft knowledge that texts in both serif and sans serif types are eminently readable when designed and set well, and used for the uses they were designed for. There is also the perception that the sans serif fonts currently in use are less suitable than traditional seriffed fons for the setting of large texts meant for immersive reading. I want to use these perceptions to leverage [adding later: perceptual-mechanical] knowledge construction so that action might be rendered more intelligent, rather than to treat [revising later] as a knowledge construction end, a generic statement about which is more readable.

Why serifs?
1) Because seriffed fonts are more readable.
2) Because seriffed fonts inhibit more effectively the slot-processing which is destructive of the sustainability of ’immersion with-effective sense following and good comprehensional grip’.
What tells us more of what we need to know to make intelligent design choices or engage in responsible action?

My problem is that putatively authoritative statements about an ill-defined but intuitively desirable value or variable called readability—while perhaps of value heuristically—can lead to blind following. What’s needed is intelligent action where perceptual processing mechanics are sufficiently understood.

large texts meant for immersive reading.

With regards to commonly held axioms and Carl’s idea that some of them may be a little too “logicalistic”, what about immersive reading? There is no scientific evidence that there are two kinds of reading, immersive and non-immersive, that distinguish text and display type. In fact, what we know is that the eye moves saccadically (not to mention ocular drift and ocular tremor) in both.

As far as I am concerned, we decipher all text the same way. In a parallel viewing mode, there is always ancillary information available for inspection, the so-called “aesthetics” of typography. And this too may be perceived immersively, or pondered consciously.

The privileging of serifed book body text as the ultimate reading mode reminds me of D.B. Updike’s snobbery (in his “Printing Types” of 1922), that only classic book types were worthy of consideration, in the history of type, and in his recommendations for contemporary typographic practice.

Consider this exhibit, with its typogrpahic hierarchy. Which parts are read “immersively” and which not?

Peter, I agree with you that in contexts such as signage and many other contexts, such as display, sans can be equally readable.

I have been arguing for possible superiority of serifs only in the case of extended text at small visual sizes. I guess I should have repeated that context to make clear what I want to see tested.

Also I agree with you that many variables need to be tested—as I urged in another thread.

Your new point here that we need to really try to categorize carefully what situations offer significantly different conditions, and not have one single category of ’readability’ is a good point.

In terminology that some writers on type have used for more than fifty years, there is a distinction between ’legibility’—meaning ability to discipher single words, eg for signage—and ’readability’—ease of reading extended text. And of course sans can be equally legible, and in some contexts more so. But your point that there are probably more than two significantly different reading conditions is a good one, and should be taken into account in testing.

edit: I cross posted with you, Nick.

I do agree with Peter that there are significantly different conditions that put different demands on type. I don’t think that Clearview Highway, which is proven to be excellent as signage, would score as well at 10 point in extended text, judged against Sabon or Minion.

I am not comfortable with talking about different kinds of reading—immersive vs others—but I do think there are significantly different conditions that some designs will meet better than others. Not all designs suit all conditions, as far as ease of conveying the message of the type.

Nick,

Consider reading a book set in a display cut of Bodoni. The difference isn’t just size, or style, though clearly the style preference for text faces is much more conservative. If you had to choose this book set in a digital display cut of Bodoni, set small, for 5 hours straight, or the same book set in Minion, you would choose the Minion setting. Why? Well, that’s the answer to your question. I don’t think the mechanism of deciphering text at display sizes or in ornate styles is completely different from reading text, but I do think the effort of processing is very different. Fatigue doesn’t figure into trying to understand a headline in a magazine. It is a crucial issue in ’immersive reading’, which I think means reading long texts for long periods.

I agree with your reasoning Carl, but if it’s just a question of comfort for a long trip, the word “immersive” is unnecessarily loaded, with its implication that a long read is somehow more subconscious — in the way that the words are processed — than a short one.

Is it just me, or did the serifs on this board disappear recently?

(Not that that is a bad thing.)

Why do you think this extended kind of reading isn’t more subconscious? Hasn’t the whole Raygun thing made it apparent how uncomfortably conscious reading can be?

Additional theories:

Serifs reduce eye fatigue (William)
William, I am inclined to make this a separate theory from serifs helping word recognition. I would strongly argue that improvements in word recognition should show up in the amount of time it takes for the eye and brain to process the information. Eye fatigue (which is less well understood) could certainly interact with serifs, and I would describe your decrease in comprehension over time measure as one that might be a closer approximation to eye fatigue. Would you agree with this?

Serifs improve parafoveal preview (Peter)
Parafoveal preview and word location identification are both known components of reading that could be improved by serifs. These could in turn be examined by the eye tracking methodologies of the boundary and moving window studies. It would seem to me that both parafoveal preview and word location identification are unlikely since, as with word recognition, we should expect to see improvements in overall reading speed.

Finishing the stroke (Nick)
Derogating the substrate (Nick)
I don’t think I understand either of these theories or how to test them. Any proposals on how you would test these theories?

Chris wrote “Can we twist your arm Kevin? :-)”
I’m not offering to do this because I already have way too many projects on my plate. I’m hoping that by outlining a research program that someone would be interested in taking on this challenge. I would be willing to collaborate with an enterprising student who wants to take on this project.

Cheers, Kevin

>Serifs reduce eye fatigue (William)

Well, what I was theorizing above was that serifs reduce *mental* fatigue. In other words, less than ideal reading conditions are more taxing on our brain processing apparatus, so we get tired more quickly and our comprehension and reading speed deterioriate from this mental fatigue.

It may be that eye fatigue is a factor, but I wasn’t thinking of that. By eye fatigue do you mean the same thing as eye strain, such as from bright light or glare, or poor focus, as in the wrong glasses? I am thinking more of mental fatigue, such as shows up in chess players in long games.

”...I would be willing to collaborate with an enterprising student who wants to take on this project.”

I hope one will come out of the ether for you Kevin. Also, maybe one who can write good grant proposals.

ChrisL

Kevin,

“Finishing the stroke” is, I would have thought, the most basic reason possible for serifs.

“Pre-emptive” details are applied to type, in various media, to counteract corruption of the image during reproduction. This is particularly necessary with phototype, where the image is passed through a lens and exposed onto a surface — a process similar to that which occurs in the eye.

Serifs were around in scribal and lapidary times, for a reason, but were used by Incunabula printers to deal with their own problem. It must have irked typefounders that the neat and sharp image which they created on a metal surface became rough and sloppy when printed. Serifs became part of the Venetian type style because they created a neat, crisp effect — and you can see this evolution through the types of Sweynhem & Pannartz, to the definitive Jenson.

Bell Centennial is perhaps the most celebrated of the modern era “pre-emptive” type designs, but the narrowing of stems at joints has been an integral feature of letter design since before type, and is conveniently inherent in broad pen writing.

http://www.nicksherman.com/articles/bellCentennial.html

Serifs are a similar proposition to “ink-traps”, but dealing with an excess of erosion, rather than accumulation.

Serifs and ink-traps counteract the degradation of the image both in the medium, and also in the eye.

To test in a lab, fit subjects with eyeglasses that throw the image out of focus, or use text which has been photocopied several times, and see whether sans or serif holds up better.

Derogating the substrate: this is a bit of a mind-bender, but perhaps it would be possible to test it by using different colours for type and background, which are tonally identical. I suspect that under these conditions, where the figure/ground relationship between type and background is problematic, serifed text would be easier to read than sans. Just a guess!

Why do you think this extended kind of reading isn’t more subconscious?

Beacause all fluent reading is subconscious, to the extent that reading is a global skill combining separate sub-skills (eg letter recognition) that have been consciously learned and amalgamated. When reading a headline, you read the whole phrase subconsciously, not letter by letter and paying special attention to the serif style. No different than body copy.

“There is no scientific evidence that there are two kinds of reading, immersive and non-immersive...” [ Nick ]

You’re right, no, there isn’t.

There is, or might be, however, an agreement—or social contract—to call the engaged, motivated reading of long texts by experienced readers ’immersive reading’, and the deliberative process the reader engages in during immersive reading when an unfamiliar word or phrase of acronym is encountered, ’letterwise decipherment.’ The perceptual processing routine that is the norm for each of these is hypothesized to be different, and there are perceptual processing reasons to think this is a sustainable hypothesis: when we meet an unfamiliar word during immersion we do something different, often involving a regressive saccade and a prolonged (in microsecond terms) visual search within the bounded map, as well as a deliberative sequential sounding out on the basis of our learned knowledge of symbol to sound rules, before moving on.

Both processing routines are learned, and become to various degrees automatic.

What happens in captions, headlines, decks and way-finding? We connect with these kinds of texts in browsing or way-finding, or ’referential-frame establishing’ situations. We automatically resort to the same two processing routines (sub-routines) used in immersive reading, but without as large a benefit perhaps of the preview and semantic context advantages that are maximized at text sizes with longer texts. The response biases of the perceptual system retain their skew to a processing routine not premised on letter-wise slot-processing, or so I believe.

The perceptual processing impact of serifs at display sizes is a different story. At display sizes their gestural-atmospheric import perhaps plays a more imortant role than their optical-grammatical function in inhibiting slot-processing.

What doesn’t make sense, to me at least, is aligning the binaries immersive / deliberative directly along the reference axis text / display. A processing routine learned (sub-attentively) during the aquisition of ’fluency in immersive reading’ becomes the preferred line of attack whenever and wherever text is encountered in the life-world of the reader.

Bill, I agree that eye-fatigue is not what you are after. I think the premise of your ’sustainability of immersion with robust comprehension’ test is that there might be additional ’computation costs,’ (or at least, costly pitfuls) in the visual cortex associated with the sans serif when used at text sizes. And that the force of these costs is such that they disturb the most effective allocation of neuronal resources for comprehension, so that is one area where there force is expressed.

Think giggles is still reading???

:-D

regarding: serifs creating a neat crisp effect [Nick] as the reason for their introduction / assimilation into type design

my view: the serif in roman lower case types is, or represents, (factor#1) the formalization—in a new (non-scriptorial) technology or ecology of text production, namely punchcutting—of scriptorial conventions of stroke termination, within (factor#2) a humanistic classicistic cultural sphere dispositionally oriented to the carolinian miniscule and its pairing with the Roman inscriptional capital. (With the formalization being subject to, or under, (factor#3) the countervailing pressures of constraints introduced by the technical requirements of sidebearings, the trueness of the resultant impression, and the necessity of preserving the integrity of the word image.)

Right Peter, I wasn’t proposing crispness as the main or only reason. I think that there are always multiple reasons for design. In fact I had already posited factor#2 based on the Roman resistance to Sweynhem & Pannartz’s northern style of type.

Is your “the trueness of the resultant impression” the same as my “neat crisp effect”?

’Giggles is wasting time and bandwidth, folks. Do what most of have done: ignore her….’
Fine Miss Cunningham! If you think your so good then why do you even bother with my questions? Dont if you dont want to! no ones telling you to and it’s not my fault i haven’t reached your level of knowledge in typography so stop being so nasty. Bet you were worst than me at my level. Leave me alone and stop bullying! Were you never told that bullying was wrong and nasty? Dear me, even i know that and anyway, who said this site is ONLY for people at the top end of typography? i have i right to be on here just as much as you do no matter what level. By the way, remember- students ARE the future designers.

There is more detail in each character in a serif face than in a san serif face — and that is why we teach our school children in “Century Schoolbook” as they learn to recognize the alphabet as they read.

Amazingly, as we age and still read — it is so instilled in us, we have no problem recognizing letter formations. Go back to Type 101 and remember - cut your serif type in half - and you can still read the sentences easily.

We use it for ease of recognition — and therefore, we shall continue using serif faces for reading purposes. (Help you get through many manuscripts, books, newspapers, etc.)

P.S. It doesn’t matter what level you are on. History is important, and this is part of the history of typefaces. My all-time favorite face is still Goudy Old Style. Each letter is beautiful — every bit of punctuation was well thought out. (I hate what digitized typefonts did to those “diamonds.”) Personally, I wouldn’t want to lose that sense of style, design or history.

i agree that the digital versions should be as original and accurate as could be. It loses its originality thus its quaulity.

Using serif in a contemporary context is so terribly postmodern. We need to live in our own time. The only reason serifs are ’more legible’ is because we have become accustomed to them. May they die a fiery death. Long live Helvetica Neue Bold Outline!

Okay I know this is an old thread that was randomly resurrected, but I wasn’t around for the original and do have something to add :)

About a year and half or two ago, I attended a dinner featuring a second language education researcher from Florida State University (I think it was FSU, might have been UF, one of the two heh). One of the parts of his research involved understanding how foreign language learners read and understand texts, in this case, specifically L1 English students learning Spanish. While conventional wisdom would have it that students are most confused in Spanish by the conjugations, they found actually that students tend to focus the majority of their effort on word stems. They did this by studying how the did various worksheets/tests/etc while in some mechanism that allowed eye tracking, so they could see exactly where and for how long students were studying different parts of the words. IIRC, the students would read words backwards, that is, read the conjugation quickly, and then backtrack to study the base word, eg, in “acaeciésemos”, they would focus on “-iésemos” (1st Pl. Past Subj. -se form) and then later spend time on “acaec-” (acaecer, to happen) figuring out what it means, rather than the other way around was would native speakers.

It would seem to me that a similar approach could be used to judge reading texts between serif and sans serif.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Is Spanish read from left to right or the other way round? Could that be a reason as to why they read that way? Why wa sit just tested on the Spanish. Should have tried people who read arabic. They read from right to left. Hmm...

The initial question is a fair one, but so much research over so many years has established that the funkiness, contrast, and sheer visual interest of serifs are why they are preferred for reading. Sans-serifs overall have less variety as a species than serifs as a species. If you collect the most beautiful examples of type over the years, or just since 1970, serifs will outnumber sans-serifs by a comfortable margin. In book and magazine design, there’s a reason serifs have always been preferred, though some on this board deny all that empirical evidence whenever the question comes up.

A world without se