Alright, I want you to take a look at these three sentences and let me know which one of them do you find the
easiest to read. Is it the first one, which is in Times New
Roman? The second, which is in Arial? Or the third, which is in Comic Sans?
Out of all of them, which one do you find the nicest to look at, aesthetically? And
are those two answers of yours the same, or different? Pop them down in the comments.
The world of readability and aesthetics in fonts is one that is hugely controversial. And as
I've discovered, the story of why Times New Roman, specifically, is so popular is actually
unscientific. So, let's dive in. Thanks to my Patreon community for supporting
BrainCraft.
This journey started when, last month, I was asked to reformat my research paper I'd been working on into Times
New Roman.
In the nine months since I started working on it, I'd descended from using my preferred
Helvetica Neue to Calibri (because Microsoft Word kept reformatting paragraphs into it)
to Times New Roman, what I consider to be the most vanilla of all typefaces.
In my despondence, I turned to Instagram and asked, "Why do academics love Times New Roman?"
This pinched a nerve and I received hundreds of emotionally charged responses that spanned
from disgust to support for Times New Roman. (Those people are out there).
And the same thing kept coming up: Time New Roman is the easiest to read. That serif fonts,
those with the little notches at the top are more accessible than Sans Serif fonts, those
with the straighter lines.
I want to add a quick note on pronunciation. It should be Serif and Sans Serif. But I can't
say Sans Serif 10 times with a straight face, so please accept my "sans" for the purpose
of this video.
And I started to wonder, is there actually any research on this? What does the research
say? And have people who need accessible fonts been consulted in the development of them?
Have they actually been asked just what they want?
So, I emailed some people, in Comic Sans, because I m a troll.
Don t judge every typeface for its face value. Don t even judge Comic Sans.
I feel like letters have feelings, type has feelings
This is Paola Kassa, a graphic designer, YouTube creator and my new personal font therapist
who can tell us why different fonts are used and chosen in the first place.
Communication is the basis of graphic design.
If you can t read it, and you re trying to communicate something then what's the point?
As a design rule, you'd want to choose typefaces and fonts, all your choices would be around
what the theme of the design is. What works for your design.
legibility, readability, those are really important factors that you want to think about
when choosing a design and choosing a font to use.
So how do we know which fonts are the most readable or accessible? These are scientific
questions, which takes us into some research.
Thankfully some researchers are exploring the Serif vs. Sans Serif debate too.
A 2005 study found that serifs made text slightly more legible if it was very small, but at 12pt,
there was no difference in accuracy or reading speed between Arial and Times New Roman, although
people said they preferred reading Arial.
Though, my random Instagram questions show that preferred fonts can get very personal.
In another study of 500 people, Times New Roman and Noto Sans were the most preferred fonts, but
they each only got 17% of the vote, meaning there's a lot of variability in people s favorite
fonts. No surprises there.
And even though most of the people in that study thought that they would read faster
in their preferred font, this actually wasn't the case.
Some people did read faster in their favourite font, but others read slower, so on average
a preferred font didn't speed up reading rate.
But overall, the one finding that is pretty consistent across all of these studies is about font size.
Size matters.
Multiple studies have found that larger font sizes improve readability and comprehension.
So while it's often assumed that fonts with serifs are more readable and accessible than fonts without,
research actually doesn't support this! And serifs are also disliked when it comes to an aspect
of our communication that is super essential: making sure it's accessible to everyone.
Fonts are interesting. Conceptually fonts are interesting. You could say a font is a
work of art.
You may remember Matthew from my video LEGO for the blind about a project he started to
develop text-only instructions for massive LEGO builds. Matthew built everything you
see here and he was born without vision. But in addition to being a master builder,
Matthew is a treasure trove of information about font design for people with visual impairments.
There was a font that's called Tiresias and this font was developed by a graphic designer
for the Royal National Institute of the Blind in the UK. And this font was criticized, but
I think it was criticized for either kind of its graphical appeal or its difficulty
of legibility. The main criticism that those who have enough vision to read
against these fonts is that the more fantastical they are, the more ornaments they have, the
difficulter [more difficult] it is to read because you need to parse out the actual letter
from all the fancy stuff around it. And that's straining to the eyes. And it takes up a lot
of time.
And fonts like Tiresias, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and APHont have also been designed for people
with visual impairment. But the research on their benefits is not clear.
One study looked at the reading speed of people with sight problems using Tiresias, Times
New Roman, Helvetica and Foundry Form Sans. And what they found was that the size of the
fonts had more impact on reading speed than the fonts themselves. Having text at 14 point
instead of 12 would increase the proportion of the population who are able to read fluently.
Similarly, there are fonts designed for people who have dyslexia with the intention of improving readability
But then when researchers actually looked into these
fonts, you can probably guess what happened. In two different studies of people with dyslexia,
OpenDyslexic didn't improve reading rate; one of those studies also found that OpenDyslexic
tied in 10th place out of 12 fonts when readers were asked which fonts they preferred. And
in more research, children preferred to read in Arial than Dyslexie.
So, I will say that all of this research surprised me. I thought that if there was a font designed for people
with dyslexia to improve their reading experience, then it would improve their reading experience.
But what I've learned is that something that's designed for a certain group
of people isn't always generalizable to everybody in that group. Everbody has a slightly different experience.
Some people, like accessibility advocate Alex Chen, say that Comic Sans is actually the
most readable for people with dyslexia because in a word like Illinois, you can easily tell
the letters apart. So maybe we should just start submitting
our work in Comic Sans. I know that a lot of this font research is inconclusive
and it kind of fans the flames of this controversy. But we can say that it's a misconception that
Times New Roman is more accessible or readable. There is not any data
to back that up. So the question remains: why is it so popular in academia?
Perhaps an older legacy is just what Times New Roman has going for itself. It was designed
by Stanley Morrison for the London newspaper The Times (which is where the Times in Times
New Roman comes from) and it debuted as the paper's font in 1932. And it was Microsoft Word's
default typeface until 2007, when they changed it to Calibri, which is just a whole
other can of worms. For comparison, Arial wasn't invented until
1982 (making it a millennial). And good ol' Comic Sans made its debut in 1994, alongside my Lion
King t-shirt.
But unlike the timeless joys of Hakuna Matata, we do have worries about Times New Roman. Maybe
we just crave the clean lines of a sans serif, or maybe we're resistant to nonsensical
rules being forced upon us
People get really fed up when people tell them that it's a rule and that it's what you
have to do. And I think people just get tired of that and are like I m just going to make
my own rule
And in making our own choices, there are so many ways that we can communicate and express
ourselves.
I think it's very cool that for sighted people, you have a lot of choice in what you can do
with your letters and your words, and you can have them be as ornate or vanilla as you
want.
But a lot of these characteristics of fonts depend on our own interpretations and perceptions of them.
And that's the thing about fonts: type, like other areas of design, is subjective and people
have a lot of opinions about it.
Science can't tell us which font is best because just like the design of a home, there are certain
features that we like, and there are others that certain groups need. And this can change a lot
from person to person.
What research can tell us is that if you want to read text quickly, you should increase
the size of that text.
And what we know is that people will always have opinions about what they think is best.
Especially, on the internet.
I would say: Strong, disciplined, agile, and it's tidy.
Definitely accessible, clean, digital and easy.
Comic Sans, I think it is childlike, a little ugly, overused, but also accessible, so I'm going to put accessible in there. And fun.