Amplitude - A typeface designed for airplane cockpits

Alexander Orn

Hi everybody, my name is Alex and I am doing my final design project at my university. 
I'm designing a typeface for airplanes, that is suppose to easier to read when the instruments are vibrating. 
I've done a lot of research on the subject and based pretty much all design-decitions in some kind of theory/study I've found. 

The biggest, and probably most noticeable thing is the way horisontal lines are almost completely gone in the second style. The reason for this is because diagonal lines are easier to perceive in an vibrating environment. 
I've tried to make every letter as unique and clear as possible, because I don't want the user to have a hard time recognising  or mixing up the letters up with each other.
I made it monospaced because a lot of the text in these instrument are set vertically, and there's a lot of acronyms/shortend words.

This is the first time I'm making a monospaced typeface, so any feedback about the proportions would be very appreciated!
If there's something else you notice that I could change I'd love to hear also.

Here's a link to the album with some images https://imgur.com/a/Ic9ZB

AbrahamLee

What a great project! What do pilots think of it?

Craig Eliason

/W/ is too dark. Maybe its center vertex doesn’t need to come all the way up. 
Consider lowering the center vertex of /M/ a little, which might help disambiguate it from an /H/. 
Curious, what do acronyms have to do with monospacing?

Thomas Phinney

Interesting about the diagonal-lines thing. As aircraft vibration is often either vertical or horizontal, diagonal lines would be easier to read with either of those, and no more susceptible to oscillatory non-directional vibration than anything else.

I will be very curious to hear whether the inherent reduced familiarity and hence reduced legibility of the diagonal lines outweighs any benefit from reduced vibration sensitivity? I suspect that across typical test conditions the answer is “yes” and hence a more “normal” font will be better.

Rafael Saraiva

Very interesting project... Have you thought of testing the font with a 'real' layout? I'd say that even a short animation could be important if you are able to emulate the vibrations and prove your point. 

Jasper de Waard

Note that the name 'amplitude' is already taken: https://store.typenetwork.com/foundry/fontbureau/fonts/amplitude

@Thomas Phinney Makes a good point. Jave you considered straight but diagonal lines instead of wavy lines? And could you share the research on which you based this decision? I'm interested.

Alexander Orn

AbrahamLee said:

What a great project! What do pilots think of it?

Thank you! I have not yet showed it to any pilots, but I certainly will if i get the chance. Towards the end of the project I will test it as good as I can, and hopefully I'll get in contact with a pilot.

Craig Eliason said:

/W/ is too dark. Maybe its center vertex doesn’t need to come all the way up. 
Consider lowering the center vertex of /M/ a little, which might help disambiguate it from an /H/. 
Curious, what do acronyms have to do with monospacing?

Thank you! I will work on the blackness in the /W/, although I would like to keep the vertex at the top so that it doesn't look too much like the /M/, but I'll look into it!

About the acronyms; I read that when having a font monospaced it puts the focus to the individual letters in a word instead of the "word image" produced by a proportional typeface. And since most of the words in the studied environment are shortened like this: Radar = RDR and Emergency = EMGY — I argued that focus on each individual letter would be more important than "word image" since these shortened word might not look like their original counterpart.

Thomas Phinney said:

Interesting about the diagonal-lines thing. As aircraft vibration is often either vertical or horizontal, diagonal lines would be easier to read with either of those, and no more susceptible to oscillatory non-directional vibration than anything else.

I will be very curious to hear whether the inherent reduced familiarity and hence reduced legibility of the diagonal lines outweighs any benefit from reduced vibration sensitivity? I suspect that across typical test conditions the answer is “yes” and hence a more “normal” font will be better.

Thank you for your input!
According to the study that I based this whole diagonal lines idea on the most common type of vibration is vertical, but I get what you mean and to be honest I am thinking the same way as you about this. 
If I were to do this as a project for a real client it would probably look more "normal", but as an experiment I enjoy the challenge of coming up with a design that fits within the bounds of my brief and having all the decisions I make based in the theory I've found.
If it ends up non-functional, at least I've made a pretty funky looking typeface
When I'm done with the project I could update you all on success or failure of my design!

Rafael Saraiva said:

Very interesting project... Have you thought of testing the font with a 'real' layout? I'd say that even a short animation could be important if you are able to emulate the vibrations and prove your point. 

Thank you! I've been tinkering a little in AfterEffects trying to come up with a test for the typeface. My idea of a test I could create with my resources is having some animated text vibrating on a screen, and having a person trying to read it before some time limit. Maybe having my typeface compared to some other in-use "aircraft typeface" in this manner could prove/rebut my point!


As a sidenote I apologize for any bad grammar/terminology, I am very much a Swede.

Alexander Orn

Jasper de Waard said:

Note that the name 'amplitude' is already taken: https://store.typenetwork.com/foundry/fontbureau/fonts/amplitude

@Thomas Phinney Makes a good point. Jave you considered straight but diagonal lines instead of wavy lines? And could you share the research on which you based this decision? I'm interested.

Oh, I'll find some other cool name for it!

About the diagonal lines, I found it hard to make them straight without not having a shallow angle. I wanted the lines to be as close to 45deg as I could get, and when they were straight and ~45deg they ended up really short instead.

The reference for the study I based the diagonal lines thin on is this:

Readability of vertically vibrating aircraft displays. 
Patrik Andersson, Claesvon Hofsten. 1999. 

Displays Volume 20, Issue 1, 25 February 1999, Pages 23-30

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SiDaniels

As "Amplitude" is taken how about "Kenneth" as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWkMhCLkVOg ?

Rob McKaughan

@Alexander Orn: What is the study you mention above (in your original post)?

Johannes Neumeier

I dig the Vibration style, but it's really impossible to judge if that makes any actual sense for the application. What studies did the diagonal logic originate from?

If we forget about the reasoning behind it, it can be appreciated in its own right, which might lead to interesting ideas also.

On the point of legibility though. For me the whole point of adding both i serifs and and l tail is to distinguish the two from each other and from the 1. You've negated that differentiation by adding both a i bottom serif, and an l top serif. Especially imagining some vertical vibration the three letters will be very hard to tell apart. The large x-height equally turns n and h pretty close to each other. All the bowled characters like p d b q could probably be more clear had they no spur, since the stem is so short the eye might sort the bowl to stem position either as belonging up or down based on some vibration or quick glancing up and down. Personally I find that the Vibration style also adds so much noise that the added benefit of distinction of individual letter might be lost to overall more strain on deciphering the words. The logic of making all horizontals zigzag also means: There is no more a visual group of "letters with horizontals".

Alexander Orn

@Rob McKaughan  @Johannes Neumeier

Readability of vertically vibrating aircraft displays. 
Patrik Andersson, Claesvon Hofsten. 1999. 

Displays Volume 20, Issue 1, 25 February 1999, Pages 23-30

Christian Thalmann

I'm not sure replacing a horizontal stroke with a wavy horizontal stroke is an improvement in legibility. I suspect it would be more helpful to redesign the glyph architecture to avoid horizontals, e.g. with a /C-shaped /E.

Jasper de Waard

@Alexander Orn: While I think this is very interesting project, the scientific basis is a bit thin. It would be very impressive if you could experimentally show that your typeface works well in airplane-like conditions. To do this, you could probably start with randomly vibrating some text on screen, in accordance with an airplane vibration pattern (so, mostly in vertical/horizontal direction?), and letting participants read short texts. If you could create such animation(s), I could help you with setting up the experiment.

Alexander Orn

@Johannes Neumeier Thank you for your input! I am totally going to go over the typeface now that you mention these problems!

The problem with not having serifs on /i, /l and /1 is that they become so thin, because of the monospace. Without the serifs they leave a huge gap in the text, but maybe the problem of them being hard to tell apart is bigger than having gaps in the text.

The second problem with /n, /h, /p, /b, /d and /q could maybe be fixed by increasing the length of the ascenders and descends and removing/changing the spurs from the bowled letters!

André G. Isaak

The problem with not having serifs on /i, /l and /1 is that they become so thin, because of the monospace. Without the serifs they leave a huge gap in the text, but maybe the problem of them being hard to tell apart is bigger than having gaps in the text.

If you add a bottom left serif to the i it might help to better differentiate between i and l.

André

Alexander Orn

@Jasper de Waard Thank you! I'm planning on doing such tests, and I have already started tinkering with some animations just like you described. 
Your help would be very welcome and I will soon have some animations done.
How do you imagine setting up this experiment?  

Jasper de Waard

I am only familiar with Open Sesame, which is free open source software (Mac and Windows) for creating and running psychological experiments. Participants can see the videos and give a response, and the results are output to an excel file. You would just need a laptop to test on It's fairly straightforward to create such an experiment, you could give it a try yourself. The tutorials are of great help. If you have any technical or experimental design questions, feel free to send me a pm. I'm no expert, but I think this shouldn't be too hard.

With regards to the experimental design, the options are endless. I'd say: display short clips of moving words (in both variants of your typeface and a more 'standard' typeface), and measure participants' reaction times on a task that requires identifying the word.

On a different note: do you think pilots actually read the text on their displays? Wouldn't they know what each number/color represents from experience, without having to actually read the dashboard? Perhaps you should give special attention to designing effective numbers, but I don't know enough about airplane dashboards to be sure.

Jasper de Waard

Be ware, though: designing, running, and analyzing experiments can take a lot of time

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Johannes Neumeier

However, testing the basic effect doesn't have to be complex.

Rafael Saraiva

James Montalbano said:

An aerospace company has been testing and evaluating a suite of Terminal Design fonts for use in their flight deck for over a year.

Which ones, James?

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Rafael Saraiva

Well, I hope it's not Badinage   

btw under nda i would not post what you posted but it is certainly another topic. Good luck with the project!

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