How to Typographize with a Hammer - readability experiment

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)
Grzegorz Luk (gluk) Posts: 161
in Type Design Critiques
I'm just asking you to treat the post as a joke and an interesting readability experiment :D


Tagged:

Comments

  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,437
    Really fun! Wish there were a better solution for diacritics. 
  • Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)
    Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.) Posts: 213
    It's amazing how flexible our brain is. 
  • Helmut Wollmersdorfer
    Helmut Wollmersdorfer Posts: 212
    Nice experiment.

    It works not very well in my brain at the first 3 attempts, because I have a general problem with light on dark text. But when my brain recognises one of the characters, then it gets all in the line.

    Interesting, that's easier for me to read the last character in the line first. That's a known effect and used in machine learning, that disturbing a hardened model is necessary to allow additional learning. We have a phrase for it in common language: opening the mind. In sports the principle is known as variability training.

    After 10 times reading I adapted to it and reading speed becomes normal.

    Thanks for this extreme example. I now have new ideas to solve the recognition problem in OCR, when text runs from dark on light to light on dark e.g. in advertisements or logos. 
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
    edited March 2022
    Many typographers have done this type of negative space design, me included:

    "Pure", c.a. 2007
  • Marc Oxborrow
    Marc Oxborrow Posts: 220
    This is very cool and surprisingly readable, especially after (as others have pointed out) the brain has a few lines to acclimate to the approach.

    I find the I (capital i) consistently hard to identify. I think it's the asymmetric/varied treatment of the serifs in a letter that I expect to be essentially symmetrical.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,437
    It breaks down with /I because it's the only letter without an "inside."
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,131
    In general, I did not find it particularly hard to read, but occasionally I did have some difficulty when it was hard for me to identify the spaces. This happened between letter pairs like MI, IE, MM and so on, where it seemed like there was a full white box around the small black square instead of it being a space with the white areas above and below it being intended to be ignored.
  • Grzegorz Luk (gluk)
    Grzegorz Luk (gluk) Posts: 161
    John Savard said:
    [..]  some difficulty when it was hard for me to identify the spaces [...]
    Helmut Wollmersdorfer said:
    [...]  I have a general problem with light on dark text. [...]
    thank You for all comments. I reworked demo for comparison


Categories