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
Comments
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?
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.
@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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".
Readability of vertically vibrating aircraft displays.
Patrik Andersson, Claesvon Hofsten. 1999.
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!
If you add a bottom left serif to the i it might help to better differentiate between i and l.
André
Your help would be very welcome and I will soon have some animations done.
How do you imagine setting up this experiment?
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.
btw under nda i would not post what you posted but it is certainly another topic. Good luck with the project!