Hi everyone,
I'm a PhD student at the University of Reading, and I've got an online research project running that I'd like to bring to the forum's attention, because getting data from trained & experienced type people is so valuable.
It's a survey web app, anonymous, and it asks you to look at some type specimens and mark anything that looks like a letter-fitting problem (using the highlight tool built-in to the specimen). This means "fitting problem" in the broadest possible sense: doesn't matter if the source of the trouble is the default side bearings, a kern, a ligature, or even something about the glyphs themselves. It's just an exercise in "what looks wrong in the final output", you might say.
My research is about letter-fitting algorithms, and this is essentially a way of putting an algorithm (or several) to the test by having people look at & respond to its results in a font with actual, readable text. So the more people, the stronger the analysis of what happens!
You can find it at http://Letter.fit ... it's live right now, but certainly let me know in a comment or DM if it appears to vanish. You DO have to be at least 18 years old to complete the survey; that's a legal requirement imposed on the University.
The app will show you up to five specimens. They are all independent of each other, though, so if something happens and you have to leave after fewer, that's totally fine and there's no harm done. It also asks some generic background questions, but it doesn't ask for any personal info and it doesn't store any or track you.
The intent is that people can look through five specimens at a comfortable, not-feeling-rushed pace and do the entire thing in under a half hour, while still feeling like they looked and saw what they wanted to. But obviously everyone is different; you can go as fast or as slow as you like.
One other thing to add: the site's been up for a while (in fact, you may have seen me blather on about it if you stumbled into one of my last two ATypI talks), but although data-collection has been good so far, I wanted to post something here since I'm really trying to ramp up the promotional machine, to get a wider audience of type- and design-interested people to take a crack at it. And the general public as well.
SO it would be immensely valuable if some people are kind enough to share the link to the site with other interested parties (as many as you can ... without invoke their ire, of course). Industry folk, aficionados, students (who are at least 18 years old), meet-ups or forums — if you can share the link in a way that's respectful of the rules/norms of the relevant community, I would greatly appreciate it.
(There are Twitter Card and OpenGraph bits sprinkled in, so hopefully sharing it online looks a bit nicer. If those seem broken, I hope somebody will give me a poke.)
Anyway, guess that's it. Hope you can give it a run-through!
Thanks,
Nate
Comments
Side note, because of the randomization, it *is* possible to take the survey multiple times and not see repeats. However, I've been tacitly downplaying that for a couple of reasons, not telling people "please come back", etc.
First, although combinatorically you're extremely unlikely to encounter the same font+specimen+version combo twice, there is still a decent chance you'd see the same text block more than once, and overdoing that can be a problem (either via highway-hypnosis or subconsciously tempting you to look at the same letter pairs that stood out to you on the previous run, which is the opposite of the desired effect).
Second and more importantly, though, is fatigue. I know looking at specimens is fun (and I hope it is for you, too), but in practice if people go through many many iterations of the test app, the reliability of what they highlight will suffer.
All that to say that if you are interested in going through the survey more than once, that's great enthusiasm and we're happy to have your data. But don't binge on it; make that a "come back to it a different day" sort of thing.
Quousque tandem abutere, Nathana, patientia nostra?
Or just show three versions of the same paragraph, and ask which is preferable?
However, I thought the accepted standard for body text readability was speed, and perhaps comprehension, not taste in appearance.
In other words, I don’t believe in right and wrong in the nuances of type design, certainly not for small amounts of letter fitting that have no measurable effect on immersive reading. If that’s how it comes out in toto, as the result of the type designer’s decisions, or the font software or layout engine designer’s, or the typographer’s or whatever, it is what it is.
What are you hoping to discover?
Quousque abutere, Nathane...!
@John Hudson, I couldn't agree more.
My favorite typographical Latinization is however “Birminghamiae”.
But I’m disappointed Johannis couldn’t come up with anything for his surname, “Baskervillius” for instance?
...But back to the topic. Speaking frankly I think it's a worrisome result of the experiment's setup that folks on this thread, who are at once some of the most patient type reviewers and possessors of the most valuable opinions you could consult on the topic, can't get through the test. I too gave up on it after two pages or so--it just takes too long. Is it too late to rescale the instrument?
Like I alluded to earlier, this is a rather lengthy dive into the test-design process itself. So it might be informative for people in this thread who have concerns that I may not have thought through the impacts of intervening variables. Accounting for these effects across the full pool of respondents is part of the testing process.
Nathan, you write:
What you’re left with is a one-liner: “Some people observe this and other people observe that, though it must be understood that their evaluations were in no way uniform or equivalent, given that their viewing hardware and software varied greatly.” I don’t see how any conclusion drawn from such a data set could be useful. I see that one of your dissertation supervisors has written widely about the effect of design on the presentation of uncertain information, such as people’s perception of climactic issues, but type design is not at all like that. Type design begins with a point of view, the desire to make something specific. Otherwise, why bother?
As I said, you asked for something I found impossible, not too small. As a type designer, I assumed that I was looking for bad kern pairs, and I would have had to examine the font as a whole to determine what those were, because kerning is supposed to take into account the totality of possible glyph combinations. And even then, it’s the type designer’s aesthetic—who am I to say they are incorrect? If you’d asked me to manually kern a paragraph of text à la Shinn, I might have done that.
If I’m going to use an algorithm to help space a font, I’d like to be able to adjust its parameters as I adjust glyph shapes, as an interactive design process, to optimize the type design—glyphs and spacing as a dynamic, integral, designed system. That’s how I use class kerning.
Any kerning algorithms that are subsequently applied to my finished work, I detest on principle. Like horizontal scaling, faux bold and faux italics, in that respect. I suppose this is rather old-fashioned of me, in our post-modern world, but I will cling to my authorship.
No, no, Nathan. My criticism has all to do with your method and nothing to do with being “fearful” (an odd choice of word) of your conclusions. I shall explain:
• It seems to me that the vast number of viewing variables of viewing hardware and software, as described above by John Hudson, makes it impossible to obtain a meaningful sampling.
• Who will benefit from this research? You never say. Because you assert that it “doesn't matter if the source of the trouble is the default side bearings, a kern, a ligature, or even something about the glyphs themselves,” I wonder whether this study has anything to do with type design, per se. In the online survey, you divide the viewers into two groups: type designers and not type designers. “Not type designers” is a lot of people, and you might, at least, ask them whether or not the Latin alphabet is their native script, or whether or not they are engaged in typography as a professional or profession-related activity. That might add a kernel of interest.
• Given these open-ended parameters, it appears that your work may have more to do with the field of Cognitive Psychology than type design. Every now and then, researchers from that field have dabbled in issues involving type design, such as the group from Australia who, about five years ago, claimed to have developed a font that improved memory and alleviated perceptual difficulties amongst people with dyslexia. It was much discussed on this board, where it didn’t get much love—rightly so, in my opinion.