I've started to write an essay on the topic of legible type design.
Main focus is on glyph structure and determining the optimal shapes for legibility/readability in general.
It is practical work, based fully on experience. The essay should document the results and attempts at forming a more or less structured theory based on the results. At least there are some indications that it is feasable at this point, and that is my major motivation to start with documenting.
The thing is, I haven't found much, if any, directly related literature. It would be good to mention some of other scolar's works but nothing notable yet is found in the Web.
Maybe some of you know such books or articles? I mean directly related to what I do.
Since I haven't found much, it feels like almost no progress happens in the field (after some successfull movements of 16th century whithin Latin typefaces). Was not to expect in our high-tech world, but it seems it is so.
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“Readability: discovery and disputation by Berkson & Enneson in Typography Papers 9.
A ton of research has been done (and continues to be done) by Dr. Sofie Beier. You can find lots of info at her website (http://sofiebeier.dk/). Most of her research articles and papers can be found and downloaded from Researchgate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sofie-Beier).
Good luck with your essay!
Good to see your interest in the discussion!
Sofie Beier is already in the list of interest.
However let me elaborate on the topic. There might appear some misunderstanding.
My topic is typeface _in general_. Not Latin or some other specific existing type.
See the crucial difference:
1. "Legible typeface design"
2. "Legible Latin typeface design"
The task definition of my work (1) is:
"to determine the glyphs for optimal (maximal) readability in general"
The task definition of most works found by web search (2):
"to tweak the strokes of Latin (or other historical) glyphs for better readability"
Yes, some of the studies try to "dig into the surface", still initially the _task_ definition is completely different.
I do realize there is a lot published on e.g. "Times vs Arial" and such, but that is not the topic.
- try to find some for general aspects in the field of design or cognitive psychology
The work of Sophie Beier focuses on design with empirical methods of cognitive psychology.
The principles for alphabetic scripts (writing systems) like Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew etc. should be the same. Maybe Asian scripts like Han, Hangul or Indic (e.g. Hindi, baseline on top) are special in some way. Arabic is special in many ways.
You can begin at basics of visual (=human) recognition works. This falls in the science of physics, medicine (neurology, anatomy). In short: a complicated process recognising color, contrast, edges (contours), skeletons, angles, corners, weight (area), geometric components and does something with it. It can adapt very fast (see in Beier "familiarity") to new letters and symbols or fonts. There is also influence of a language model which allows fast reading (and not recognising mistypings or reading similar words). We can also read words if some characters are missing, reordered, damaged, degraded (overinking, fading), warped. Adapt to mirrored or rotated text.
That is to say, in most real world cases, legibility is substantially dependent on what the range of possible characters is.
Let’s simplify it an awful lot for discussion purposes. Let us say a character set is only two characters. What makes those characters legible depends immensely on which two characters they are. Being boring and using Latin for a moment, what makes a “P” legible will depend immensely on what the other possible character is. What if it is R? A? O?
Now, what is interesting to me is that if you abstract too much above this, perhaps you ALSO won’t discuss this issue, because you don’t want to talk about character sets? I hope that is not the case.
I call them "primal" or "reference" glyphs. Those that come out with pairwise similarities will be treated further somehow, but that is another story.
That is connected with application. Yes, if we speak about special cases, like e.g. binary numbers representation, special tricks can be applied.
For binary numbers I personally use the "dash and knot" presentation which is for example a string like "---s -s-s" for the "0001 0101". The fact that there are only 2 digits, can be used to exploit the weight difference for legibility. But for greater amount of glyphs, one cannot use this "loophole". So in other cases, have to deal with, basically, optical properties of individual glyphs and determine the best working ones regardless of others*, and this approach is what gave good results in the end.
(* that is an oversimplification of course, dependency arises, especially when adapting the glyph for close placement etc, but not major _structure_ dependecy)
For binary numbers, see above dash-and-knot example, e.g. I can pick other glyphs as a "knot" without losing much, but even in this case it is better to base off of those "primal" glyphs.
Mostly readability is more important. But if there are unknown words in the text legibility is important to decipher the spelling. In more formal texts (science, math, juridical) spelling and punctuation can be very important.
We have the approaches of Sophie Beier measuring "Typeface Legibility: Towards defining familiarity". That's not complete but good enough.
Also Johannes Neumeier tried to design "Legibility in typeface design for screen interfaces". That's an example of his work:
And that's not very different to what I did a few years ago to choose a fixed-width font for editing program code and proof reading of historical transcriptions, because low legibility costs time and strengthens the eyes:
I decided to use Menlo, but would like to have the enclosings ([{}]) of Monaco. Or Monaco with the \a of Menlo.
Maybe i will compile a font with "best of" fixed width shapes.
Yes, legibility can hurt elegance.
There are no ‘optimal’ letter shapes, any more than there are optimal notes or optimal instruments in music. It’s how the elements are put together that’s critical, and this is a matter of taste, not any theoretically objective measure of ‘readability’ or ‘legibility’.
In other words, type designers rely on their individual good taste to create functional fonts, and such things as formal aesthetics (e.g. texture and tonality en masse), and allusive qualities (e.g. an impression of elegance or a particular cultural ambience) are indeed functional, not just disambiguation between I, l and 1). And typographers rely on their good taste to format selections of fonts into layouts that will appeal to the taste of prospective readers, to the extent that documents will be sufficiently palatable for the nutrients to be digested.
Illegibility is like toxicity: it’s the dose that makes a poison. For reading, the dose is measured scientifically in time—the faster text may be deciphered, the less toxic it is; science mostly prioritizing speed as efficiency. But why not slow down and smell the roses? After all, there is another scientific theory, disfluency, which posits that illegibility is not without virtue and thus no doubt may also, in certain circumstances, be optimized!
To Thomas’ point about the inter-relation of characters, there are in fact optimal suites of letter shapes that have emerged in the field—through marketplace empiricism, one might say— and these are the accepted genres of typeface, identified by categories such as didone, geometric sans, and grotesque. These genres constitute a taxonomic zone between typefaces and alphabets.
For instance, the ‘Continental’ version of Gill Sans may be considered a set of alphanumeric shapes for geometric optimization, while the original was a humanist optimization. Which of these is more legible, more readable? If that can be decided at all, it depends entirely on context—the typography of a particular document, the nature of the media, the reading proficiency of the target audience, the text content, the cultural milieu.
Clearly, of course, the geometric has a legibility deficit when compared with the humanist, as the round \a is much more similar to \o than the two-storey version. But so what? If this were an issue, the genre would not be as pervasive as it has proven.
Optimization, then, is nothing but good, appropriate style.
With legibility by the way, I personally understand the intrinsic (physical) ability of the glyphs to contribute to readability. And as I see from special literature there is tendency to use this term with that meaning. Main purpose of the term, when used in studies, is to separate from other higher level aspects of readability and try to abstract from application. Although with some interpretations from author to author, but in general there is no big disagreements here as far as I understand. Yes, some of authors define legibility as pairwise glyph discernability, but in my view the latter is not synonym for legibility, but rather a [resulting] property contributing to legibility. One of major but not the core.
I like to have a rant, once in a while!
Without peripheral context: I vaguely recall that there is a method of reading sentences in which individual letters are rapidly flashed, in the same position. Apparently one can learn to read with some fluency using this method. Perhaps that might be useful to you.
Charles Bigelow, Typeface features and legibility research, Vision Research 165 (2019) 162–172 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698919301087?via%3Dihub
is a good overview on 11 pages what happen the last 100 years in this field. It's a sort of meta study with many references.