Indeed, Renaud's observations were consistent with a 1998 study from Carnegie Mellon, which pitted Times New Roman against Georgia. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it's not as easy to read in print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal. Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Especially to a professor who has to wade through a collection of them Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn't set off any subconscious triggers. Maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do. Why did Georgia - which he switched to later on in his college career - perform better than the others? Here's what Renaud wrote: His papers were handed to his professors in three different fonts: Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Georgia. Renaud went back and looked at his essay scores and the different typefaces he'd used when he submitted his work. What he did change, however, was his essay font - three times, in fact. "I'm probably even spending less time with them now than I did earlier in my studies." "I haven't drastically changed the amount of effort I'm putting into my writing," he wrote. Here's the thing: Toward the end of his last semester, Renaud's average essay score began climbing. Over the course of six semesters, Renaud wrote 52 essays for his classes, earning himself a commendable A- overall. Take this somewhat famous quasi-experiment by university student Phil Renaud back in 2006 (preserved for posterity in Pastebin form). But font can have real-world implications that affect our lives in tangible ways. Type design is something we tend not to think about when we're reading. Text meant for a book requires a different approach of typesetting from one that is meant to be seen on a poster. Size of type, letter-spacing, word-spacing, leading (interline spacing), column width, justification, etc., all play a key role in how readable a passage of text is (or isn't). "Besides the formal qualities of the typeface, the structure of the letters, a lot also depends on how the fonts are employed, and for what purpose." He continued: Plus some shapes of serifs might actually hinder readability if they are too prominent or draw too much attention to themselves," Alexander Tochilovsky, a design instructor at the Cooper Union School of Art, told me in an email. "There are many very readable sans serif typefaces out there. (User-interface designer Alex Poole pored over 50 empirical studies for his master's thesis if you're interested in learning more.) Online, it's commonly understood that serifs, or fonts with a tiny line tailing the edges of the lettering, like Times New Roman, help influence the horizontal flow of reading. Ī lot goes into typeface design that we tend not to think about. Maybe there is a slight difference in how they are rendered in PCs or laptops that causes the starch in Computer Modern to be a little softer than the starch in Baskerville. And there can be a number of explanations for that. I would have expected that if you are going to have a winner in Baskerville, you are also going to have a winner in Computer Modern. Computer Modern is a little bit more tuxedo and Baskerville has just a tad more starchiness. It seems to me that Georgia is slightly tuxedo. There are some fonts that are informal - Comic Sans, obviously - and other fonts that are a little bit more tuxedo. The word that comes to my mind is gravitas. Why was Baskerville more believable? Dunning had a theory: The fact that font matters at all is a wonderment." "That advantage may seem small," Dunning told the Times, "but if that was a bump up in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it. īaskerville's weighted advantage wasn't huge - just 1.5 percent. But is there a typeface that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.īelieve it or not, the results of this test even show a disparity between Baskerville and Georgia - two apparently similar serif typefaces. The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes - at least among some people - contempt and summary dismissal. Roughly 40,000 people responded to the quiz, and the results were weighted to evaluate which fonts inspired more confidence in the research, and which fonts made the information appear less believable. When readers came to the site, the story was presented in different typefaces: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, and Trebuchet. In part two, with the help of Cornell psychologist David Dunning, Morris designed a quiz to evaluate whether the Times' readers found the study's conclusions believable. Part one was an ordinary article about a scientific study concerning optimism versus pessimism.
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