You make font choices every day. You pick type designs each time you use a word processor, read an e-book, send an email, prepare a presentation, craft a wedding invite and make an Instagram story.
It might seem like just a question of style, but research reveals fonts can dramatically shape what you communicate and how you read.
Beatrice Warde. They also embody style, emotion and authority. Like a villain’s costume in a movie, they quietly tell part of the story.”>Fonts are “the clothes that words wear,” said early 20th-century editor Beatrice Warde. They also embody style, emotion and authority. Like a villain’s costume in a movie, they quietly tell part of the story.
“The signals that we can send are often quite small, like the symmetry of round shapes in the letter B,” says Tobias Frere-Jones, a designer whose work includes the font used by the 2008 Obama campaign. “But they get their power by being repeated over and over again.”
Like clothes, fonts are also functional choices. Just as you wouldn’t wear a bathing suit in a snowstorm, fonts have to fit the technology delivering the words (screen or paper), the space they inhabit (phone alert, page or billboard) and the person doing the reading.
large recent study.”>Picking the right font can increase your reading speed on a screen by 35 percent, according to a large recent study.
We know fonts matter, yet research shows no one font works best for everyone. See for yourself: This story includes three mini-experiments that might help you see how you respond to different fonts — and perhaps pick ones that are better for you.
Find each word in the ingredient lists below
Select the word avobenzone
titanium dioxide,zinc oxide,oxybenzone,octinoxate,octisalate,octocrylene,homosalate,avobenzone,mexoryl SX,aminobenzoic acid,trolamine salicylate
Select the word panthenol
cetyl alcohol,(DMDM) hydantoin,stearic acid,sorbic acid,potassium sorbate,carnauba wax,panthenol,xanthan gum,dehydroacetic acid,benzyl alcohol,methylisothiazolinone
Select the word disodium
sodium lauryl sulfoacetate (SLSA),decyl glucoside,hexachlorophene,cyclomethicone,dimethicone,cyclopentasiloxane,sodium lauroyl methyl isethionate,disodium,histidine,niacin,sodium cocoyl glutamate
Which did you find the easiest to scan?
Zoya Bylinskii, a research scientist at tech company Adobe.”>What’s going on? Fonts have subtle elements that impact how you perceive them. In that sense, fonts are like eyeglasses. “They’re the lens through which you perceive written text,” says Zoya Bylinskii, a research scientist at tech company Adobe.
Most commonly used fonts can be broken into two types: serifs and san-serifs.
Serif fonts, like Times New Roman and Garamond, have decorative “wings” and “feet” on letters — called serifs — that make the form more distinctive. These are considered best for longer text passages.
Sans serif fonts, like Arial and Helvetica, are defined by what they don’t have: those “wings” and “feet.” They have cleaner lines and are considered best for titles and shorter text.
Other types include display and cursive-like script fonts.
But even within these groups, there’s a world of variation that impacts how we perceive words. The most important characteristics bundled into a font include:
Proportion: Letters become harder to parse when they start to resemble each other too much, such as when they’re very condensed.
Contrast: the difference between the thinnest and thickest part of each letter. If the contrast is too high, parts of the letters might fade away and become a strain on your eyes.
Letter spacing, also known as ‘tracking’: Crowd more letters into a space and your ability to read it suffers.
A bad font choice can confuse you about which letters are which. It can also interfere with your ability to quickly recognize the familiar overall shape of a word.
Select the smallest line you can read across different fonts to see which is most legible
36pxFont legibility is18pxa measure of how12pxclear the characters8pxand glyphs of a particular6pxtypeface are at different sizes4pxfrom small to large, on screens or paper.
Each font has a different X height — literally the height of a lowercase letter x compared to a capital one — that can make words easier or harder to read.
When it comes to glancing at small text, like on a phone alert, X height is a big factor in font readability. Researchers studying drug labels have found that X height was much more important than overall type size in how readable a label was.
The device you’re reading on can also make a huge difference: The latest high-resolution screens (particularly on phones) make it possible to use fonts with more contrast at smaller sizes. (At the same time, some fonts that were developed for older, low-resolution screens look a bit gross on our modern ones.)
So what about when you’re reading whole paragraphs of text, like in this story?
Tap the start and finish buttons to time your reading comprehension.
Your reading time: 0s
Last year, researchers at Adobe published a large study of how people experience fonts fo
