A few posts ago I wrote about a study that the CNIB did with OCAD in Toronto about type and its readability. I was reading a small article in Step Inside Design this past week called Good (Letter) Works. There is a London, England based firm called Fontsmith who created a custom font for Mencap, a British charity for the learning disabled called PS Me.
Here is a bit from the Step Inside Design article:
“We didn’t want to make something patronizing,” says Jason Smith, FontSmith creative director. “We wanted to make something beautiful that was easy to read.” So FontSmith worked with the client… to conduct a series of focus groups. The designers tested existing fonts to see which held the most appeal (Comic Sans?) and explored several in-progress designs, assessing how width, style, letterspacing and other factors affected readability. Ultimately, larger, rounder letters proved more accessible, and Smith hopes the new font, FS Mencap, becomes a standard in uder-friendly fonts, maybe someday rivaling Arial and Helvetica.”
I find this interesting because, like the CNIB study, it finds that a sans serif face is legible and readable. I would challenge any charity to try testing a serif face (ie: Times New Roman) vs a san serif (ie: Arial or Helvetica) in a letter.
If you decide to test it out, please let me know! And if I can convince one of my clients to try it, I’ll report back.
According to many of the studies I’ve seen, typeface legibility is largely the result of familiarity. A face such as Times is usually found to be highly legible because people see it frequently, while a face such as Rockwell is seen only now and then.
Among older direct mail consultants, using Courier or “typewriter” fonts is an unchallenged rule of design. But while I frequently use these faces, I also use others depending on the audience and product. I wouldn’t generally go with courier to a young business audience because it would scream “direct mail” and may interfere with the message. But for a hardcore direct mail responsive audience, a typewriter font will do nicely.
In design, there are no rules, only rules of thumb. It’s up to the designer to intelligently apply these guidelines to achieve the best result.
For the typical charity, I’d think a Courier or standard serif face would be a safe choice. Then again, I’d love to see test results on a highly legible san serif face such as Verdana.