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.
