| In this blog, in my published book and in my forthcoming book as noted below, I discuss the usage of fonts very thoroughly. I disagree with some of the comments in the article below as this blog and my email are both written with Arial as the font of choice but the comment of the other fonts are worth noting. | ||||||
| ==================================================================== Good Netiquette to all! ===================================================================== |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw&__scoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
Your E-mail Font Is Ruining Your Life
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Your E-mail Font Is Ruining Your Life
designers ditch Helvetica and Arial (Helvetica's 'ugly bastard son'). You should, too.
designers ditch Helvetica and Arial (Helvetica's 'ugly bastard son'). You should, too.
Bloomberg.com July 27, 2015 — 2:10
PM EDT
Well, maybe not your life. But
certainly your reputation with people of good taste.
Helvetica, the hip font of choice
for brands and typeface nerds, is the default font setting for Apple
Mail. Gmail defaults to Arial, a font one designer called Helvetica's
"ugly bastard son." If the browser doesn't support Arial, Gmail will
use Helvetica instead.
While Helvetica is beloved by design
nerds for its neutrality, its uniformity and lack of consistent spacing make
it hard to read in large chunks of text. "The letters are too close
together," said Nadine Chahine, a type designer at Monotype. "That
makes it too tight."
Arial, like Helvetica, has what font
designers call "ambiguous" letter shapes that make it difficult to
parse lots of words in a row. "If you imagine b, d, p, and q, those
are letter forms that all the children always mess up. They are mirror forms of
one another," font designer Bruno Maag said. "That feature is
emphasized in a font like Arial, where the shapes are literally mirror
forms."
See how the b and d mirror
each other below, and how the space between the h and the e in
Helvetica is slightly larger than it is between the t and the i? These
may seem like nuances here, but both make the words harder to read when they're
packed in great swatches of text and you're reading a lot of e-mail.
And you are. Working Americans spend almost a third of the workweek checking and reading
e-mail. In a 40-hour week, that's over 11 hours a week reading online
communications in fonts that aren't doing our eyes any favors.
E-mail "clients" — the
programs you use to check your e-mail, like Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook
— tend to favor sans serif fonts, in which the letters don't have end
strokes, like Helvetica, Arial, and Microsoft Outlook's default Calibri.
(Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are the three most popular desktop email
clients, a study of over 1 billion emails found.)
"It used to be, until
relatively recently, that most readers in a corporate environment would not
have very high-resolution screens," typographer Gerry Leonidas said.
Simpler fonts, without all the details and design elements that come with
serifs, would render cleaner on those lower-resolution screens. But
"in the recent four or five years, we have significantly higher resolution
to get good spacing, clean separation, so you don't get grayscaling of
characters," Leonidas said. So e-mail clients no longer have to use
sans serif fonts.
Under the weight of decades of
history, though, they often default to them — tragically, in Maag's
view.
"The argument that a serif font
is too fussy doesn't cut it anymore," he said. "You want a font where
the letter forms are not ambiguous." Serif fonts, because of the
additional stroke added to the ends of each character, tend to have that
quality. See how the serifs in Georgia, below, give each letter its own
character.
The key to a good font is
legibility, a combination of speed, comprehension, comfort, and a kind of
emotional acceptance of the font. The way the letters are shaped, the spaces
between them, and the spaces within the letters themselves all determine how
easy something is to read.
"When we read, we don't read
letter by letter," Jose Scaglione, who designed Literata,
the custom font for Google Play books, said. "We recognize a group of
letters and recognize the interaction that exists between black and the
white."
Bookerly, the new font designed by Maag for the Kindle, is a
serif font, which many believe is better for reading long blocks of text,
although there is much debate and conflicting research about its merits over its sans
counterpart. "Each character shape is very unique," Maag said of
Bookerly. "It creates a harmonious, varied word shape." According to
internal tests done by Amazon, Bookerly reads 2 percent better than previous fonts on speed, comprehension, and
emotional acceptance, Maag said.
Literata was designed with the same
principles in mind. The designers elongated the ascenders and
descenders — the top of the d and the bottom of
the p, for example — to improve recognition of word shape.
They also made the characters a bit wider.
Although the daily grind often
requires sifting through a novel's worth of e-mail, we interact with
digital communication in a different way than we do books, and
ideally fonts should reflect those varied experiences. Bookerly was
designed for sustained reading of a single document and takes fatigue into
account. For e-mails, we generally scan a couple of paragraphs. Having
letters with wide, consistent spacing is most important for quick reading, the
designers we interviewed said. A serif font will also make it easier to
distinguish between letters.
Even today, users don't have to
subject their eyes to Helvetica's or Arial's blunted letter
shapes. Gmail's preferences offer six additional fonts and
customization of the width of the letters. Apple Mail has even more font
options.
In fact, anyone who knows anything
about fonts does change the settings. For his own e-mail experience, Maag likes
Verdana (sans serif) or Georgia (serif), which both have more "open"
shapes than Helvetica and Arial. Verdana, as you can see below, has more, and
more even, spacing between letters. Scaglione also likes Georgia. Chahine
has an affinity for Calibri and Verdana. Leonidas used to use Verdana but
upgraded to HD screens and now uses a font called Input.
Maybe it's time for e-mail
clients to change the default settings. "I do believe that
organizations can certainly improve lives by specifying better fonts,
which of course has an effect on how you read your e-mail," Maag said.
Even better, what about giving the
people a Bookerly for e-mail? "In theory, yes. A font for reading
e-mails could be possible," says Scaglione. Dare to dream.
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