Reading about Clearview and traffic signs reminds me of the efforts of designers Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir. They standardised fonts and sign designs for the UK in the late 50s just as the rollout of motorways was being planned.
They came up with two fonts expressly for ease of readability that stand the test of time remarkably well.
The UK government's Traffic Sign Manual[0], and in particular Chapter 7 (The Design of Traffic Signs)[1] are bizarrely interesting reads. Maybe that says something more about me than the documents though...
For large, easily readable lettering - subway stations, highway signs, billboards etc. - I've found the best combination of readability and pleasantness is Avenir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenir_(typeface)
What about all the alphabets, abjads, etc. that don't have separate majuscule and minuscule letters? Are people in China or India or Israel dropping dead because they can't pick out important information fast enough from blocks of text?
The difference is that most people are not used to reading all caps, whereas for example people in China use blocks of characters all the time and can parse them quickly. In addition, now you can just skim the report quickly to see if there is anything BIG coming.
The ability to more quickly recognise shapes when they are visually distinct, compared to when they are visually similar, is not a cultural or habitual thing. I'm sure a Chinese person can read Chinese faster than I can, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't benefit from more visually distinct characters.
They do benefit from visually distinct characters. They've been optimized for thousands of years and the ones that were hard to recognize morphed or were dropped. That's why recognizing radicals is just a clue rather than a rigid system (similar to how English spelling works).
In the case of brahmic scripts (disclaimer: I only learned the Marathi alphabet as a child) you don't "read" the characters any more than you do in English, but rather look at the word shapes.
There is continual evolution: in high school we studied Greek with word spacing just like modern English; I was shocked at hard it was to read original inscriptions without word spacing (and some old texts that were boustrophedon). I also thought it would be really hard to read German highway signs, but after a while (less than a year) I started to automatically break the compounds into meaningful chunks while zooming down the road.
We have an end result of a process of: consistent writing direction > spacing > punctuation > increased discrimination of letterforms (introduction of the minuscule) > regularization of spelling
Typography matters in all these languages. It's not just letterforms: word and sentence spacing varies among English, French and Russian, for instance.
Reading really exploits some deep structures in the brain. Articles like these, to me, implicitly say more about neurology than culture.
In my opinion, this is actually one of the benefits of simplified characters as compared to traditional. They have much more varied shapes and as such are easier to tell apart at a glance: compare characters like:
双飞机会带着几个人
to:
雙飛機會帶著幾個人
Both are actually the same set of characters, but the first one seems much easier to distinguish at a glance. I'd suspect this would
Be true even for native speakers/readers, though I've never seen a study on it.
This notion of glance time (in the video) reminds me of the hidden layers in a neural network. When you see visualizations of these hidden layers (check out various deep learning videos...), it's indeed a model for glances at different layers of abstractions / time intervals.
> Look familiar? Blame typewriters and stubborn lawyers
(Under an excerpt from a legal disclaimer.) I think legal disclaimers are written in all caps exactly to make understanding more difficult, while still conveying the 'I told you' feeling.
No, they are written in all caps, because lawyers think that it is a necessary component of the "conspicuous" requirement of the Uniform Commercial Code, and nobody feels strongly enough about it to really test it in court and risk damaging oneself.
Contrary to popular belief, companies do not want people to misuse their products or break their license agreement simply because they didn't understand the implications of it.
A happy customer is a returning customer.
A customer accidentally breaking an agreement is not a happy customer.
There are many, many industries (not just lawyers) that decided touch typing with intermittent shift pressing was hard and found it much easier to just type everything ever in all caps for all eternity. That still comes up anytime you mention removing the caps lock key from keyboards: all the people that do a lot of typing and hate the shift key.
Ask someone that works health care records about it sometime.
> When specifying font height, or accessing graphs to determine the size of a lower-case character, the distinction between “x” height and overall size should be made.
> As a general recommendation, the “x” height of a font used for important flight-deck documentation should not be below 0.10 inch.
> The recommended height-to-width ratio of a font that is viewed in front of the observer is 5:3.
> The vertical spacing between lines should not be smaller than 25–33% of the overall size of the font.
> The horizontal spacing between characters should be 25% of the overall size and not less than one stroke width.
Those seem like very reasonable points. Are you confused by the terminology? If so:
- "x" height refers to the height of the mean line of lowercase letters, e.g. the lowercase letter "x". Ascenders (on letters like l, t, k) will exceed this height.
- height-to-width: seems straightforward: wider fonts may often look more modern (see e.g. the Eurostile vs. Frutiger comparison in the article), but are harder to read.
- spacing: allow for enough whitespace vertically and horizontally. This, again, improves legibility compared to condensed fonts.
This all checks out to me. They are talking about flight deck documentation, which means, the guidebook type can be small but not too small to read due to movement and perhaps if the reader is in an emotional state. You can imagine reading instructions on Apollo 13 after the increase in Carbon Dioxide just to go through a power down sequence checklist.
Floating around, emotional state, perhaps some brain dysfunction due to air composition and lack of sleep. You don't want the type too small.
The article talks about how Terms and Conditions are in all-caps due to "legal traditions". Is the all-caps a legal requirements? Otherwise, I am going to go with the assumption that Apple and other companies put their Terms and Conditions in all-caps precisely because it makes them hard to read.
Apple have enough experience in typography and certainly haven't bowed to tradition in that arena. There is no reason they would suddenly start doing it for T&C unless it suited them.
>> Sans-serif fonts are usually more legible than fonts with serifs.
>>Avoid using dot matrix print for critical flight-deck documentation.
The serifs on fonts make it easier to distinguish letters and ligatures. It is the reason nearly every textbook and journal article is written in serif fonts.
Because serif fonts dominate in print, you eventually train mostly on this font and therefore you can read text in a serif font faster than sans-serif.
On a dot-matrix printer (see Nasa guidelines) and low resolution monitors, sans-serif is a better choice. But that era has ended.
Arguably Caps letters are more visually distinct. From a distance lower case "e", "a", "o" can be a lot more difficult to tell apart then "E", "A" and "O". Not to mention of course the classic problem of mix case "I", "l", "1"
Of course, depending on font we have issues with all caps as well, especially when mixed with numbers: "Z" and "2", "O" and "0", "Q" and "O" etc.
Yeah thing is, with readability, you also have to consider expectation, as in you're reading efficiency includes the ability to expect what's coming too. I'm not sure all caps improves that or could hinder it. But one way that I'm thinking is this, how the jumbled inner letters can still be read. I'd be interested in a test with people and this using all caps vs normal sentence case. http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/
As an example, it is dead easy to spot common speed limit signs, mainly because there are so few speed limits. Even when my sight was failing, I could make out the speed limits at a distance with little trouble. Not because of some magic of the text, but simply from familiarity.
So, in an age where most of what we read is mixed case, it makes intuitive sense that we would be better at reading it. I fully realize intuitive sense doesn't translate to an explanation and is why I'm asking the question.
Precisely this. Because "readability" isn't "what is this letter": humans interpolate based on context. It doesn't matter whether it's:
The Quick Brown Dog Jumped Over The Lazy Fox
-or-
Tha Quiek Brawn Deg Junped Ovar The Lasy Pox
... if you're expecting a certain phase, your brain can error-correct quite well.
Obviously this might not work where letters are important (say a 24-character software license key), but where words or prose is concerned, what matters is the whole.
They came up with two fonts expressly for ease of readability that stand the test of time remarkably well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_%28typeface%29 and Motorway (font).
They also standardised many of the pictograms for use on warnings, colour schemes and iconography. They also did the rail and airport alphabets.
http://designmuseum.org/designers/jock-kinneir-and-margaret-...