After reading Anna’s wonderful post about letter and line spacing and my recent encounter with 5pt, curly, impossible to read body copy, I decided to dedicate this blog post to type legibility and the end reader.
As a designer I understand the pull of using certain fonts based on looks alone, but unfortunately not all typefaces are created with legibility in mind, nor should they be. Some are created with the intent of being used as larger headlines, for special projects, or to just stand out from the crowd. These sorts of fonts are generally not ideal for body copy. Type faces best suited for legibility are said to have three traits: subtlety, transparency, and restrained design characteristics.
The first, subtlety, is fairly self explanatory. Fonts that are too decorative, light, or bold are hard to read in big blocks of text and at smaller sizes. The second trait, restrained design characteristics, goes along with subtlety, but has a tad more to do with the technical side of designing a font. With this, characters are easy to recognize, the white space within the characters is sufficient, and serifs (if applicable) do not call attention to themselves. The last trait, and the hardest to explain, is transparency. Transparency in type means the font isn’t noticed or the person reads the words rather than seeing the characters.
Another factor of type or copy legibility is size. It’s important to think about who your end user or reader is going to be. If you’re designing a brochure for college design students, they might appreciate that smaller 9pt font. But, if you’re making an informational booklet about say vision problems, it would make sense to use a larger size (no 5pt, curly font, please and thank you). Going along with size is color. In my research on the topic I’ve found that while it’s obvious that black on white is easy to read, white on black and lighter grays are not as much. When designing for the elderly or people with vision problems, reversed type and lighter colors are hard to read. So while it may look better, it’s always a good idea to know your demographic and design accordingly.
So what is the best size, color, and type face you can use for legibility in your body copy? Different people will tell you different things. But one thing is for sure, a curly font at a 5pt size is definitely not it.
If you’d like to read a more in-depth (and better written) article about type legibility and the reader, here’s a fantastic article from Linotype.
