Thursday 21 November 2013

Legibility of a Sentence

Legibility of a Sentence

Bellow are manipulations and type edits of a sentence using changes in tracking, point size and horizontal scaling. These simple things used on the sentences increased visual recognition of individual letterforms enough for the sentences to read how a sentence should be read from left to right.

The bellow had a large overall tracking increase with more increase applied too FOX, the point size was reduced on the word quick. There was no need to alter more than one words point size as the first 2 words are serif and sans serif fonts. Or roman and gothic. They are legible letterforms and produce easy to distinguish words to create readable outcomes through easy to distinguish glyphs, the tracking was increased more on FOX due to the original tracking been quite tight creating a visually obvious block of type drawing attention too it. 
As the block or wood typeface was eye catching enough I enhanced this to create a loud first word of the sentence creating an obvious starting point for the eye to read from left to right. Each corresponding font thereafter was decreased in point size creating a taper effect wich worked well. The horizontal scale of THE was reduced to 50% due to the legibility issues of the individual glyphs on the original word due to the glyphs been stretched out. The eye reads this sentence in terms of size order wich is another way forcing the eye to read something in a chronological order.



This one was a difficult one, this script font wasn't very legible terms of individual glyphs as well as readability issues when glyphs combines. So I increased the tracking to help maintain better readability, contrasted the next word QUICK with a small point size nearly half the size as THE. This helped distinguish THE as the first word as the block type is a very visually obvious type. Tracking was gradually increased on BROWN and FOX wich helped the eye distinguish BROWN before FOX. 
The final sentence again benifited from 2 legible fonts to begin the sentence so distinguish the beginning of the sentence wasn't difficult. An increase in tracking on  QUICK helped distract attention from the bold highly visual BROWN word so to strengthen this the point size of BROWN was decreased along. Script word FOX was decreased again in point size to create a taper affect again to lead the eye to the smallest word last.



I am personally not happy with these outcomes as a whole because I feel Readabilty is still an issue due to lack of consistency within point size, tracking etc and confusion caused by various font styles. In my opinion to maintain Readability and legibilty consistency is a key thing to consider.

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