Legibility & Readability session

Legibility & Readabilty session 

Todays session was intense with the information we received but will be invaluable in all influences of my design principles and practices. We learned about factors of Legibility and Readability. 

Readability: Is how easy a text can be read.

Legibility: How well glyphs can be distinguished determines good legibility. 

Factors that affect Legibility & readability are the following:

Kerning: Too close kerning creates hard to distinguish glyphs. Kerning should be left alone generally in body text as the spacial framework has already been laid out by the typeface designer. Kerning can be effective with pairs of glyphs at large scale were small changes can make a big visual difference. 

Legibility of individual glyphs will help maintain a readable set of letterforms. The negative space within glyphs, the counters help distinguish individual glyphs. 

Maintaining good readability means your eye can flow across the line of type easy, so line length needs to be took into consideration.

Tracking: Too much tracking can make the word un recognizable and fade away, too close tracking can create a cluttered outcome and hard to distinguish individual glyphs. When used correctly it can have a robust effect in changing typographic dynamics and visuals. 

Justification: How the type is justified helps create more readable outcomes, align left is good for large body texts due to the eyes natural nature to read from left to right creating a good flow of movement through reading.

Leading: This creates space between each line of type, it can be adjusted to create easier to distinguish words and allow the eye to move across the page well. By increasing leading or decreasing to tighten words together words can feel cluttered or even overlap anatomical elements like descenders and ascenders into the baselines of other words. Too much leading can break off the flow of reading the lines of words. Increased leading is readable at a distance but less unclose. 

Case format: Uppercase is good for distance reading for things like headers, lowercase is easy on the eye and good for body text. 

Anatomy: Contrast within bold elements and light elements can hinder legibility e.g. lightweight stems contrasting with very bold bowls.

Line length: Line length can effect how well the eye flows, too short and the eye breaks off too often causing confusion, too long and reading will become tiresome. 

Weight: Bold typefaces are high impact and good for headers like newspapers, in body text they become too hard to distinguish individual glyphs. No more than 8 words is said to be a limit for headers.

Type origin: Script fonts are hard to read in body text best suited for decorative purposes, with roman and gothic fonts in regular weights maintaining good readability. 

Using our discussed knowledge to determine if text is legible we ordered our typefaces into order of most legible to least. 

Below is the most readable. A gothic face. 

Our groups most readable and un readable texts bellow. A roman typeface and a stretched out block typeface, the stretched elements created bad legibility and made it hard to distinguish individual glyphs and the too close leading created one solid block of type to the cap height been too close to the baseline of the above word. This also applies to an x height that nears the cap height in a combination of uppercase and lowercase glyphs. 

Everyone else's most readable and least readable. 

Using my new found typographic knowledge on readability and legibility we cut up out texts to create 4 sentences with 1 of each fonts. 4 different fonts for the 4 words, we are required to make the sentence into an easy to read, readable sentence with the eye distinguishing "the" as the most obvious word following onto "quick" etc etc. for example. Use the template of words shown below in a digital outcome.

THE QUICK BROWN FOX