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TYPOGRAPHY
New Legibility Designs
Old tricks, new technology
The classic typefaces from Linotype (now Monotype) known as the Legibility Group are the earliest designs specifically created to be highly legible in a less-than-ideal reading environment. Designed in the 1920s, the goal was to improve the reading experience in newspapers of the day. Decades later, typefaces like ITC Charter and the extended ITC Officina family were designed for maximum legibility when imaged by low- resolution printers. In the mid-1990s, Tahoma and Verdana were created to ensure easy reading on computer screens.
Ever since Apple put fonts into a mobile phone in 2007, designers have been using typefaces in everything from wearables to the Internet of Things. Fonts have found their way into the interiors of automobiles, handheld diagnostic and biometric devices, and even the interfaces of white goods, like refrigerators and washing machines. The problem is that many of the usual typographic candidates don’t perform well in these small—and often legibility-demanding— environments. They were created for print, not screen imaging.
Old faces, new challenges
If you’re strictly a print designer, you might not care. But if you take on just about any kind of digital project, textual legibility can be a very real issue. Dr. Nadine Chahine, type director and legibility expert at Monotype UK, sums up the situation: “We are living in
a world where a significant portion of our time is spent looking at computer screens, handheld devices and wearables. Good use of typography provides clear and effective communication, which is desperately needed in a world where we are constantly being bombarded with information.”
Type designers are once again addressing the legibility problem by optimizing classic typefaces specifically for interactive design and creating new designs especially for small screens. These device-
optimized fonts go by various names and are available from large foundries as well as boutique font providers. The most prominent are the Font Bureau’s Reading Edge fonts, Hoefler & Co.’s Screen- Smart designs and Monotype’s eText typefaces. On the goal of legibility, David Berlow, president of the Font Bureau, says, “The idea is to make fonts that are as readable as Verdana and remain intact down to nine pixels per em-square without losing the stylistic distinction of the design.” And although the foundries share this common objective, each has attacked the problem in a different way.
Answers from the past
In 2002, the Font Bureau’s long association with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida, enabled it to put these concepts to work in a new suite of newspaper “readability” designs. And now the foundry is doing it again with its Reading Edge fonts, looking to Linotype’s original legibility designs to accomplish its goal. “What the old [designers] did to make type for use at small sizes has been well researched and documented,” Berlow continues. “Designers of metal typefaces increased the space above the baseline and enlarged lowercase x-heights. They made the glyphs proportionally wider. They opened up apertures, added weight slightly and dug ink traps into the acute angles of glyphs.”
Hoefler & Co. also relied heavily on generally accepted legibility design principles, incorporating them into the fonts in real time from the get-go. According to the company’s website, “ScreenSmart fonts aren’t just designed for the browser, they’re designed in the browser. To create them, we first built our own suite of font development tools directly on top of the WebKit layout engine so that our designers could create fonts in the same environment in which people would read them.”
Monotype based its research for its eText fonts on historic documentation as well, but backed it up with extensive clinical
Allan Haley
26 Advertising Annual 2016