Just Your Type

Want to make a graphic designer salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs? Say the word “typography.”

We’d be eating pizza around a conference room table at my old company when someone would bring up the subject and the graphic designers would get all slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Sometimes, I’d say the magic word myself just to see a string of mozzarella glisten from their lower lips. Ask them what was so enchanting about a group of glyphs and the best they could muster was some mumbo-jumbo that sounded more like a mysterious incantation than an enlightening explanation.

It was around this time that I noticed how publishers were giving readers a brief history of the typeface* used in the book they just polished off. These usually involve the unpronounceable name of the font’s 15th century creator and adjectives such as “bold,” “clean” and, my favorite, “readable.”

Well, shouldn’t all fonts be “readable”? Of course, but they also need to be “legible.” Is there a difference? As it turns out (and much to my surprise) yeah! Legibility and readability are two different, yet connected, optical animals. Let’s boil ‘em down and see why:

Legibility is the province of the typeface designer, who’s charged with creating a font where each character is distinct and recognizable. Think of them as the architects of the alphabet. One of the earliest, most-well known typeface designers is the 16th century Parisian Claude Garamond, whose Roman types are still admired and used today for such essential elements as the small bowl of the “a” and the small eye of the “e.”

Readability is the domain of the typographer, who assists readers in navigating around a page without causing the eye any sudden stops, starts or collisions. By selecting the right font and type size for the job, not to mention using the correct spacing between letters, words and lines, the typographer acts as the text’s traffic cop. If the columns of a magazine, newspaper or the page of a book can be read for long minutes with optimal comfort, then the typographer has safely directed your peepers through a busy information intersection.

If that isn’t clear (and I hope it’s a sight better than the well-meaning yet undecipherable gibberish I’d get from the designers), here’s the bare bones after the boilin’: “Legibility” is about perception; “readability” is about comprehension. If letters are seen clearly, they can be understood absolutely.

Got it? Good. Now go track down a designer and break it down for them.

* This blog uses Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype Typography. A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.