Graphic designer and Ph.D Scholar at the Royal College of Arts Sofie Beier has set out to discover what makes a typeface legible. Her goal is to develop new typefaces with high legibility as well as a high aesthetic value. She shared her ideas with a full crowd at an evening event that also featured seven German typeface artists.

By Maj Carboni, journalist

“Readers read best what they read most.” This quote is projected on the white wall at the graphic design firm Pleks in Copenhagen, where Ph.D. Scholar Sofie Beier from the Royal College of Art in London is about to give a presentation on the relationship between legibility and type design. The room is so full that people have to be seated on folding chairs, in window sills and on the floor. A surprisingly large crowd, says the founder of Pleks, Mads Quistgaard, who welcomes the audience to what he calls a “nerd event”.

The quote on the wall is exactly what Sofie Beier wanted to challenge with her research, she says in her introduction.

With her background as a graphic designer, Ph.D. Scholar Sofie Beier has what she calls a “fascination with typography”. Her research offers specific suggestions as to why some typefaces are more legible than others. Here, however, she has played with illegibility – letters that do not relate to any existing alphabet. Photo: Sofie Beier

“It’s a widespread theory among designers and researchers that people read more efficiently when they read a typeface that they’re used to reading. Taken to the extreme, this would mean that we should limit the existing number of typefaces to a very small number,” she says.

However, with her background as a graphic designer, Sofie Beier finds this a rather dull and unfortunate solution. With her research project, she aims to develop new typefaces that are both graphically interesting and easy to read.

Design Offered a New Approach
As a graphic designer, Sofie Beier differs from other researchers who have studied type design in the past. The vast majority of typeface studies have been carried out by cognitive psychologists wanting to ascertain which of a number of existing typefaces was the easiest to read. Sofie Beier instead looked at why some typefaces are easier to read than others.

By studying the basic letter forms, she identifies specific characteristics in the individual letters that can be used in the design of new typefaces. Sofie Beier presents a range of letters that she has designed and tested with 41 test subjects of different nationalities. She did this partly by letting the subjects look at the letters very briefly and partly by letting them to move closer and closer to the letter ‘d’ until they recognised it. In the existing research, ‘d’ is defined as the easiest letter to recognise. Next, Sofie let the test subjects look at additional letters, while she noted which letters were confused with others.

Through this approach she discovered, for example, that a lower-case, so-called one-storey ‘a’ and a closed-form ‘e’ are both easily confused with an ‘o’. However, ‘a’ and ‘s’ are easier to recognise if they have an unconventional design where part of the letter stretches below or above the x-height, which in typographic terminology refers to the two lines that a lower-case ‘x’ stays within. Sofie Beier had some of her theses confirmed, but there were also surprising findings. For example, she thought that an open ‘s’ would be easier to recognise than a closed one, but she found the reverse to be the case.

Is It Possible to Design the Perfect Typeface?
On the basis of her research findings, Sofie Beier has designed three new typefaces that incorporate the letter characteristics that the test subjects found most legible.
“Does that mean that it’s possible to design a typeface that’s universally superior in terms of legibility?” was one of the questions from the audience.

Sofie Beier studies the legibility of typefaces. One of her findings is that a closed ‘e’, which is the last in this row of four, is often confused with an ‘o’. The two examples of an open ‘e’ in the middle, with the small inside shape, were instead easily confused with a ‘c’. Examples from the typeface Ovink, which was developed by Sofie Beier.

“No, I don’t believe in that. Whether a particular typeface is perfect relies very much on the situation. For example, if a typeface is to be used for road signs, in principle it should be tested on roads under all sorts of weather conditions and with different types of people,” Sofie Beier replied.

Thus, the findings of her own study are only a guideline, she explains. It would also be pertinent to test the individual letters in connection with other letters. A particular type of ‘c’ placed just before a particular type of ‘l’ might be confused with a ‘d’, depending on the design. The problem is that there are so many combinations of letters, situations and other factors, such as the spacing of lines, that are difficult to single out in a test situation.
“The methods we use in research are really only applied for the want of better alternatives,” says Sofie Beier.

Readers Pick up New Type Designs Quickly
The next step for Sofie Beier is to determine how quickly a reader gets used to a new typeface. She intends to do this by studying the effect on a person’s reading rate when they’re asked to read a new typeface for a longer period of time. Her hypothesis is that a reader quickly becomes familiarised enough with a new typeface that their reading rate increases.

The last ‘a’ in this row is a so-called one-storey ‘a’, which in Sofie Beier’s test was easily confused with an ‘o’. However, when an ‘a’ transcends above the x-height, as in the third example here, it is easier to read. Examples from the typeface Ovink, which was developed by Sofie Beier.

This was confirmed by a member of the audience who did a similar study. Here, the letter ‘d’ was consistently replaced by a square, which the readers soon got used to.

Thus, Sofie Beier’s ongoing research will contribute to more general insights into what happens when someone is introduced to a new type design. This may be a crucial factor in the design of new typefaces.
“If familiarity with a typeface proves to be very important, we probably need to be more conservative with regard to introducing new type designs. If instead it doesn’t prove very influential, that means that we can be far more aggressive with regard to designing new high-legibility typefaces,” she says.

Magazine Dedicated to Typefaces
After a lively debate with the audience about type design research, which continued well into the break, it was time to hear about a more alternative approach to type design. A group of seven German artists talked about the production of their art magazine, which changes name with each new issue, based on the typeface used throughout that issue.

Sofie Beier thought that an open ‘s’ (the first in this row) was easier to recognise than a closed one (the middle ‘s’), but her actual finding was the opposite. To make it even easier to recognise, the type designer should let the ‘s’ descend below the line of writing, as in the last example here. Examples from the typeface Ovink, which was developed by Sofie Beier.

Thus, they have put out magazines entitled, e.g., Helvetica, Times, Tiffany and Memphis. Some of the typefaces are well-known, while others have been designed by young, relatively unknown typeface-designers. The artists who contribute to the magazine may choose to draw inspiration from the appearance or history of the given typeface. When a new issue comes out, the group throws a release party with a theme based on the typeface. When the magazine was named after the typeface Techno, for example, the release event was a techno party.
“We have chosen to dedicate each issue of our magazine to a particular type design to acknowledge that each typeface has its own unique appearance, history and content,” said one of the seven young artists. The upcoming issue of the magazine will be named after a typeface custom-designed for them by Pleks.

Sofie Beier’s presentation was part of a week-long workshop from 26 March through 2 April 2008 on the relationship between legibility and type design. It was organised by ‘Danish Faces’ (Forum for type design) and the design department of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture (study department 11).  You can read more about Sofie Beier’s research at www.sofiebeier.dk You can see the covers of the German art magazine at www.theselection.net/zeitschrift

 

 

Mind Design #8, 2008