Laura Santelli : Chapter 4+5

Chapter 4 : Legibility

            I believe legibility is the entire point of typography it’s self, and it makes sense to have a variety of type in a world with such a variety of people. We could argue all day about whether serif is easier to read than sans serif, when truth is that decision is personal preference. Personally, I think something like design in general always has a generational tie to why we do things the way we do; while our parents grew up reading Times New Roman in all their books and newspapers, we grew up reading Arial and Helvetica in our text messages and computer screens. Granted, it’s not everywhere and it’s not the only typeface we read, but we’re living in a world that’s changing traditions left and right. While some may be used to or just prefer one type, some are used to the variety of it, and others may not even notice. Not noticing, in the design world, I believe can be a good thing. When someone reads a sentence, the last thing a designer wants is for him or her to question whether that’s an “a” or a “u”, but rather to partially get the message just by glancing at the design it’s self. Most styles have a different interpretation: how italic and bold weights seem to communicate differently than ‘light’ or ‘black’ styles. I believe every style serves a different purpose. However, what’s easiest for the human eye to read is essential to any type design and not only has a lot to do with the letterforms but with the choices of color it’s used against. I also thought cutting a word horizontally and seeing it’s easier to understand the top half rather than the bottom half was very interesting, and our ability to fill in recognizable words (i.e. magazine titles are almost always covered by the model on their front page, but we don’t think twice about what letters are missing). Therefore, legibility is much more complicated than it seems, and takes many angles in order to achieve it as well as convey it in the way desired.