The wonder of fonts

Font has become more interesting to me since taking this class, and I’ve been taking more time to notice its variations. A few months ago my Kindle suggested I change the default font of my books to Bookerly. The Kindle stated it causes less eye strain or fatigue than other fonts. I have a hard time seeing the difference between this and some of the other fonts available on the Kindle, so it is interesting to me that people have taken the time to not only develop the Bookerly font, but also apparently to study how it affects the reader compared to other fonts.

It’s been a few years since I've written a paper, but I do remember that the font was always Arial or New Times Roman. This is what Arial looks like, and this is Times New Roman. They are so different that I don't understand why they were both considered acceptable default fonts. Perhaps this was just the preferences of various teachers I had. Page 26 of White Space is Not Your Enemy reports that Times New Roman and Helvetica are today's standards. Helvetica is very similar to Arial, so perhaps the standard is to have a default saref and default sans saref font.

The thing that stood out to me the most on the Poster Pointers PowerPoint is that subheadings should be sans serif while the body should be in a serif font.

 

Sans serif subheading

with serif body

Serif subheading

with sans sarif body

Sans serif subheading

with sans serif body

Serif subheading

with serif body


In the samples above it is easy to see why the subheadings would be sans serif while the body would be serif. It helps to create contrast between the body and subheading, and serif fonts cause less eye strain, so it makes sense that the bulk of the text would be serif.

Lastly, while reviewing this blog post it is easy to see why on page 34 our text lists using too many fonts as a layout sin, but I will leave it as is because in this instance I think showing the differences is important.