Now why is any of this interesting? 1
Why do we care about these families and subfamilies? 2
Well some of it is to do with styling and making it look good. 3
You know, for example, if you're creating something that is meant to be conservative, you don't want to 4
use something like a modern typeface. 5
So having that knowledge is important but more importantly it's about readability. 6
So there was a study conducted by MIT a few years back where they looked at the difference between a 7
car dashboard that was created in a Grotesque typeface versus a car dashboard that had a Humanist typeface. 8
And then they looked at how long the drivers needed to look at that dashboard at any given time. And 9
they found an 11% reduction in the amount of time that the drive is needed to look down at that 10
dashboard in order to gauge the information they needed 11
when they used a Humanist instead of a Grotesque. 12
And when those times are converted into distance say on a standard motorway or highway and it was actually 13
equivalent to about 40 feet in difference. 14
So if you think about the driver who needs to look down at that dashboard while they were traveling 15
40 feet longer than the driver who had a Humanist dashboard, then that could actually be the difference 16
between life and death of a pedestrian. 17
So even though we think that you know design is very much about form, at heart, it's actually all about 18
function and designs with only form and no function will never ever work well. 19
So always keep that in mind. 20
Now in this study, they tested the difference between a Grotesque typeface which you can see up here 21
versus a Humanist typeface down here. And we're going to talk about some of the things that make a particular 22
typeface more readable than the other. 23
So first you can see that the Humanist typeface has more open shapes. So if you look at the 'C' the size 24
of the opening is slightly larger than the 'C' in the Grotesque typeface. 25
Also if you look at the inter-character spacing in the Grotesque typeface there's less distance between 26
each of the letters than the Humanist typeface 27
also making it slightly harder to read. And then we look at how ambiguous the letters are from each other. 28
So the 'g' and the nine in the Grotesque look pretty similar. 29
They're all very square. 30
Whereas in the Humanist font you can clearly differentiate the 'g' and the nine 31
so there's less confusion in the brain and hence leading to increased readability. 32
And finally when you're selecting a readable typeface, you want to look for varying proportions, so certain 33
letters having large width, certain letters having a narrow width. These are a few things that determine 34
readability and determine when we should pick each typeface.