About Legibility

In a survey made by Clark University in 1911 to ascertain “the relative legibility of different faces of printing types,” twenty-six faces of widely dissimilar designs were studied, among which were Caslon, Century, Cheltenham, and News Gothic. “Ye gods! and has it come to this?” was the reaction of F W. Goudy, the prolific type designer, to the results of the survey, which judged News Gothic to be “the nearest approximation of an ideal face.”1 This tidbit appeared in Mr. Goudy’s Typologia, published in 1940 by the University of California Press. Prejudice is not the only virtue of this book. In fact, I found it utterly absorbing and hope that the reader’s curiosity is sufficiently aroused to look it up.

1. Typologia, p. 142.

Equally revealing, although sprinkled here and there with a number of miscellaneous ideas with which it is difficult to agree, is Stanley Morisons little book First Principles of Typography (Macmillan, 1936). In referring to the design of the title page, Morison dogmatically states: ‘As lower case is a necessary evil, which we would do well to subordinate since we cannot suppress, it should be avoided when it is at its least rational and least attractive—in larger sizes.” And the discriminating reader will note both the sense and nonsense of the following: “The main line of a title should be set in capitals and, like all capitals, should be spaced.” The first part of this statement is, of course, clearly controversial; the italicized part is true most of the time, but not all of the time.

2. First Principles, p. 19.

Both books, however, are full of scholarly, useful, and occasionally amusing information. I say useful because they spell out those aspects of type design and typography that have little to do with trendiness and that instead deal with those unchanging, timeless qualities of good design.

Before leaving this very brief reference to legibility, it is well to remember that behavior patterns, habit, and familiarity with a particular typeface seriously influence the judgment of the designer and his audience in matters of style, type selection, and readability. Both Messrs. Goudy and Morison have demonstrated that typographic objectivity is next to impossible. It is clear that taste, prejudice, trends, popularity polls, and the foibles of the marketplace play some sort of role in affecting one’s typographic judgment.