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