It's not just 'more space' between letters in Courier, it's a monospaced font, meaning every letter and space is the same width on every character. Very handy for coding!
And some of us grew up on typewriters. Courier is more readable to me than Lucida Console, but I don't trust Courier to be absolutely monospaced. Should I learn to trust?
@@JeffKaylin-ft5cx At least in Notepad++, I never encountered a character that didn't fit the grid that monospace makes. Everything always lines up nice.
Except that 1's (one) and l's (lower case 'L'), and 0's (zero) and 'O' (uppercase 'o') are often too similar, and at some point-sizes, even indistinguishable. For coding, it's better to use a monospace font (like Consolas) that was designed specifically to avoid those confusing conditions.
As a programmer, Courier is the bomb. Some characters (like l and I, or O and 0) look VERY similar in certain fonts. Courier and other Serif fonts make these letters easier to tell apart, which is very important when debugging code. Courier is even fixed-width so it helps with eyeballing indentation and line length.
There are more modern monospaced fonts, such as Lucida Console, Consolas, and Cascadia Code. I'll not express my preferences between them, but they're definitely geared towards programmers.
You may want to check out Akkurat-Mono; I've programmed in a good many fonts and color schemes and I find Akkurat-Mono and Solarized Dark to be my overall favorites, respectively. There's many glyphs in Akkurat that I like feel are a little cleaner than Courier, like r, q, ?, etc.
My favorite font is Verdana for the simple fact that it's a sans serif font in which the capital I and lowercase L are actually DISTINCT from each other.
This is my biggest beef with most san serif fonts! It was a genuine factor when we were considering the name Iona for a kid. (It just looks like lower case Lona in a lot of fonts which bugs me an unreasonable amount.)
Tip for writers: whenever you get tired, swap your document's font to Comic Sans (or another radically different font, but comic sans is just strikingly different than most). You'll recover some stamina and notice more mistakes to correct!
Personally, I don't find Comic Sans to be hard to read, but it gives a sense of informal/ light hearted/ childishness that causes issues when used as an inappropriate design choice. 😂 I think that's why it has the reputation it does. Though it's perfect for use in comic books!
That is spot on the reason why typographers would make fun of comic sans. It's a good font, but is plagued with people using it in settings that don't feel appropriate. I suspect it's readability is part of why it tends to get used a lot the way it does though. I think it would be more accurate to say early on before it became a meme, that typographers weren't making fun of the font, they were making fun of the people that chose to use it for their "Wash Your Hands Before Returning to Work" signs.
In comics, lettering is such an art form, adjusting stroke and width and all that in so many little ways to be more readable and expressive (even when it looks normal) that it's shocking when you see a comic where the type was just a font, it looks surprisingly bad. Comic sans evokes, but is not useful for, comics--way more than one might expect!
@macherie1234 Comic Sans is great for headers and titles and random text you want people to notice first. On the other hand, it's not the best for a whole essay or resume or report. I usually like Comic Dand when used with other fonts, bot when it's the main one.
I absolutely adore comic sans. It's super readable for dyslexic people, ESL learners, people who have trouble focusing, etc, etc. Also, it just has a super fun, loose personality to it. Whenever I would have to type anything for school, I learned that typing it up first in comic sans helped me get my thoughts out of my head quicker and easier.
Same to that last part - I find that using a font like Times New Roman when trying to write a first draft is much slower than using some kind of silly handwriting font. It's almost like my brain thinks "no one could ever take my report seriously in that font" and lowers the expectations xD
@@who9387 it's because it used be used *everywhere* by inexperienced designers. You could see comic sans in business settings, or even at funerals. The silly look is very off-putting in that context.
@@tultrapfighter Yes it's not a businesslike font and that's why I like it for emails etc between friends, I'm now retired so have no bisiness communication, to me it's PERFEC for wha tI need, friendly and HIGHLY READABLE
As a graphic design student, I was happy to see this topic covered. I don’t know if I will ever have a default font again because the suitability of a font depends on the situation, and I spend a lot of time discovering new fonts I like.
Read the Vignelli Canon (available as a PDF for free), if not done already. He has a point (or two) … ;-) Oh, and preference changes with age (and who are your "heroes" in typography).
I used to specifically and intentionally make every text document I started in a different font depending on what it was. Funny silly little story I'm sharing with a friend? Comic Sans or Kristen ITC. Diary entry? Handwriting font of some sort, maybe changing the specific one per day depending on mood. Notes for myself to reference later? The default Arial is fine. And if a specific word needed extra emphasis, I'd make it a different font so it would stand out i.e. in a document with a handwriting font, I'd use chiller to say I was SCARED. I also wrote a screenplay for school where I used different fonts for each character, the narrator, and the scene-setting bits that aren't supposed to be spoken aloud. I've always loved playing around with fonts! Except wingdings and similar symbol-based ones though. Those... kinda take away the point of writing anything down, yanno?
i had a hard time picking a font for my personal 'branding' ended up going with old garamond just bc i like how it makes the g in Olga look :) the rest of the body text i used din, cause i like the mix of old school and new high tech
An example of a font specifically developed for people with low vision is Atkinson Hyperlegible, which was made by the Braille Institute. It's a really cool font, and tries to make sure letter differentiation is as easy as possible without making the whole thing look like a ransom note.
I've been scrolling through the comments for someone who would bring this up! It's SUCH a great good font! It's extremely readable. The designer worked with the Braille Institute to develop a font that looked beautiful but that also could distinguish between lowercase L and uppercase i, the number 0 and the uppercase O and uppercase Q, and the uppercase B and number 8.
as a programmer, something I've strongly felt is needed is a Atkinson Hyperlegible that's monospace; I feel it would make everything so nice if I could have a variable width font as a default in the OS but still be able to use the same font when coding where being ablet to line things up vertically is very useful.
I had a friend who hated pineapples on pizza so much he ordered 4 boxes of all meat combos, when everybody in the group openly said they wanted at least one with pineapples. He also hated comic sans and he had to finish all 4 boxes by himself
its not for no reason, its because its either inapropriate to the subject, or because of the rather unappealing design. u dont wear a clown costume to a funeral either.
@@wildstarfish3786 Yes, I teach special education and I had a student a few years ago who just could not handle the way "a" is in most fonts. He knew it was an "a" but he seemed to think that he had to copy it when he wrote words we were showing him with that "a". I started using comic sans since the "a" looks like a written "a" and he could handle it much better.
@@anonanon-fm3dvI have students with L1 Arabic with the same habit; they have a hard time remembering that “a” has two lowercase written forms (plus the capital, so three whole shapes for a very important letter). AND the script a (with the hook) looks a LOT like an upside down “e”. So now we’re asking them to remember five or six vowel letters, up to 14 vowel sounds, and the two most common vowels (a and e) look nearly identical in print. It’s so much.
Comic Sans is actually GOATed. Its been found people with dyslexia have an easier time reading it than other fonts. It even outperformed a font specifically designed for dyslexics
I hate open dyslexic, It might be easier once you're used to it, but you don't get to chose your font all the time in the real world. It's just to different. I found Shantel sans, it has the comfort of comic sans, but has even spacing and sizing.
It was really useful to hear that spacing is a major factor in readability across different font styles. Times New Roman is the most common serif font, but it was specifically designed to get the most letters in the smallest space, so it's not an especially good test of the readability of serif fonts. Its ubiquity is a result of commercial choices. About thirty years ago, I composed a guide to learning a language directed at strictly monolingual students; so, it had to introduce a lot of new concepts, as well as the detail of the language. I was printing out a draft, and someone came in and asked what it was. I explained, and added (with a tone of voice that I thought was evidently cynical) "And I've set it in Comic Sans, so it will be easier to understand." "Good idea," they said. So I left it in Comic Sans, rather than changing it to Garamond.
The CORRECT answer is Tahoma. Some others may look nice, but they don't show things like these two letters: I l properly. You can't tell one is an i and one is an L.
Thanks for the tip! I've personally adapted my handwriting to properly distinguish between lowercase L and uppercase i. lt irks me when l can't teII the difference at a glance, so it's nice to know there's a sans serif to fit these desires.
As a Russian learner, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between Cyrillic п and л in certain sans serif fonts. That little hook on the latter is very important, and it's usually more obvious in serif fonts. But for native-level readers it might not matter so much since it's known that you learn to recognize the shape of entire words rather than reading them letter by letter.
Fonts come up quite a bit in the accessibilty community, mainly around which is the most accessible for people with vision problems. So, so glad to see you cover this topic!
Fonts are my life. I suffered severe interest in fonts when first studying commercial art in college. That segued into further exploration working as a layout artist for a manufacturer of marine gauges and instrument panels. And, during all the in-between times, there was experimentation when designing posters and programs for the entertainment industry. (There was serious thought behind which to use for reading in dim light, when sitting in a seat in a theater.)
before actually watching this Comic Sans will always have my dyslexic heart. plus, he's great in the game so really there's no comparison. okay, now back to science.
You used the word kerning to describe letter spacing. Kerning affects letter spacing but is not the same thing. You also neglected to mention that Courier is a fixed pitch font. It was invented for the typewriter. With fixed pitch fonts every character has the same width which means fewer characters can fit on a line. On a screen where space may be limited, fewer character will fit. In book printing this results in more pages and costs.
I love Open Dyslexic. I don’t have dyslexia but I have TDAH and reading, even if I love to, it’s super hard After changing the font in my kindle, I finally stop abandoning books in mid reading, because it’s not an exhausting activity anymore! One aspect these studies didn’t took in consideration is that not everything is about velocity or speed. Quality of life also matters
@@FeeshUnofficial I've seen quite a few devices/programs that don't support what you think would be a standard font, so a knock off would be necessary.
This is really helpful, as someone with optic nerve damage. I came in to learn random interesting things and wound up with really applicable info for me, so thank you Scishow ❤
My favorite font is Lucida Casual. Its in between serif and sans serif with just enough thickening at the end of each stroke to locate it without making the letters run together. Times Roman has too many straight vertical line segments. In small print I sometimes have to bracket each letter between my thumbnails to decode the text one letter at a time.
From Europe the most strange is the fact that fonts were tested for security road signs. In Europe as in many other part of the world, road signs are mainly using shapes, colors and ideograms and very few text except when there is no other choice. Because recognizing shapes, colors and simple images is far less brain consuming and easier to understand for people unable to read easily for any reason. And even if I don’t have any precise references that I can remember, I’m pretty sure it has been established by studies.
This is true in the US too (that most signs are shapes and color-coded). It’s just signs telling you about cities/road names/etc that are words (for the most part)
@@madelinemcdonald2609 That's not true. Europeans driving in the US are flabbergasted by the black text on yellow background signs that contain important information like "yield".
Comic Sans is the best because there are differences between upper case "I", lower case "L" and number "1"; also between number "0", and upper case "O".
i’m an elementary school teacher and while i do use comic sans occasionally, on a screen/projector, we use a slightly thinner version of a sans serif font that is also slightly curvy and stylistic. we want it to mimic our hand writing, but comic sans is usually too thick for the size font we use and the amount of words. in a second grade classroom, they are reading paragraphs on the projector, so thinner letters allows more space and for their eyes to easily glide through the words up close. the spacing is also important, more spacing between letters and words helps young readers as well. in my opinion, early readers need predictable fonts. there is a common font used in G1 books (beginning reading level books) where it doesn’t put the hook at the end of j and every student is always so confused because it looks like a long i. i can’t figure out why they do that and why we have to use them.
The more important distinciton when it comes to road signs is ALL CAPS vs Mixed Case, and actually Mixed Case is vastly more readable at a glance (like when looking at a road sign quickly) than ALL CAPS is.
I think for things like STOP(aka expected and consultant) all caps is better, but for anything that is unexpected and you have to parse on the go mixed case is better
Thanks for a great video! I am dyslexic and teach dyslexic children and adults and I have been talking about Sans Serif fonts for years as a better font than Times New Roman or other Oldstyle or Modern fonts. I love Arial, Helvetica, and my new favorite is the Lexend font in Google Docs with is nice cross between Comic Sans and Helvetica. Super helpful that you included all of the research studies in your video!
If we were voting, my vote is always "Century School Book": nice style, a little flourish, easy to read, really looks good whether at 8, 12 or larger. It's sure hard to replace Calibri as a default (in Windows). And I've tried but like a virus, it keeps coming back.
Calibri is a good, modern, typographically sound font. Not the worst choice for a default font in MS Office (Arial was way worse). Century Schoolbook is a "Modern" typeface (which isn't modern by now, but the category is called that), and a bit out-of-date aesthetically, but still used in science (TeX's standard font is from this family). If using Word, you can modify your standard settings, also in PowerPoint, but it's not easy.
@@c.augustin Microsoft just recently changed the default font from Calibri to Aptos and it's killing me. I need to get around to changing the default instead of just working myself up over it every time.
including courier, i just find most monospaced fonts easier to read in general, and if you want text thats heavily formatted like in a programming setting, it's pretty important to have it all lined up too
Many authors I know (and I know a LOT of authors) use Comic Sans for writing first drafts, because they hit word-count milestones more quickly and are less prone to writer's block. I've tried it, and it does work - but I have no idea why!
I put everything I do into comic sans, for myself, for my early childhood age students and most important, for my husband after a stroke completely took his ability to read and recognize letters. This is significant because every font was ground zero, he could not make out the letters, especially the serif fonts. Block print was readable in all caps, but again lower case was hard for him. Most of his reading practice now is street signs(his choice), and thanks, now I get it, it's got to be the additional spacing. Even moving, he can read signs better than a television screen.
Until recently, I owned a Web design company, designing my first Website in 1994. Over the years, I've taken tons of grief for my preference for Times New Roman and in recent years Comic Sans. Some from customers and some from the Website visitors. People were so vocal they pretty much screamed at me. My thought was that it wasn't about how pretty a font was, but rather the transfer of information, and that explanation did work at times. But there really are a whole group of people that fancy themselves the font police.
I still am a guy who leaves sans serif for headlines and serif fonts like Palatino for the text. I *might* use Comic Sans for a joke headline, but not for as many as 100 words. I could be convinced if I got into texting to friends regularly. I used to have a very funny "old West" font for that sort of thing, but I haven't seen it for about 15 years, now.
I have ADHD, not dyslexia, but I often have trouble keeping my eyes on the page. For me, monospaced fonts like Courier keep my attention better, but Comic Sans is also high on the list, and yes, it pains me to say that because I have some experience in graphic design. I also tend to switch fonts often while writing drafts because it helps me catch typos.
Courier is also a _slab serif_ font, meaning that it's lines never turn skinny, and instead are always thick. This produces that consistent width that one of the studies mentions.
During my teaching career, I dealt with a number of pupils who spoke little to no English (the school was near a university where there were a lot of foreign graduate students who brought their families with them). I discovered, through trial and error, that pupils whose native alphabet was different, such as Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and so on, made better progress if I used Comic Sans. I wondered if this was because as they learned to write in English, it was easier for them to make an approximation of Comic Sans shapes compared to other fonts. Pupils whose native alphabet was the same seemed to make better progress with other sans serif fonts, ie not Comic Sans, but less with serif fonts.
My brothers went to a school specifically for dyslexic kids that had it's own proprietary font, also designed specifically for dyslexia. I'd be interested to see how it would hold up in studies like these
I fell in love with Comic Sans the first time I saw it - it looks natural rather than harsh, is very easy to read, and I feel more like myself when using it. Most other fonts somehow make me feel artificial, less human.
I like MS Tahoma, since it's named after my favorite volcano & mountain, Mount Rainier (Tahoma/Takoma was its original name, meaning 'White Princess').
I'll try out the thing about spacing tomorrow at work. Am currently working on the layout for a publication, and my colleague said that it was a bit difficult to read. We already increased the space in between lines.
I've been using Comic Code for my text editors and such. It's basically a Comic Sans styled font with monospace, so its letters have the distinctiveness of Comic Sans, while having the spacing of fonts like Courier.
After a brain bleed a few years ago I had a subtle nystagmus (a sort of shaking in your eyes) that made reading sans-serif fonts way more difficult. With serif I could rely more on the shape of the whole word. Ariel was the very worst; it was about a year before I could comfortably read more than a few words at a time.
I recently got a pdf editor software that I’ve been using nonstop to OCR old academic articles (turn text images into clickable text) so that I can listen to them with TTS instead of reading them. The OCR software actually lets you look at “suspect” letter that it isn’t sure about. The font in the application itself doesn’t distinguish between I, l, and |. (That’s capital i, lowercase L, and a vertical bar). Meaning that if I want it to be correct then I have to manually type those letters. With no way of knowing if the program was right in the first place. (It also reads all en-dashes as the logical negation symbol, so I have to find-and-replace that every time, or my TTS program will start telling me about inNEGATIONteresting words that are split across lines. 😭)
Courier is not only a wider font, it's also a monospace font (every letter takes exactly the same amount of width). This gives it a precisely fixed visual cadence, which makes it easier to read for some people with bad vision because every fixed amount of space is exactly one letter. There's no guessing and confusion about whether the letter you're trying to read at any given position is just one wide letter, or two thin letters blurring together, etc., and taking out the spacing and character count guesswork is a huge workload reduction (which translates to much better reading speed and accuracy) for anyone with less than perfect vision.
Varying font styles for aesthetic effect is pretty common in graphic design, but I know of one instance of a series of novels using different font styles for aesthetic effect: the Pendragon series by D. J. MacHale. In the series, a teen boy named Bobby Pendragon has to leave home to travel and save the multiverse, and his friends stay behind and read about his adventures through the journals he sends them. The text of the journals is written in a serif font, and the part of the story that takes place outside the journals is written in a sans serif font. The font switch really highlights the shift in setting, and is kinda jarring, but in a good way; it pretty effectively emulates the feeling of pulling yourself out of a really compelling story and going "whooooaaaa".
I was really hoping to see them touch on monospace fonts. For me the most frustrating thing a font can do is make a capital 'i' look like a lowercase 'L'.
Huh, I specifically heard the opposite about all caps, when they were doing the signs in Britain, they found that it was easier for people to recognise the shape of the word, and thus read it easier, when it was in lower case.
I am really surprised. No one has commented on the terminology involved. Font and typeface are not completely interchangeable. Typeface is the family of characters with a common design... Font is a particular size and style of the typeface. Are we throwing away centuries of printing history here?
4:37 - To nitpick, one doesn't need to actually _read_ those signs - they are perfectly clear without any text. Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals (to which the US is, naturally, not a party) prescribes using only absolute minimum of text (eg. the actual speed on speed limit, but without text "speed limit" or similar); as much information as possible is conveyed by the shape, color (and light or dark background, so that color bling can also read them) and icons/pictograms.
I argued with my English teachers in high school AND college that Times New Roman should never have been made the standard for research papers due to its thin strokes being harder to read at 12pt than most other choices. My concerns were always dismissed because "serif fonts are easier to read" and I was sometimes threatened with point deductions if I deviated from it. I'm glad there's now research out there that shows ultimately that it never mattered. I get to have the last laugh.
I had a very hard time in the 2000's - this Powerpoint bug (at least in the French edition) adding a space _before_ apostrophes. It was fixed a few releases later - and ALL business presentations were written in Comic Sans. Dude! Found a way to search/replace fonts, its was impossible to focus on that.
As someone with both dyslexia and macular degeneration (diagnosed when I was only 39) I have been searching for a font that works for me. So many have suggested Open Dyslexic. While I found the heaviness on the bottom to be helpful at grounding the letters, I found the lack of serifs made things even worse. Now I understand WHY. Thank you, SciShow. May we all come to accept and love the diversity of fonts. (Even Comic Sans.)
1. Sans-serifs are generally more legible, because their shapes are "clearer". And for the same reason texts set in uppercase are easier to read than mixed case texts. And that's why uppercase letters are used for signs and headlines - because those are things one is supposed to "get at a glance". 2. HOWEVER, serif fonts make it easier for our eyes to group letters into words, and follow the line of text. Also, they makes easier for us to visually "keep apart" individual lines from each other - and that's why they are used for body of a text in books or newspapers - where one has to "scan" a page/ column LINE AFTER LINE, top to bottom. 3. "No significant difference" - I guess those two qualities of serif and sans serif fonts sorta "cancel out" each other. A body of a text printed in, say, Gil Sans is very clear - I mean, the typeface is clear and its letters are easier to read (distinguish) than those of Times (for instance), but then Times makes it easier to follow the line of text. Also, it's ALWAYS easier for us to read fonts "that we are used to" - for instance, for majority of people outside of Germany "Schwabacher" font is next to unreadable, and considering that we all are exposed daily, multiple times, to Helvetica/ Ariel and "Times/ ~ New Roman" it's no wonder they are very readable. 4. The "age difference" ( _"75 yrs olds took 38% longer to read the screen..."_ ) - you're jumping to conclusions, my dear Watson. The main reason for slower reading dashboard screens by older folks, WHILE DRIVING, is the problem with shifting the focus - when you get older your eyes need MUCH MORE time to adjust the focus from "(nearly) infinity" to "very close up". (Ask me how I know...). I can tell you that even a simple task of taking your eyes from the road in front of you and "reading" the speedometer (or a thermometer display next to it) takes a noticeable amount of time now - while 20 yrs ago it my eyes would adjust in an instant.
Comic Sans has been my favorite font ever since I first discovered it, and I happen to be dyslexic. I realize that I looks very informal. So after I finish composing the letter, essay, or whatever, I select all and change it to arial. But after finding out that courier is more readable, I may switch from arial to that.
As teacher who teaches students learning to read and English language learners, I like Comic Sans because it reflects how the students learn to read/write their letters.
It's of note that serifs help when printing on low quality paper at small text sizes, because the ink tends to bleed randomly serifs increase the odds of there being ink where you need it most. But so much text is completely digital now and usually people have no reason to be cheap about font size or paper quality when it comes to actually printing something.
There are things other than font that affect readability. More than once I've read academic papers that break up a long word at the end of a line with a hyphen and continue on a new line, and that makes the text much harder to read. I guess the editors just wanted the right edge of the page to be not too jagged.
Some people get wrong the answer to "Should it look nice or be easy to read?" Left justified for anything I produce and hanging indent for my own notes. It is time to forget the mechanical typewriter rules.
In the IT world (and with all the security on apps and web sites, we are all involved in IT), codes and passwords that involve mixtures of letters and numbers MUST distinguish the letter I from the number 1, the letter O from the number 0, and the upper case I from the lower case L. Otherwise, codes and passwords will be entered incorrectly. And even for normal text, letters too close together, especially at small sizes. Aerial, for example, fails some of the tests in the previous paragraphs, but in addition, lower case R blends in with a following lower case M, N, or another R to make a jumble, a lower case M, or a lower case NR. This is especially true with bold type. When I receive a display of a code to be entered, I often use Ctrl+c, open a Notepad (which by default uses a monotype serif font) window, and Ctrl+v to be sure I’m reading it right.
Courier is a fixed width font. It's not just the spacing, but all the letters take the same space. I'm curious if that enters into the equation for readability. OAN, if you want to turn in a paper that isn't quite long enough, most people can't tell the difference between Georgia and Times New Roman, but Georgia is *much* wider, so it takes up more space
Yes, Georgia will fill the page with fewer words, and for two reasons. First, there’s a little more space between the letters; and second, it has a greater “x height” (the height of the “small” letters a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x and z), and all the lower case letters-including the ascenders (b, d, f. h, k and l) and the descenders (g, j, p, q and y)-are wider in proportion to the x height. (The letter t is not a full-height ascender, as the word “little” illustrates.) Another thing in Georgia’s favor is that there’s a little less contrast between thick and thin strokes, with the thick strokes being about equal to those of Times New Roman, while the thin strokes are a little heavier. But don’t think no one will notice the use of Georgia instead of Times New Roman in a term paper, because there’s one glaring difference: Georgia has old style figures (sometimes called “text figures”), with the 0, 1 and 2 only slightly taller than x height, and with as 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 as descenders and 6 and 8 as ascenders. Personally, I think that old style figures look out of place in modern fonts like Georgia, and that’s my only quibble with what I think is otherwise an excellent font.
I have dyslexia, and I have typed in comic sans then just changed the font to Times New Roman because that’s easier for me. I also have changed the fonts of documents I’m reading to comic sans or some other font because it’s easier for me to read
I took a digital design class that ended up being a Typography class and the teacher was crazy annal about using "typeface" and not "font" (and would get upset at us for every using the word font). I know the old definition for typeface is what we've called font now for 6 generations (anyone who's ever had access to Word alone would know them as fonts), but everyone in the industry I've met gets all up in arms about calling fonts, font. (Generations with access to Word: silent gen, boomers, Gen x, Gen y...which keeps getting renamed and groups with other generations, millennials, Gen z, and now gen alpha). I was curious, how long does something have to be referred to in a specific way to make that the accurate word (Like literally meaning figuratively now)? Or should we all still be using the word typeface?
I suppose it is becaause the early computers only had one typeface (8×8 dots) and I believe it is the variations of the typeface that are fonts. Once bold font and italic font were common terms the new typefaces got associated with the term font too. New technology often modifies terms from the old.
Fun fact: Since Courier is monospaced (every character is the same width), it is the most common font to be used by translators (like me) in order to be able to invoice the amount of text fairly. However, while working on a translation and chewing on a tricky sentence, it can sometimes be helpful to change fonts to kind of "rewire" your brain and think of a solution.
I wasn't really paying attention for the first half, but then I remembered that I do have a wide choice of fonts to use in communicating information. I also happen to be huge fan of my typewriter, (for quickly typing small labels,) which just so happens to tap out letters in good old Courier! That's a win for me!
From my graphic design background, I thought the theory was that serifs weren’t originally there to make reading faster or help you to comprehend them better at normal printed paragraph sizes of around 10-14 points, but that they make it EASIER for your eyes to move down the line as they jump. Our eyes jump from one thing to the next, called “saccades,” and the serifs are little hints on the next letter to stand out a bit for your brain to notice the difference and help the saccade jump down the line more easily. At larger sizes such as a headline, the serifs were thought to be distracting and slow down the saccades.
As a slightly dyslexic and terminally online being, Iosevka is our actual go-to for readable font, or any other monospaced fonts really. Courier isn't just wider, it's monospaced, and that does the trick for us.
I've always used courier. I like the way it harks back to old fashioned hand typing. I love its clarity and simplicity. And I love the feel of white space between and within letters. I also like Helvetica for headlines in copy. In contrast, Times New Roman and Ariel feel fussy and crowded.
It's not just 'more space' between letters in Courier, it's a monospaced font, meaning every letter and space is the same width on every character. Very handy for coding!
And some of us grew up on typewriters. Courier is more readable to me than Lucida Console, but I don't trust Courier to be absolutely monospaced. Should I learn to trust?
@@JeffKaylin-ft5cx At least in Notepad++, I never encountered a character that didn't fit the grid that monospace makes. Everything always lines up nice.
Except that 1's (one) and l's (lower case 'L'), and 0's (zero) and 'O' (uppercase 'o') are often too similar, and at some point-sizes, even indistinguishable. For coding, it's better to use a monospace font (like Consolas) that was designed specifically to avoid those confusing conditions.
Courier is used for scripts too.
Consolas is the default (and also monospaced) font for VSCode, and it's served me well.
i have a comic sans tattoo which reads "memento mori" sometimes i cover most of it so it just reads "meme"
Vala.
I think you would be fun to hang out with.
oh hohohoho, you've given me ideas
Memento Mori, UNUS ANNUS
"Remember that you will type."
As a programmer, Courier is the bomb. Some characters (like l and I, or O and 0) look VERY similar in certain fonts. Courier and other Serif fonts make these letters easier to tell apart, which is very important when debugging code. Courier is even fixed-width so it helps with eyeballing indentation and line length.
There are more modern monospaced fonts, such as Lucida Console, Consolas, and Cascadia Code. I'll not express my preferences between them, but they're definitely geared towards programmers.
Love courier new honestly got so many f's because I hate using Arial and time new Roman. For myself parchment is my favorite
You may want to check out Akkurat-Mono; I've programmed in a good many fonts and color schemes and I find Akkurat-Mono and Solarized Dark to be my overall favorites, respectively. There's many glyphs in Akkurat that I like feel are a little cleaner than Courier, like r, q, ?, etc.
Personally, I really prefer Fira Code for programming. It's free, configurable, and supports ligatures.
Iosevka gang
My favorite font is Verdana for the simple fact that it's a sans serif font in which the capital I and lowercase L are actually DISTINCT from each other.
Try Consolas, the added plus is that it's monospaced
Ah... Comic Sans was my first love. It's Verdana I married, though.
Verdana is definitely under appreciated
This is my biggest beef with most san serif fonts! It was a genuine factor when we were considering the name Iona for a kid. (It just looks like lower case Lona in a lot of fonts which bugs me an unreasonable amount.)
Helvetica: “Arial? ARIAL?? That pathetic wannabe?? HOLD MY CLEANLY-DESIGNED, NEGATIVE-SPACE-BALANCED BEER!!”
Yeah Helvetica shits on Arial
Did you notice they used Arial Bold and Helvetica Light when they showed them on screen? lol
and Frutiger is vastly superior when it comes to distinguishing numerals from a distance
Meanwhile me: these 2 fonts look identical. Doesn't matter whichever I choose
Damn straight, it's HELVETICA 4evr!
Agree, I always change the font if it's Arial and I have a choice
Tip for writers: whenever you get tired, swap your document's font to Comic Sans (or another radically different font, but comic sans is just strikingly different than most). You'll recover some stamina and notice more mistakes to correct!
Thanks for that! Xx proofreader!
Is one of those mistakes that you're now using Comic Sans? 😁I kid, I kid.
@@KBRoller I'm an ESL and I was in bed.... :(
Personally, I don't find Comic Sans to be hard to read, but it gives a sense of informal/ light hearted/ childishness that causes issues when used as an inappropriate design choice. 😂 I think that's why it has the reputation it does. Though it's perfect for use in comic books!
Also, if you look at it closely, Comic Sans has a lot of subtle non- symmetric details (like the bottom of a capital B isn't as round as the top).
That is spot on the reason why typographers would make fun of comic sans. It's a good font, but is plagued with people using it in settings that don't feel appropriate. I suspect it's readability is part of why it tends to get used a lot the way it does though.
I think it would be more accurate to say early on before it became a meme, that typographers weren't making fun of the font, they were making fun of the people that chose to use it for their "Wash Your Hands Before Returning to Work" signs.
In comics, lettering is such an art form, adjusting stroke and width and all that in so many little ways to be more readable and expressive (even when it looks normal) that it's shocking when you see a comic where the type was just a font, it looks surprisingly bad.
Comic sans evokes, but is not useful for, comics--way more than one might expect!
I used to write my HS class lecture overheads in Comic Sans to make them less imposing. Seemed to work.
@macherie1234 Comic Sans is great for headers and titles and random text you want people to notice first. On the other hand, it's not the best for a whole essay or resume or report. I usually like Comic Dand when used with other fonts, bot when it's the main one.
I absolutely adore comic sans. It's super readable for dyslexic people, ESL learners, people who have trouble focusing, etc, etc. Also, it just has a super fun, loose personality to it. Whenever I would have to type anything for school, I learned that typing it up first in comic sans helped me get my thoughts out of my head quicker and easier.
Same to that last part - I find that using a font like Times New Roman when trying to write a first draft is much slower than using some kind of silly handwriting font. It's almost like my brain thinks "no one could ever take my report seriously in that font" and lowers the expectations xD
It’s great for people with dyslexia
@ravioliis_ _ I really don't get the anti Comic Sans thing. It's the most friendly-looking and READABLE font there is. What is not to like ?
@@who9387 it's because it used be used *everywhere* by inexperienced designers. You could see comic sans in business settings, or even at funerals. The silly look is very off-putting in that context.
@@tultrapfighter Yes it's not a businesslike font and that's why I like it for emails etc between friends, I'm now retired so have no bisiness communication, to me it's PERFEC for wha tI need, friendly and HIGHLY READABLE
As a graphic design student, I was happy to see this topic covered. I don’t know if I will ever have a default font again because the suitability of a font depends on the situation, and I spend a lot of time discovering new fonts I like.
Read the Vignelli Canon (available as a PDF for free), if not done already. He has a point (or two) … ;-) Oh, and preference changes with age (and who are your "heroes" in typography).
I used to specifically and intentionally make every text document I started in a different font depending on what it was. Funny silly little story I'm sharing with a friend? Comic Sans or Kristen ITC. Diary entry? Handwriting font of some sort, maybe changing the specific one per day depending on mood. Notes for myself to reference later? The default Arial is fine. And if a specific word needed extra emphasis, I'd make it a different font so it would stand out i.e. in a document with a handwriting font, I'd use chiller to say I was SCARED. I also wrote a screenplay for school where I used different fonts for each character, the narrator, and the scene-setting bits that aren't supposed to be spoken aloud. I've always loved playing around with fonts! Except wingdings and similar symbol-based ones though. Those... kinda take away the point of writing anything down, yanno?
If it was up to me, Consolas, just everywhere for everything (which is what I do on my browser)
i had a hard time picking a font for my personal 'branding' ended up going with old garamond just bc i like how it makes the g in Olga look :) the rest of the body text i used din, cause i like the mix of old school and new high tech
An example of a font specifically developed for people with low vision is Atkinson Hyperlegible, which was made by the Braille Institute. It's a really cool font, and tries to make sure letter differentiation is as easy as possible without making the whole thing look like a ransom note.
That's one I tend to default to. It's a pretty "invisible", "neutral" font that doesn't draw attention to itself while still being extra readable.
I've been scrolling through the comments for someone who would bring this up! It's SUCH a great good font! It's extremely readable. The designer worked with the Braille Institute to develop a font that looked beautiful but that also could distinguish between lowercase L and uppercase i, the number 0 and the uppercase O and uppercase Q, and the uppercase B and number 8.
as a programmer, something I've strongly felt is needed is a Atkinson Hyperlegible that's monospace; I feel it would make everything so nice if I could have a variable width font as a default in the OS but still be able to use the same font when coding where being ablet to line things up vertically is very useful.
@@leave-a-comment-at-the-door There are a few fan-made monospace conversions, like eHyperlegible and Atkinson Monolegible, if you want to try those
Comic Sans is a wonderful way to figure out who likes to hate stuff for no reason.
I had a friend who hated pineapples on pizza so much he ordered 4 boxes of all meat combos, when everybody in the group openly said they wanted at least one with pineapples. He also hated comic sans and he had to finish all 4 boxes by himself
Well, do you LIKE things for no reason? Why do you like symmetry? There's always a reason for EVERYTHING.
I just think it looks kind of stupid, like it has its place, but then again I’m also a sucker for serifs
its not for no reason, its because its either inapropriate to the subject, or because of the rather unappealing design. u dont wear a clown costume to a funeral either.
I feel like I can now admit that I like comic sans.
Never knew fonts could impact so much more than just aesthetics. Definitely going to be more conscious about the fonts I use in the future.
Comics sans is perfect for ESL teaching because all of the letters look like written versions.
Especially a really
@@wildstarfish3786 Yes, I teach special education and I had a student a few years ago who just could not handle the way "a" is in most fonts. He knew it was an "a" but he seemed to think that he had to copy it when he wrote words we were showing him with that "a". I started using comic sans since the "a" looks like a written "a" and he could handle it much better.
@@anonanon-fm3dvI have students with L1 Arabic with the same habit; they have a hard time remembering that “a” has two lowercase written forms (plus the capital, so three whole shapes for a very important letter). AND the script a (with the hook) looks a LOT like an upside down “e”.
So now we’re asking them to remember five or six vowel letters, up to 14 vowel sounds, and the two most common vowels (a and e) look nearly identical in print. It’s so much.
Yep! And just teachers of younger children in general.
Exactly! When I make worksheets for my ESL students, I always use comic sans.
I continue to love and admire this channel for communicating nuance accessibly
Comic Sans is actually GOATed. Its been found people with dyslexia have an easier time reading it than other fonts.
It even outperformed a font specifically designed for dyslexics
It's covered by copyright IP (almost every sign you see using it is illegal), so go for Courier.
Full edit: Commented on the wrong comment, my bad... half sleepy, lol
I do agree though.
Imma just quickly reply to the other comment, lol.
I heard somewhere that Comic Sans was originally designed for people with Autism
@@Ms.Pronounced_NameI was WONDERING why the subtitles in Sonic Adventure 2 used Comic Sans
I hate open dyslexic, It might be easier once you're used to it, but you don't get to chose your font all the time in the real world. It's just to different. I found Shantel sans, it has the comfort of comic sans, but has even spacing and sizing.
It was really useful to hear that spacing is a major factor in readability across different font styles.
Times New Roman is the most common serif font, but it was specifically designed to get the most letters in the smallest space, so it's not an especially good test of the readability of serif fonts. Its ubiquity is a result of commercial choices.
About thirty years ago, I composed a guide to learning a language directed at strictly monolingual students; so, it had to introduce a lot of new concepts, as well as the detail of the language. I was printing out a draft, and someone came in and asked what it was. I explained, and added (with a tone of voice that I thought was evidently cynical) "And I've set it in Comic Sans, so it will be easier to understand." "Good idea," they said. So I left it in Comic Sans, rather than changing it to Garamond.
The CORRECT answer is Tahoma.
Some others may look nice, but they don't show things like these two letters: I l properly.
You can't tell one is an i and one is an L.
Every one of the dozen or so fonts I use do distinguish them. Esp the serif fonts.
You wrote i L
Thanks for the tip! I've personally adapted my handwriting to properly distinguish between lowercase L and uppercase i. lt irks me when l can't teII the difference at a glance, so it's nice to know there's a sans serif to fit these desires.
@@undercoverduck I've never seen handwriting that makes l and I look the same
Verdana as well distinguish I and l
As a Russian learner, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between Cyrillic п and л in certain sans serif fonts. That little hook on the latter is very important, and it's usually more obvious in serif fonts. But for native-level readers it might not matter so much since it's known that you learn to recognize the shape of entire words rather than reading them letter by letter.
Fonts come up quite a bit in the accessibilty community, mainly around which is the most accessible for people with vision problems. So, so glad to see you cover this topic!
Fonts are my life.
I suffered severe interest in fonts when first studying commercial art in college. That segued into further exploration working as a layout artist for a manufacturer of marine gauges and instrument panels. And, during all the in-between times, there was experimentation when designing posters and programs for the entertainment industry. (There was serious thought behind which to use for reading in dim light, when sitting in a seat in a theater.)
My condolences. But "Suffered severe interest in fonts" is a dope villain origin and i also welcome my noble font overlord
before actually watching this Comic Sans will always have my dyslexic heart. plus, he's great in the game so really there's no comparison. okay, now back to science.
I love Comic Sans, unironically. It's bold, easy to read and a little goofy. The absurdist nature is great.
The Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding... i had no idea this was a thing.
I felt an immediate urge to subscribe.
I often switch a document to courier or comic sans while editing, then back to whatever the font snobs like when I'm done.
You used the word kerning to describe letter spacing. Kerning affects letter spacing but is not the same thing. You also neglected to mention that Courier is a fixed pitch font. It was invented for the typewriter. With fixed pitch fonts every character has the same width which means fewer characters can fit on a line. On a screen where space may be limited, fewer character will fit. In book printing this results in more pages and costs.
Yeah, for larger blocks of text, I absolutely hate Courier. It's the best for coding, though!
I love Open Dyslexic. I don’t have dyslexia but I have TDAH and reading, even if I love to, it’s super hard
After changing the font in my kindle, I finally stop abandoning books in mid reading, because it’s not an exhausting activity anymore!
One aspect these studies didn’t took in consideration is that not everything is about velocity or speed. Quality of life also matters
I unironically use comic sans (or knockoff versions of it) on all my devices, because it truly helps me distinguish between I and l.
Why... Why would you use a knockoff... It's literally an open source, public domain, web standard font
@@FeeshUnofficial I've seen quite a few devices/programs that don't support what you think would be a standard font, so a knock off would be necessary.
That’s why I started using Times New Roman, it makes it so much easier.
I use Tahoma as my default for similar reasons.
That's what I always thought with I and l
This is really helpful, as someone with optic nerve damage. I came in to learn random interesting things and wound up with really applicable info for me, so thank you Scishow ❤
My favorite font is Lucida Casual. Its in between serif and sans serif with just enough thickening at the end of each stroke to locate it without making the letters run together. Times Roman has too many straight vertical line segments. In small print I sometimes have to bracket each letter between my thumbnails to decode the text one letter at a time.
From Europe the most strange is the fact that fonts were tested for security road signs. In Europe as in many other part of the world, road signs are mainly using shapes, colors and ideograms and very few text except when there is no other choice.
Because recognizing shapes, colors and simple images is far less brain consuming and easier to understand for people unable to read easily for any reason. And even if I don’t have any precise references that I can remember, I’m pretty sure it has been established by studies.
This is true in the US too (that most signs are shapes and color-coded). It’s just signs telling you about cities/road names/etc that are words (for the most part)
I think the video refers to DESTINATION signs, which need wording.
@@madelinemcdonald2609 That's not true. Europeans driving in the US are flabbergasted by the black text on yellow background signs that contain important information like "yield".
Comic Sans is the best because there are differences between upper case "I", lower case "L" and number "1"; also between number "0", and upper case "O".
Yeah, but so does Consolas.
Thank you! fonts where there is no difference between capital i's and lower case L's are BS.
You are missing the wonders of Monospace fonts.
And in comic sans, lowercase "A" is an easy to read "one story" a. No weird extra curved line.
My first (manual) typewriter had no number 1 key - you had to use lowercase L.
i’m an elementary school teacher and while i do use comic sans occasionally, on a screen/projector, we use a slightly thinner version of a sans serif font that is also slightly curvy and stylistic. we want it to mimic our hand writing, but comic sans is usually too thick for the size font we use and the amount of words. in a second grade classroom, they are reading paragraphs on the projector, so thinner letters allows more space and for their eyes to easily glide through the words up close. the spacing is also important, more spacing between letters and words helps young readers as well. in my opinion, early readers need predictable fonts. there is a common font used in G1 books (beginning reading level books) where it doesn’t put the hook at the end of j and every student is always so confused because it looks like a long i. i can’t figure out why they do that and why we have to use them.
I always believed in Comic Sans being the most iconic and best font. Glad to feel validated by science.
The more important distinciton when it comes to road signs is ALL CAPS vs Mixed Case, and actually Mixed Case is vastly more readable at a glance (like when looking at a road sign quickly) than ALL CAPS is.
I think for things like STOP(aka expected and consultant) all caps is better, but for anything that is unexpected and you have to parse on the go mixed case is better
I'm dyslexic and I've always liked Comic Sans, but my favorite is Black Chancery.
Black Chancery is a beautiful font, but not easy to read.
Any font named Chancery is desined to be awesome!
@@BritishBeachcomberI mean lowercase is very legible in black chancery but the numbers are mediocre and the upper case letters are abysmal to read
I just looked it up. It's one of the few fonts in which the capital letters grow down rather than up. Feels very pirate-y
Take a look at OpenDyslexic, it's definitely my preferred font, provided that I'm dealing with text that's large enough for it.
Thanks for a great video! I am dyslexic and teach dyslexic children and adults and I have been talking about Sans Serif fonts for years as a better font than Times New Roman or other Oldstyle or Modern fonts. I love Arial, Helvetica, and my new favorite is the Lexend font in Google Docs with is nice cross between Comic Sans and Helvetica. Super helpful that you included all of the research studies in your video!
If we were voting, my vote is always "Century School Book": nice style, a little flourish, easy to read, really looks good whether at 8, 12 or larger. It's sure hard to replace Calibri as a default (in Windows). And I've tried but like a virus, it keeps coming back.
This should have been the APA / MLA standard font imo. Much easier to read than Times New Roman and it even stands out by having "school" in the name.
Calibri is a good, modern, typographically sound font. Not the worst choice for a default font in MS Office (Arial was way worse). Century Schoolbook is a "Modern" typeface (which isn't modern by now, but the category is called that), and a bit out-of-date aesthetically, but still used in science (TeX's standard font is from this family). If using Word, you can modify your standard settings, also in PowerPoint, but it's not easy.
@@c.augustin Microsoft just recently changed the default font from Calibri to Aptos and it's killing me. I need to get around to changing the default instead of just working myself up over it every time.
The Supreme Court of the United States agrees with you.
including courier, i just find most monospaced fonts easier to read in general, and if you want text thats heavily formatted like in a programming setting, it's pretty important to have it all lined up too
Many authors I know (and I know a LOT of authors) use Comic Sans for writing first drafts, because they hit word-count milestones more quickly and are less prone to writer's block. I've tried it, and it does work - but I have no idea why!
I put everything I do into comic sans, for myself, for my early childhood age students and most important, for my husband after a stroke completely took his ability to read and recognize letters. This is significant because every font was ground zero, he could not make out the letters, especially the serif fonts. Block print was readable in all caps, but again lower case was hard for him. Most of his reading practice now is street signs(his choice), and thanks, now I get it, it's got to be the additional spacing. Even moving, he can read signs better than a television screen.
Courier is a fixed width font. That's why its spacing is so easy. It's also why it's the most common font for programmers editing code. (Like me.)
Until recently, I owned a Web design company, designing my first Website in 1994. Over the years, I've taken tons of grief for my preference for Times New Roman and in recent years Comic Sans. Some from customers and some from the Website visitors. People were so vocal they pretty much screamed at me. My thought was that it wasn't about how pretty a font was, but rather the transfer of information, and that explanation did work at times. But there really are a whole group of people that fancy themselves the font police.
I still am a guy who leaves sans serif for headlines and serif fonts like Palatino for the text. I *might* use Comic Sans for a joke headline, but not for as many as 100 words. I could be convinced if I got into texting to friends regularly. I used to have a very funny "old West" font for that sort of thing, but I haven't seen it for about 15 years, now.
I have ADHD, not dyslexia, but I often have trouble keeping my eyes on the page. For me, monospaced fonts like Courier keep my attention better, but Comic Sans is also high on the list, and yes, it pains me to say that because I have some experience in graphic design. I also tend to switch fonts often while writing drafts because it helps me catch typos.
Monospaced comic sans
Courier is also a _slab serif_ font, meaning that it's lines never turn skinny, and instead are always thick. This produces that consistent width that one of the studies mentions.
During my teaching career, I dealt with a number of pupils who spoke little to no English (the school was near a university where there were a lot of foreign graduate students who brought their families with them).
I discovered, through trial and error, that pupils whose native alphabet was different, such as Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and so on, made better progress if I used Comic Sans. I wondered if this was because as they learned to write in English, it was easier for them to make an approximation of Comic Sans shapes compared to other fonts.
Pupils whose native alphabet was the same seemed to make better progress with other sans serif fonts, ie not Comic Sans, but less with serif fonts.
As a former early childhood teacher, Comic Sans was much more useful with children who were just engaging with letter recognition for the first time.
I've really never understood what's not to like about Comic Sans.
My brothers went to a school specifically for dyslexic kids that had it's own proprietary font, also designed specifically for dyslexia. I'd be interested to see how it would hold up in studies like these
I fell in love with Comic Sans the first time I saw it - it looks natural rather than harsh, is very easy to read, and I feel more like myself when using it. Most other fonts somehow make me feel artificial, less human.
I like MS Tahoma, since it's named after my favorite volcano & mountain, Mount Rainier (Tahoma/Takoma was its original name, meaning 'White Princess').
The mountain
I'll try out the thing about spacing tomorrow at work. Am currently working on the layout for a publication, and my colleague said that it was a bit difficult to read. We already increased the space in between lines.
I've been using Comic Code for my text editors and such. It's basically a Comic Sans styled font with monospace, so its letters have the distinctiveness of Comic Sans, while having the spacing of fonts like Courier.
After a brain bleed a few years ago I had a subtle nystagmus (a sort of shaking in your eyes) that made reading sans-serif fonts way more difficult. With serif I could rely more on the shape of the whole word. Ariel was the very worst; it was about a year before I could comfortably read more than a few words at a time.
You guys are always a font of knowledge 😊
😭😭😭😭😭😭🤣
SciShow again coming through with the question I never asked, but needed the answers to. I usually prefer TNR in word, but Arial for presentations.
Comic Sans is only hated because it appeared in one too many serious communications. But every font has its place, except for Papyrus.
I'd love to be in a position in life where I could write everything in Comic Sans, just to be a menace to society
Mad lad! LOL
The best font is obviously Papyrus
no its flowey
I recently got a pdf editor software that I’ve been using nonstop to OCR old academic articles (turn text images into clickable text) so that I can listen to them with TTS instead of reading them.
The OCR software actually lets you look at “suspect” letter that it isn’t sure about.
The font in the application itself doesn’t distinguish between I, l, and |. (That’s capital i, lowercase L, and a vertical bar). Meaning that if I want it to be correct then I have to manually type those letters. With no way of knowing if the program was right in the first place.
(It also reads all en-dashes as the logical negation symbol, so I have to find-and-replace that every time, or my TTS program will start telling me about inNEGATIONteresting words that are split across lines. 😭)
It bothered me way too much that he says "Comic Sans" yet pronounces sans serif as "saahns serif"
🤯
My favorite fonts is the guy from Hapoy Days. He is so cool.
Courier is not only a wider font, it's also a monospace font (every letter takes exactly the same amount of width). This gives it a precisely fixed visual cadence, which makes it easier to read for some people with bad vision because every fixed amount of space is exactly one letter. There's no guessing and confusion about whether the letter you're trying to read at any given position is just one wide letter, or two thin letters blurring together, etc., and taking out the spacing and character count guesswork is a huge workload reduction (which translates to much better reading speed and accuracy) for anyone with less than perfect vision.
At work, I always know the research is going to be fire if the slideshow is in comic sans.
I love the special dyslexia font. It helps to ground letters through my visual snow. It allows me to read paragraphs.
Comic Sans so appropriately named, my all time favorite. It enhances my favorite pastime.
As someone with dyslexia I would really appreciate more stuff you use the special dyslexic font
Varying font styles for aesthetic effect is pretty common in graphic design, but I know of one instance of a series of novels using different font styles for aesthetic effect: the Pendragon series by D. J. MacHale. In the series, a teen boy named Bobby Pendragon has to leave home to travel and save the multiverse, and his friends stay behind and read about his adventures through the journals he sends them. The text of the journals is written in a serif font, and the part of the story that takes place outside the journals is written in a sans serif font. The font switch really highlights the shift in setting, and is kinda jarring, but in a good way; it pretty effectively emulates the feeling of pulling yourself out of a really compelling story and going "whooooaaaa".
I was really hoping to see them touch on monospace fonts. For me the most frustrating thing a font can do is make a capital 'i' look like a lowercase 'L'.
Huh, I specifically heard the opposite about all caps, when they were doing the signs in Britain, they found that it was easier for people to recognise the shape of the word, and thus read it easier, when it was in lower case.
I am really surprised. No one has commented on the terminology involved. Font and typeface are not completely interchangeable. Typeface is the family of characters with a common design... Font is a particular size and style of the typeface. Are we throwing away centuries of printing history here?
I love Comic Sans. It's more fun, and for my adult students, takes some of the pressure off test-taking.
4:37 - To nitpick, one doesn't need to actually _read_ those signs - they are perfectly clear without any text. Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals (to which the US is, naturally, not a party) prescribes using only absolute minimum of text (eg. the actual speed on speed limit, but without text "speed limit" or similar); as much information as possible is conveyed by the shape, color (and light or dark background, so that color bling can also read them) and icons/pictograms.
I argued with my English teachers in high school AND college that Times New Roman should never have been made the standard for research papers due to its thin strokes being harder to read at 12pt than most other choices. My concerns were always dismissed because "serif fonts are easier to read" and I was sometimes threatened with point deductions if I deviated from it.
I'm glad there's now research out there that shows ultimately that it never mattered. I get to have the last laugh.
I had a very hard time in the 2000's
- this Powerpoint bug (at least in the French edition) adding a space _before_ apostrophes. It was fixed a few releases later
- and ALL business presentations were written in Comic Sans. Dude!
Found a way to search/replace fonts, its was impossible to focus on that.
As someone with both dyslexia and macular degeneration (diagnosed when I was only 39) I have been searching for a font that works for me. So many have suggested Open Dyslexic. While I found the heaviness on the bottom to be helpful at grounding the letters, I found the lack of serifs made things even worse. Now I understand WHY. Thank you, SciShow. May we all come to accept and love the diversity of fonts. (Even Comic Sans.)
have you heard of Atkinson Hyperlegible?
Had my hand up in the air, " what about spacing "..... thank you.
1. Sans-serifs are generally more legible, because their shapes are "clearer". And for the same reason texts set in uppercase are easier to read than mixed case texts. And that's why uppercase letters are used for signs and headlines - because those are things one is supposed to "get at a glance".
2. HOWEVER, serif fonts make it easier for our eyes to group letters into words, and follow the line of text. Also, they makes easier for us to visually "keep apart" individual lines from each other - and that's why they are used for body of a text in books or newspapers - where one has to "scan" a page/ column LINE AFTER LINE, top to bottom.
3. "No significant difference" - I guess those two qualities of serif and sans serif fonts sorta "cancel out" each other. A body of a text printed in, say, Gil Sans is very clear - I mean, the typeface is clear and its letters are easier to read (distinguish) than those of Times (for instance), but then Times makes it easier to follow the line of text.
Also, it's ALWAYS easier for us to read fonts "that we are used to" - for instance, for majority of people outside of Germany "Schwabacher" font is next to unreadable, and considering that we all are exposed daily, multiple times, to Helvetica/ Ariel and "Times/ ~ New Roman" it's no wonder they are very readable.
4. The "age difference" ( _"75 yrs olds took 38% longer to read the screen..."_ ) - you're jumping to conclusions, my dear Watson. The main reason for slower reading dashboard screens by older folks, WHILE DRIVING, is the problem with shifting the focus - when you get older your eyes need MUCH MORE time to adjust the focus from "(nearly) infinity" to "very close up". (Ask me how I know...).
I can tell you that even a simple task of taking your eyes from the road in front of you and "reading" the speedometer (or a thermometer display next to it) takes a noticeable amount of time now - while 20 yrs ago it my eyes would adjust in an instant.
Comic Sans has been my favorite font ever since I first discovered it, and I happen to be dyslexic. I realize that I looks very informal. So after I finish composing the letter, essay, or whatever, I select all and change it to arial. But after finding out that courier is more readable, I may switch from arial to that.
As teacher who teaches students learning to read and English language learners, I like Comic Sans because it reflects how the students learn to read/write their letters.
It's of note that serifs help when printing on low quality paper at small text sizes, because the ink tends to bleed randomly serifs increase the odds of there being ink where you need it most. But so much text is completely digital now and usually people have no reason to be cheap about font size or paper quality when it comes to actually printing something.
i love how you quoted the one study that couldnt find the differences vs the hundreds of studies that could find the differences 😂😂😂 well played man!
There are things other than font that affect readability.
More than once I've read academic papers that break up a long word at the end of a line with a hyphen and continue on a new line, and that makes the text much harder to read. I guess the editors just wanted the right edge of the page to be not too jagged.
Some people get wrong the answer to "Should it look nice or be easy to read?" Left justified for anything I produce and hanging indent for my own notes. It is time to forget the mechanical typewriter rules.
In the IT world (and with all the security on apps and web sites, we are all involved in IT), codes and passwords that involve mixtures of letters and numbers MUST distinguish the letter I from the number 1, the letter O from the number 0, and the upper case I from the lower case L. Otherwise, codes and passwords will be entered incorrectly.
And even for normal text, letters too close together, especially at small sizes. Aerial, for example, fails some of the tests in the previous paragraphs, but in addition, lower case R blends in with a following lower case M, N, or another R to make a jumble, a lower case M, or a lower case NR. This is especially true with bold type.
When I receive a display of a code to be entered, I often use Ctrl+c, open a Notepad (which by default uses a monotype serif font) window, and Ctrl+v to be sure I’m reading it right.
I've switched all my defaults to Atkinson Hyperlegible everywhere I can. It makes such a (positive) difference that I won't go back.
It is a nice font but doesn't have the range of characters I need sometimes. I have downloaded it though, now I know about it.
Courier is a fixed width font. It's not just the spacing, but all the letters take the same space. I'm curious if that enters into the equation for readability.
OAN, if you want to turn in a paper that isn't quite long enough, most people can't tell the difference between Georgia and Times New Roman, but Georgia is *much* wider, so it takes up more space
Yes, Georgia will fill the page with fewer words, and for two reasons. First, there’s a little more space between the letters; and second, it has a greater “x height” (the height of the “small” letters a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x and z), and all the lower case letters-including the ascenders (b, d, f. h, k and l) and the descenders (g, j, p, q and y)-are wider in proportion to the x height. (The letter t is not a full-height ascender, as the word “little” illustrates.)
Another thing in Georgia’s favor is that there’s a little less contrast between thick and thin strokes, with the thick strokes being about equal to those of Times New Roman, while the thin strokes are a little heavier.
But don’t think no one will notice the use of Georgia instead of Times New Roman in a term paper, because there’s one glaring difference: Georgia has old style figures (sometimes called “text figures”), with the 0, 1 and 2 only slightly taller than x height, and with as 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 as descenders and 6 and 8 as ascenders.
Personally, I think that old style figures look out of place in modern fonts like Georgia, and that’s my only quibble with what I think is otherwise an excellent font.
For me, Consolas is one of my favorite fonts. I don't really know why, but it just...is
If you are a programmer, monospaced fonts are awesome. I love you Consolas :)
Not me about to forward this video to every other store manager in the region
I have dyslexia, and I have typed in comic sans then just changed the font to Times New Roman because that’s easier for me. I also have changed the fonts of documents I’m reading to comic sans or some other font because it’s easier for me to read
I took a digital design class that ended up being a Typography class and the teacher was crazy annal about using "typeface" and not "font" (and would get upset at us for every using the word font). I know the old definition for typeface is what we've called font now for 6 generations (anyone who's ever had access to Word alone would know them as fonts), but everyone in the industry I've met gets all up in arms about calling fonts, font. (Generations with access to Word: silent gen, boomers, Gen x, Gen y...which keeps getting renamed and groups with other generations, millennials, Gen z, and now gen alpha).
I was curious, how long does something have to be referred to in a specific way to make that the accurate word (Like literally meaning figuratively now)? Or should we all still be using the word typeface?
I suppose it is becaause the early computers only had one typeface (8×8 dots) and I believe it is the variations of the typeface that are fonts. Once bold font and italic font were common terms the new typefaces got associated with the term font too. New technology often modifies terms from the old.
Fun fact: Since Courier is monospaced (every character is the same width), it is the most common font to be used by translators (like me) in order to be able to invoice the amount of text fairly. However, while working on a translation and chewing on a tricky sentence, it can sometimes be helpful to change fonts to kind of "rewire" your brain and think of a solution.
yeah i was gonna say, Courier is a monospace font (which means every letter has the same width)
Who ever did the thumbnail deserves a bonus
I never hated Comic Sans, but I've been told to not use it for business stuff because it looks unprofessional or something.
I wasn't really paying attention for the first half, but then I remembered that I do have a wide choice of fonts to use in communicating information. I also happen to be huge fan of my typewriter, (for quickly typing small labels,) which just so happens to tap out letters in good old Courier! That's a win for me!
Lexend!
Everybody... Lexend.
Put that on your teleprompters for a week then come back and tell me I'm wrong.
From my graphic design background, I thought the theory was that serifs weren’t originally there to make reading faster or help you to comprehend them better at normal printed paragraph sizes of around 10-14 points, but that they make it EASIER for your eyes to move down the line as they jump. Our eyes jump from one thing to the next, called “saccades,” and the serifs are little hints on the next letter to stand out a bit for your brain to notice the difference and help the saccade jump down the line more easily. At larger sizes such as a headline, the serifs were thought to be distracting and slow down the saccades.
As a slightly dyslexic and terminally online being, Iosevka is our actual go-to for readable font, or any other monospaced fonts really. Courier isn't just wider, it's monospaced, and that does the trick for us.
I've always used courier. I like the way it harks back to old fashioned hand typing. I love its clarity and simplicity. And I love the feel of white space between and within letters. I also like Helvetica for headlines in copy. In contrast, Times New Roman and Ariel feel fussy and crowded.
I most definitely do not have a special place in my heart for Times New Roman