Second, serifs do seem to make a difference – but not as much as I would have expected, and only for some readers. I could poke fun at that, but it raises an obvious possibility: maybe I’m wrong about serifs! So, on to point 2… And about the second half of that, they are generally wrong. People have strong opinions about what fonts they like – and often, about what fonts they find easier to read. But here are two key results – each of them completely fascinating.įirst: people’s font preferences don’t correlate at all with their reading speed or comprehension (Wallace et al.’s Figure 10). If you’re a font nerd, you should definitely read the paper, because there are lots of moving parts (like careful standardization of font sizes, which is not nearly as easy as you might think). They asked a simple question that turns out to have a very-far-from-simple answer: do people read faster and understand better with text in particular fonts, and if so, are the fonts they prefer the ones that let them perform best? They addressed this with standardized reading-and-comprehension tasks that varied fonts and tracked performance. There’s literature on this – it’s just a rabbithole that for some reason I haven’t gone down. But to be honest, I don’t know whether I’m actually right to believe it.

So I know why I believe one shouldn’t use sans-serif fonts for long reading tasks. WordPress uses a sans-serif font by default, and I’m sure there’s a way I can fix that, and I would be less annoyed if I knew what it was. But if you’re looking for them here you’ll come up empty.

(Serifs, for anyone who is less of a font nerd than me, are those little horizontal bits at the bases and tops of letter strokes. This explain why virtually every professionally published book uses a serif font. Serif fonts help draw a reader’s eye along a line of text, and are therefore easier to read in long blocks of text. This explains their use on highway signs and the like. Here’s the conventional wisdom: sans-serif fonts are easier to read at a glance, when there are only a few words. There’s a lot of meat in it, but I’ll dip in today just to the part that grabbed me first: implications for serifs. I was pleased, therefore, to find a completely fascinating recent paper on people’s preference for, and performance reading, different fonts. * Every time one of my students sends me a thesis chapter in Calibri, I grimace, grumble, and change the font – but I also find myself wondering why this choice has become so common when it’s just clearly wrong (tongue partly in cheek there, but only partly). In particular, I have strong opinions about how bizarre it is when people choose sans-serif fonts for writing documents. I will, however, admit that when it comes to font choice, I am one of those people. I sometimes get very upset with folks who hold strong opinions without data underneath them.

Microsoft word fonts first grader