[thelist] [penalty tip] for getting OT (sans vs. serif)

Matt Patterson list-matt at reprocessed.org
Sun Feb 24 07:34:00 CST 2002


deke  wrote this on 24/2/02:

> Serif fonts actually started appearing in the late 1700s and early
> 1800s, but they became popular in the 1920s.  Futura, for instance, was
> an instant hit when it was introduced in 1928.

Assuming you mean Sans in the above para (if not then I'm well confused ;-)) then
you might be surprised to know that sans are older than seriffed letters - they
date back to the earliest writing forms, and were the chosen form for the Roman
Republic - beautiful, wide, monoline sans-seriffed letters. These were the
letterforms that the letterers of the Renaissance aspired to - they felt a
political/philosophical affinity with them that they didn't share with the later
Roman Empire.

> Serifs are pretty nigh mandatory in stone-cutting letters. Nobody
> really cares much about how fast an engraved inscription can be
> parsed, though.

Again - serifs really come into their own in inscriptions with the Roman Empire.

> With hand-set type, a serif had the benefit of resisting damage to the
> type; a thin stroke ending with a serif could easily be broken as you
> sorted type into a job case.

presume you mean sans the first time you mention it and serif the second - and
absolutely right. Serifs break off, but no-one really cared - serifs were the
standard for jobbing and book printing right the way up until the nineteenth
century.

> With linecasters, though, there was less economic reason to use
> serifs, but cast lines of type *could* get damaged - and serif type
> was considered to have a "finished" appearance.

Don't know what you mean here.

> clean and modern- looking sans-serif would have been the natural
> choice.  In display sizes, it was - but for body type, it turned out
> to be unacceptable. The serifs make reading the type much easier

That's what was thought until people did serious legibility, which concluded that
there was no statistically significant difference in legibility between them.

> That doesn't hold true for the computer screen because the resolution
> is so poor. While printers will lay down 1440 dots per *inch* on paper,
> most computer screens don't even have that much resolution for the
> entire width of the screen. Even sans typefaces perform poorly on the
> screen, which is why such faces as Ariel were developed.

Things are changing - the use of better rendering techniques (Adobe's CoolType,
MS's ClearType) can make things much better even on teeny (PDA) screens. Well
hinted true-type faces (like Matthew Carter's Georgia, which has hand-hinted by
Tom Rickner) have performed remarkably well on screen for a while now. It's pretty
much a matter of personal preference again. But, yeah, roll on imagesetter
resolution-equivalent screens! (Yes sir, your video card does need 2 Gigabytes of
memory... :-) [US letter screen in 32bit colour at 2400dpi (Image setter
resolution)]).

The critical thing is to use type well, so that it works in the context you're
using it in. Factors like inter-line space, measure and type/ground contrast make
all the difference in making something easy to read, even with crappy type.

Matt


--
   Matt Patterson | Typographer
   <matt at reprocessed.org> | http://reprocessed.org/



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