I have always been interested in fonts for some reason. When I used to make teaching materials in Japan for English learners, I started using comic sans whenever it became available, so maybe my interested increased when the anti-comic sans discussion started. Or maybe it’s just because I’ve always been in a position where my font choice would be seen by students. When I started teaching Japanese in the U.S., there were very few font choices for Japanese script, so that was always super frustrating for me — because again, my audience was language learners. A few years back that started to change and now there are a lot more Japanese fonts bundled in American products (like MS Word and PowerPoint). So now I’m able to make different/specific choices about Japanese fonts as well, for example whether it’s a teaching PowerPoint or an academic presentation.

So I really enjoyed this article in the WaPo. I don’t know if the gift link works more than once, but here it is:

https://wapo.st/3OkmElw

Here’s the regular link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...XNGF7IZ2W2EYKGGQ4Q_3

I wonder about their little "test." The content varies across the three passages, and the order may matter. If you really want to test reading speed and reading comprehension, you offer a single reading in a particular font to a large random sample, and then you introduce the same text in a different font to a different but equally large random sample, and so on.

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Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
I wonder about their little "test." The content varies across the three passages, and the order may matter. If you really want to test reading speed and reading comprehension, you offer a single reading in a particular font to a large random sample, and then you introduce the same text in a different font to a different but equally large random sample, and so on.

Yes, the design is probably questionable, and there are other ways you could design it to test different fonts with the same reader in a more rigorous way.

But just as an article to read on a Saturday morning, I thought it was fun!

So, what is the favorite song of the font simplification crowd?

I shot the serif!

Cool information! I learned some things.

I don’t think Beatrice Warde said that “fonts are the clothes that words wear.” Note where the quotation marks are in the article. What we call a “font” today is really a “typeface” (or “face”). In typesetting, a “font” was a tray of letter slugs in a specific face, size, weight, and style (bold, Italic, etc).

It was either at Apple or at XEROX PARC (I don’t remember which) where the folks who developed the GUI first misused “font” to mean “face” (and style). Like using “format” as a verb, it stuck.


We wuz taught decades ago that serifs helped guide the eye from one letter to the next so that the words had better flow. But that was all based on reading print on paper … hence Times Roman for printing The (New York, I assume) Times.

A decade or two ago, the New-Fangled Flying Machine Co changed the font in the checklists in the pilot’s operating manuals to an unweighted sans-serif font with a pretty heavy stroke. The human factors experts at the time said it was easier to read, especially for non-native English readers. I think the descriptive information is still in Times Roman.

But I can really see how reading something on screen is different from paper. You need shapes that resolve well regardless of text size, and serifs can be troublesome for that.

I like the feel of Garamond. I also like Baskerville and I recently saw a video on the history of Baskerville and the man… I had no idea it was developed by a man named Baskerville, not in a town so named. Very interesting for us typeface geeks…

https://youtu.be/6_dy_yMf0pE?si=qQd0Sr4Z8CFrqWyo

Oh, and for on-screen text, I must say I really miss the original IBM PC monochrome display font. I get nostalgic when I see it used on a command console or the editor for some programming language on Windows.

One thing that IBM did really well for a hundred years was make monospaced typefaces that looked really good.

Two of my favorite fonts are Garamond and Goudy Old Style. The latter is especially elegant. One of the talents we tried to hone as typesetters (back in the day) was the ability to identify a font based on a sample. I had a co-worker who got quite good at it. Clients would often send in work to be set with a note saying, "Please match this font."

I found a huge tome of type specimens at a local antique shop a few years ago called, "Specimen Book and Catalog" from the American Type Founders Company, 1923. Of course it came home with me. The type in it is gorgeous. There is no more beautiful type than metal, it leaves a dimensional impression on the page. Gorgeous.

OK, I admit it. This is the kind of nerdy stuff I get off on.

I just discovered that the Wikipedia page for Goudy Old Style has a photo of a Goudy OS sample with an elaborate pink border. That page is from this book I have. Cool!

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the ability to identify a font based on a sample

Now there are websites that do this, and if they can’t ID the exact font, they’ll show similar ones. The last time I did this, I was able to get the exact font.

As a slight threaddrift, a currently popular j-pop singer made a video last year in collaboration with a Japanese typesetting/font company. I used this video in one my classes, the students loved it. It has a “take on me” feel as well, except more font-focused rather than illustration focused. In case anyone is interested:

What is the font used on this message board?

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What is the font used on this message board?

Isn't it likely that this is dependent upon the web browser and local settings one uses?