Mary Clare Dyson

University of Reading · Department of Typography and Graphic Communication

Text designers are likely to benefit from guidance on how to use typographic differentiation for emphasis. Three experiments use purposely-designed fonts to explore the size and nature of differences in the stylistic characteristics of fonts (weight, width, contrast, italic) which affect letter identification. Results indicate that words set in bol...

Are characters in writing systems (e.g. Latin or Chinese) perceived in the same way as objects or do we process characters in a different way? Previous research [Gauthier et al., 2006] has suggested that readers familiar with a writing system are able to take advantage of the stylistic regularities in typefaces, whereas those without this expertise...

The book is a collection of invited chapters by renowned experts and is part of a series on Language Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Intelligent Systems. The content is wide-ranging, encompassing perspectives from computer science to social science to design and reflecting the considerable experience of researchers, teachers and practitioners....

Text designers are likely to benefit from guidance on how to use typographic differentiation for emphasis. Three experiments use purposely-designed fonts to explore the size and nature of differences in the stylistic characteristics of fonts (weight, width, contrast, italic) which affect letter identification. Results indicate that words set in bol...

Researchers are increasingly relying on e-journals to access literature within their fields. The design of the interfaces to these journals is determined by the individual host or publisher and there appears to be little standardization. This exploratory study samples a set of sixteen home screens of e-journals from different disciplines and identi...

The typographical naivety of much scientific legibility research has caused designers to question the value of the research and the results. Examining the reasons underlying this questioning, the paper discusses the importance of designers being more accepting of scientific findings, and why legibility investigations have value. To demonstrate how...

This paper introduces scientific research findings and accounts of skilled design judgement to: (i) develop an interdisciplinary account of what affects our identification of letters when reading; (ii) analyse the relationship between the approaches of psychologists and designers to explaining how we identify letters; (iii) propose ways in which co...

Studies of face recognition and discrimination provide a rich source of data and debate on the nature of their processing, in particular through using inverted faces. This study draws parallels between the features of typefaces and faces, as letters share a basic configuration, regardless of typeface, that could be seen as similar to faces. Typefac...

Letter identification is a critical front end of the reading process. In general, conceptualizations of the identification process have emphasized arbitrary sets of distinctive features. However, a richer view of letter processing incorporates principles from the field of type design, including an emphasis on uniformities across letters within a fo...

Advances in digital technology have greatly facilitated the design of new type fonts. Today, hundreds of thousands of fonts can be found in various visual appearances or styles, which are used in digital publishing and information display. As a result, it has become important to find ways of evaluating their impact on our daily lives: (1) ease in r...

Future typographic and graphic designers will need to be able to design for a range of media, both to secure their role and to provide the necessary design expertise in technological environments. This paper proposes an approach to teaching which introduces theoretical issues within a practical design project to encourage the development of general...

The objective of this analysis is to describe the characteristics of a sample of fifty web sites in order to define the basic graphic components they used, the frequency of their use and some general trends in web design. The comparison between sites also gives information on the different structures that are being used to present information. The...

This chapter concerns the contribution of the interface design to social interaction in e-learning environments. More specifically this chapter focuses on the design of social facilities in the interface that are intended to motivate and sustain the process of communication among students. Although there are design constraints in creating an enviro...

Preference influences how an individual chooses graphic material and is therefore an important consideration in the design of literacy materials for children with reading difficulties, such as those associated with dyslexia. However, little is known about what this group of children like and dislike about the typography and the illustrations in the...

This experiment investigates what happens to user performance and disorientation when visual conventions of a genre are violated. It also looks at what happens to the user performance and disorientation over time. Twenty-eight participants were randomly allocated to two independent groups: one was tested with a conventional website and the other wi...

This study uses preference measurements to compare participants' perceptions of nine versions of on-screen instructions and aims to discover the ones users consider to be the clearest and most comfortable to use. Instructions are divided into 3 categories: composite, synoptic and animated demonstrations. A group of twenty-four adult participants ra...

This paper briefly outlines the Didot project on teaching digital typography. One of the key issues, namely identifying the users of digital typography, is explored and related to the type of material that could be included in a curriculum for digital typography. Teaching methods and material that have been developed in ths area are outlined, with...

This study focuses on of the use of animation to alert students to incoming messages and system updates in an online environment. It describes an experiment which compares an animation- and a text-based interface in terms of how the students perceived the alerting system. Relationships between the number of interactions, performance, and perceived...

This review shows how the depiction of motion in media that is intrinsically motionless (such as paper) is always a creative challenge for designers of instructional material. This is a contribution to existing visual literacy research that more often focuses on motion depiction for aesthetic (e.g. photography and painting), entertainment (e.g. com...

An experiment is presented which compares a text-and a visual-based interface to an online course in terms of how the students perceive the social information. The objective of the visual-based interface is to enhance the degree of satisfaction and social presence perceived by the students. Relationships between the number of interactions and perce...

Examinations are conventionally used to measure candidates’ achievement in a limited time period. However, the influence of text layout on performance may compromise the construct validity of the examination. An experimental study looked at the effects of the text layout on the speed and accuracy of a reading task in an examination-type situation....

The primary objective of this paper is to critically evaluate empirical research on some variables relating to the configuration of text on screen to consolidate our current knowledge in these areas. The text layout variables are line length, columns, window size and interlinear spacing, with an emphasis on line length due to the larger number of s...

A basic framework is proposed to distinguish between the many ways in which Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) can be evaluated. This includes the purpose of the evaluation, the type of methods that might be used and the measures employed. The framework is not intended to cover all applications but offers one means of structuring a review of past...

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study into the influence of picture content and verbal language reading directions on reading procedural pictorial sequences. A sequence of four pictures representing the procedure 'throw away after use' was tested in four graphic configurations (one-line horizontal, one-line vertical, two-line hori...

With such a large volume of material accessible from the World Wide Web, there is an urgent need to increase our knowledge of factors in#uencing reading from screen. We investigate the e!ects of two reading speeds (normal and fast) and di!erent line lengths on comprehension, reading rate and scrolling patterns. Scrolling patterns are de"ned as the...

The Rural History Centre at the University of Reading, which includes the Museum of English Rural Life, holds extensive collections of material relating to the history of food, farming, and the countryside. As a result, it operates as the leading research and resource center for the subject in the country. The collections have been Designated of na...

This paper reports on part of the work carried out during an early phase of a project run by the Rural History Centre (RHC) at the University of Reading. The main aim of the project is to make the collections within the Centre more accessible and relevant to a range of public audiences, through the World Wide Web. The work involves cataloguing item...

With increasing use of the World Wide Web, rapid scanning or skimming of material on screen has become a frequent activity. However, the outcome of this method of reading has not been thoroughly investigated. Using a range of question types, comprehension was measured after reading from screen at both a normal and fast reading speed. In addition, b...

this paper drew upon research into the techniques used to improve the discrimination of letterforms. In defining the type of modifications to apply to specific parts of letterforms, it was first necessary to identify the elements of the letterforms. Although the labels for parts of letterforms may vary, there is some agreement as to what should be...

this paper the interdisciplinary nature of electronic publishing is addressed by raising two issues relating to the content and structure of an electronic publishing course. The first is whether it is possible to agree upon a generic curriculum, based on a set of headings or topics, which may be treated quite differently by those in different disci...

This paper briefly examines the nature of information available to people designing for the screen and proposes that applied research into factors that affect the legibility of text on screen is required. Comparisons of reading from paper and screen do not identify the optimal typographic conditions for reading from screen, and it may be more fruit...

Describes two experiments that explore the effect of line length and paging versus scrolling on reading from screen. Finds that long lines were read faster than short lines with no change in comprehension and that subject's judgment of reading ease did not correlate with performance. Concludes that further study is needed. (PA)

This paper describes an experiment that tested the ease of reading specific formats that could be used for on-line publications, such as magazines. A single scrolling column with a relatively long line length, the format in which browsers frequently display web pages, was compared with a three column paged format. No differences in reading rate wer...

This paper briefly outlines the Didot project on teaching digital typography. A key issue, namely the nature of the interaction between computer and design specialists, is discussed and related to the type of material that could be included in a curriculum for digital typography. Teaching methods and material that have been developed in this area a...

Computers serve as ideal tools for information storage and retrieval, and advances in hardware and software have promoted the development of image databases in addition to purely textual ones. However, the retrieval of images adds an extra dimension to the methods that can be used to access data. Images can not only be represented by their semantic...

In view of the issues raised by the use of multimedia in museums, this paper offers a framework for describing multimedia in museums as a first step in their evaluation A means of classifying multimedia systems is proposed with reference to their content, function, format, and operational characteristics The framework may form a useful general tool...

A description is given of the development and evaluation of a prototype symbol database for the retrieval of symbols by shape. Such a symbol database is particularly suited to manipulation using a GUI, as the items within the database can be described in terms of their graphic elements. These elements can be identified by users through investigatin...

The paper identifies the need for a suitable management system for retrieving images from a database. Various search objectives are described which cannot be met by current retrieval methods. A number of approaches to the problem are discussed and the advantages of a flexible classification system are highlighted. By analysing the formal attributes...

Without Abstract

These experiments looked at specific components of melodic contour, reversals in pitch, and nonrevereals, using a short-term recognition memory paradigm. Listeners found it easier to discriminate between same and different melody pairs if changes occurred at contour reversals. This result was independent of rate of presentation, suggesting that the...