Sofie Beier

Royal Danish Academy

Reading comprehension is an essential skill. It is unclear whether and to what degree typography and font personalization may impact reading comprehension in younger readers. With advancements in technology, it is now feasible to personalize digital reading formats in general technology tools, but this feature is not yet available for many educatio...

Purpose Patients with low vision are generally recommended to use the same fonts as individuals with normal vision. However, we are yet to fully understand whether stroke width and serifs (small ornamentations at stroke endings) can increase readability. This study's purpose was to characterize the interaction between two factors (end-of-stroke and...

Visually complex typefaces require more cognitive effort to process, which can impact reading efficiency, and have been associated with disfluency effects. Since our environments may include an increasing range of demanding reading scenarios—to which we are expected to respond, sometimes with speed and accuracy—it is important to develop an underst...

Aim It is a long-lasting dispute whether serif or sans serif fonts are more legible. However, different fonts vary on numerous visual parameters, not just serifs. We investigated whether a difference in word identification can be attributed to the presence or absence of serifs or to the contrast of the letter stroke. Method Participants performed...

Type Tricks: User design is a reference book and user manual. This book disseminates the author’s research into typeface legibility, offering tips on what to consider when designing for running text, skim-reading, expressive typefaces, reading from afar, micro-type, spatial graphics, and struggling readers (older age, low-vision, children, dyslexia...

The purpose of pharmaceutical pictograms is to help patients manage their medicinal treatment. However, the pictograms often lack perceptual clarity. While they are frequently tested for aspects such as comprehension, little attention has been paid to their legibility. This paper presents the conception and results of an experiment adapted from the...

An often-repeated piece of advice when choosing fonts for great legibility is to use fonts with large counters and apertures. To identify effects of open and closed apertures on the letters ‘a’, ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘r’, ‘s’, ‘t’ and ‘f’, we ran an experiment using the serif font Pyke as stimulus. The letters in focus were designed for this experiment with th...

Most text on modern electronic displays is set in fonts of regular letter width. Little is known about whether this is the optimal font width for letter recognition. We tested three variants of the font family Helvetica Neue (Condensed, Standard, and Extended). We ran two separate experiments at different distances and different retinal locations....

Readability is on the cusp of a revolution. Fixed text is becoming fluid as a proliferation of digital reading devices rewrite what a document can do. As past constraints make way for more flexible opportunities, there is great need to understand how reading formats can be tuned to the situation and the individual. We aim to provide a firm foundati...

Certain font features (e.g., letter width) can change the amount of space occupied by text in published works. Font styles/features are also known to affect reading eye movements (EM); however, few studies have examined these effects - and none used high-resolution displays. We examined the effects of font width on EMs by utilizing four fonts, from...

To make graphical user interfaces look more fashionable, designers often make use of high-stroke-contrast fonts. We are yet to understand how these fonts affect reading. We examined the effect of letter-stroke contrast on three bold fonts, one with extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes, one with no contrast, and one in between. The fonts...

Low vision readers depend on magnification, but magnification reduces the amount of text that can be overviewed and hampers text navigation. In this study, we evaluate the effects that font variations letter spacing, letter width, and letter boldness have on low vision reading. We tested 20 low-vision patients with age-related macular degenera-tion...

Type Tricks: Layout Design is the second release in a trilogy of books concerning typography. In addition, this book also explores layout designs, providing you with a breakdown of the guidelines you should follow in order to improve your website or digital product. Sofie Beier is a professor at the Royal Danish Academy. Her book brings practical...

Recent debate has seen the proposition that difficult to read, or disfluent, typefaces can improve certain learning conditions. This is counterintuitive for typography where it is the aim to support reading acts by creating texts that are as clear and as easy to read as possible. We explore recent literature on the disfluency effect in an effort to...

Designing legible fonts often involves balancing various trade-offs. While the added negative space that surrounds light-weight fonts enhances legibility by mediating the effects of crowding from nearby letters (Dobres, Reimer, & Chahine, 2016), it also impedes legibility at small visual angles by taking up the black space needed for letter recogni...

It is a long-lasting dispute within typography, whether serif or sans serif fonts are the most legible. However, different fonts vary on numerous visual parameters and not just the serifs. In the present experiment, we were interested in investigating whether a given difference in reading performances between serif and sans serif fonts, relates to...

To inform our knowledge of the typographical variables of stroke weight, letter width, and letter spacing, and their effects on different age groups and reading scenarios, we used Radner Reading Chart, where we measured reading speed at different sizes, to compare the fonts KBH Text, KBH Display, and Gill Sans Light. The experiment showed that for...

Crowding happens when the perception of multiple objects is impaired by their spatial proximity. It is exacerbated in the visual periphery and affects symbols such as letters or digits. Here, we investigated if crowding of digits could be reduced when a specific vertical shift is applied to each digit. Starting with the DejaVu font, we designed te...

Research has shown that fonts viewed at a smaller visual angle benefit from greater letter boldness. Since small and large visual angles operate on different spatial frequencies, we examined whether the effect was dependent on font size. By applying a paradigm of single-letter exposure across two experiments, we showed that fonts of thinner letter...

By subjecting participants to brief exposure of single letters in the peripheral visual field, we investigated 1) hemispheric differences in reading of embellished display typefaces, and 2) the legibility difference between different kinds of embellished display typefaces. The test typefaces are designed for the purpose of controlling for the varia...

Type Tricks: Your Personal Guide to Type Design is about typographical rules and the underlying structure of the work process in the design of new typefaces. In that way, it is both a reference book and a user manual. In an illustrative format, it presents the different stages of type design in an easily accessible manner. Being an expert as a typ...

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...

p>This article examines graphic design’s role within design activism. It outlines design activism in general and its relation to commercial design culture in a consumerist economy. Thereafter it discusses persuasive tendencies in graphic design and questions if its current contribution to design activism is limited to its predominant narrow role of...

This chapter reviews existing knowledge on distance legibility of fonts, and finds that for optimal distance reading, letters and numbers benefit from relative wide shapes, open inner counters and a large x-height; fonts should further be widely spaced, and the weight should not be too heavy or too light (Figure 1). Research also indicates that ser...

This paper looks into the history of letterform research and discusses why the discipline has yet to make the big break within design research. By highlighting two of the most popular focus areas (letter distinctiveness and the role of serifs) and by discussing various forms of methodological shortcomings, the paper suggests that future research in...

To understand how the design process works, the paper takes the outset in the work of one of the first innovating type designers: the English printer and typefounder John Baskerville (1706-1775). By comparing his way of working with a model for a contemporary design process, the paper reflects upon the relationship between this and the way Baskervi...

With a focus on the teaching of design students in higher education, the article will present a teaching approach model that follows the stages of the design process. The model suggests that at the Definition stage, the supervisor can focus on leading the student into a more thorough elaboration of the design problem; at the Analysis stage, the sup...

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...

Some typographers have proposed that typeface familiarity is defined by the amount of time that a reader has been exposed to a typeface design, while other typographers have proposed that familiarity is defined by the commonalities in letter shapes. These two hypotheses were tested by measuring the reading speed and preferences of participants. Par...

One frequent problem in legibility investigations is that the tested typefaces vary on too many variables. In an investigation which compares typefaces that – at the same time – vary on letter width, weight, contrast and skeleton, it will be difficult to determine precisely why the findings come out as they do, and the external validity suffers. By...

Due to a medical condition I temporarily lost the ability to read and write. As an academic researcher specializing in understanding the reading process, I could benefit from this terrible experience by explaining—on a scientific level—what happened to me, and hence draw lines to existing research and my former analyses.

Reading Letters is a book about typeface legibility. In our everyday life we constantly encounter a diversity of reading matters, including display types on traffic signage, printed text in novels, newspaper headlines, or our own writing on a computer screen. All these conditions place different demands on the typefaces applied. In a straightforw...

To enhance typeface legibility we studied how to improve the design of individual letters. Three different fonts were created, each containing several variations of the most frequently misrecognized letters. These variations were tested both with distance and short exposure methodologies. Creating variations within a typeface avoided confounds that...

The aim of the project is to investigate the influence of familiarity on reading. Three new fonts were created in order to examine the familiarity of fonts that readers could not have seen before. Each of the new fonts contains lowercase letters with familiar and unfamiliar skeleton variations. The different skeleton variations were tested with dis...