R&P: Font Research and Ideas

This is a scan of The Observer on 17/10/10.
It is about type and fonts, which is useful for my research into which font to use for our project.

This article was interesting to read because it is an article about typography and why certain fonts are more popular. The article is an extract from Just My Type: A book about fonts, by Simon Garfield, and has given me brief insights into the history of typography, and the process of how they are created. Also, it uses the terminology given to specific parts of the letters which adds to my knowledge. The article includes findings from Anthony Cahalan on font popularity, these were his results:

The part that is useful for me is the 'least favourite' fonts, so I shall consider not using these fonts for our final product. Also, the results were from "more than 100 designers" so I know that they are reasonably reliable. On the 3rd page, there is interesting comment on the difference between "legibility and readability" which explains how your chosen font may look nice, but is not good for practical reasons because close-up it is very difficult to read - Garfield says "some type is meant to be seen rather than read." I shall keep this in mind when designing the final product. This article relates to my work in choosing the right font to use, as this article explains how font is very important at conveying meaning - even between masculine and feminine designs.

Overall I learnt that your choice of font can have more meaning than you originally think, and it even gives examples such as how using capital letters can have disastrous results!

Font Tally

To decide on a font our group choose a selection of fonts that we thought could be suitable for our final product. We made a shortlist, then asked our target audience to choose their favourite font they thought would suit our product. Here are the results:

The most popular font was Arial Black Bold with a space inbetween the characters. It won with 14 votes and Arial Unicode Ms with spaces came second. Our group will take the information from this research and use it to influence our final products.