Swiss typography has a few things to answer for, one of them is that since the 1960s serif type has been regarded as the dusty and poor relative that is best kept in the closet. Swiss typography has also raised a couple of generations of graphic designers in a blinkered, almost religious, belief that only sans serif type can do the job, and more specifically the neo-grotesques. This follows the teachings that the ornaments must not be used, and that only grid structures and geometry can come close to that unattainable perfection. I, too, can find beauty in some well-crafted designs that are based on this theory that lauds function over form but struggle when this becomes the dogma for the vast majority of design output.

I would like to take a moment and discuss serif typefaces which come in all sizes and shapes, not unlike humans, with each style having an expression and function. To understand all this one also has to understand some of the history of the evolution of type Armed with this understanding we can confidently apply serif typefaces into a contemporary context, both in print and in digital environments.

Serif typefaces broadly speaking come in four basic genres: old style (renaissance antiqua), transitional (baroque antiqua), modern (classicistic antiqua) and slab serif. Some of them also have subcategories but that is an entire essay all by itself. This chronological classification indicates somewhat the stylistic features of the typefaces but as designs from the mid-20th century onwards started to mix up different features this chronological classification can only be used as a broad descriptor.

Serifs first appeared over 2,000 years ago in Roman inscriptions. There is a great debate as to why the serif is there in the first place: is it an ornamental device or does it need to be there to facilitate the stone carver to create a clean stroke termination? I don’t have the answer for that, and I don’t really mind either way. I think they look great and give us ample opportunity to create emotional expressions.

In the earliest days of printing with moveable type Blackletter was the dominant style. Serifs appeared from around 1460 south of the Alps in the publications of people such as Aldus Manutius and Nicholas Jensen with type designs based on round hand calligraphy with a broad nibbed pen. The nature of the pen very much dictates the structure of the serif and the contrast of the strokes in a letter, producing an overall sturdy type that could withstand the abuse of relatively poor paper and ink quality, and the letterpress process. Round hand calligraphy flourished during the Renaissance and hence renaissance antiqua as an alternative name for old style. Within about 100 years this type style proliferated across all of Europe, and today typefaces such as Garamond, Caslon and Plantin are well known and used.

In the early 18th century Baroque emerged as a new art expression, replacing the somewhat austere forms of the Renaissance with opulent shapes and superfluous elements; in its extreme it is Rococo which I find fabulous and much underrated. Better understanding of structural engineering and building materials allowed Baroque to manifest in architecture. Printing technologies improved dramatically, alongside paper and ink quality, facilitating a new type, the transitional — or baroque antiqua. Still loosely based on the principles of the broad nibbed pen, influences of the pointed pen can already be detected. Overall, strokes tend to be more filigrane, and typefaces have an airy and flighty appearance. Rumours have it that when John Baskerville first introduced his type readers, who were used to seeing the sturdy old styles, exclaimed that reading this new fangled typography would make you blind! How marvellous.

Baroque was relatively short lived, and toward the end of the 18th century Classicism entered artistic expression. An austerity of form returned, as if in reaction against the excesses of Baroque, with antique Greek art and architecture as models. Once more technologies across industries improved and this allowed for the modern style of type to emerge. The type structures are rooted in the pointed nib pen providing fine lines and when pressure on the nib is applied strokes swell. This results in very high contrasted strong verticals and thin horizontals, and curves that don’t have the rigidity of the previous broad nib pen but appear more fluid. Bodoni is probably the best known typeface of this type but Walbaum, Didot and Fournier all emerged around the same time. For me, a particularly fine example is the Romaine du Roi by Grandjean, with its slightly eccentric double serifs, and the peculiar spur on the ‘l’.

With the industrial revolution beginning in the early part of the 19th century demands of commerce and capitalism demanded advertising, and with advertising came a demand for a wider diversity of type styles. The slab serif was born, with all its glorious variations that we know so well from Spaghetti Western wanted posters. Structurally, slab serifs are based on the construction of the modern style typefaces, except that all the thin lines are made heavier to give the appearance of a monolinear design. The best known examples are Rockwell and Clarendon, and if you don’t get excited by a black weight of a slab serif I cannot help you.

From the beginning of the 20th century type designers and font foundries started with subtle hybridisation of serif styles, either because of a specific artistic fancy or because of necessity to fit the typeface onto the mechanical typesetting devices, such as the Linotype and Monotype type casters. The real modernisation of serif happened with the Apple Macintosh, when designers were freed of mechanical constraints, and in many instances adherence to stylistic features were thrown to the wind. In the last 30 years designers have created many wonderful and contemporary serif fonts.

The argument against using serif fonts is that UI and other digital environments need sans serifs to work well. This argument may have been true 25 years ago when screen resolutions were 72 or 96 dpi, and displays were black and white only. For the last 10 years screen technology has improved dramatically and today the average smartphone will have at least 200 dpi resolution using sub-pixel or other advanced rendering systems. Serif typefaces today display perfectly well in those environments but again, one has to look at a reputable and knowledgeable foundry to make fonts that ensure the technical accessibility of fonts. All it takes is to have an open mind to serif typefaces, and enjoy looking through printed or digital specimens from many talented type designers.

No more excuses. Hail the serif.

More ‘hail the serif’ is to come to dispel some of the myths around legibility.

The ‘Printing Types’ by Daniel Berkeley Updike is a detailed and entertaining account of typographic history across Europe from Gutenberg to William Morris.

A few weeks ago graphic designer, typographer and educator Wolfgang Weingart passed away. I think we can all agree that he left a lasting legacy amongst a whole generation of designers, and beyond. In his death he was preceded some months earlier by André Gürtler and Armin Hoffman who both also made deep impressions upon hundreds of Basel School of Design graduates.

Seeing Armin Hoffman’s work retrospective last year — online only due to the pandemic — and more recently an interview with Weingart at the Gewerbemuseum Zürich via YouTube made me reflect on my design education in Basel from 1984 to 1988, and how much my teachers in Basel had affected my career and work. Looking back, I now have the maturity to understand that although each of my teachers taught their own respective subject they all followed a single educational strategy and philosophy of design: Observe, Analyze, Create.

This philosophy was probably best embodied in Kurt Hauert’s class that asked us to create graphic translations of everyday and often mundane objects, and find their essence. Take a humble wine glass for instance: there are myriad ways to draw it with black and white gouache — or with some fancy digital equipment today — but to extract its essence is something altogether different. I discovered the meaning of that essence after sketching the glass over 250 times. This process forced me to truly observe and analyze the wine glass, and in turn observe and analyze the creation on paper.

The educational goal was not to draw the perfect wine glass but to have skills honed enough to, in the future, enable me to find the essence of any object with only few sketches.

The same process applied to Weingart’s classes. Everyone, irrespective of their background and experience, had to start with the most basic of exercises: correctly spacing a word set in all caps, Univers 55 at 72 point. Only once you mastered this exercise could you proceed to the next stage. This is a humble exercise but it forces the practitioner to observe, analyze and create — and to continually question their actions. Ultimately, the skills gained through a strict progression of such exercises allowed us to create compositions that are more to do with Kurt Schwitters Dada pieces than applied typographic communication. I could cite more examples how this design and educational philosophy was carried through all courses but I believe you understand the principle.

Embedded into these three values of ‘observe, analyze and create’ is the notion that you need to think critically, that you need to continuously question your own motives for coming to a certain conclusion, and that you need to continuously question the desires and motives of your client. When presenting your work to the world, you need to have clear rationales as to why things are the way they are. That requires observation and analysis. Saying ‘I like it’ simply does not do. It was more than once in Weingart’s class that he asked me: “So what are you doing in my class? You really should be a gardener”, and it was only later in my time at Basel that I understood what he meant by this.

It was in André Gürtler’s class that I discovered my love for typeface design which subsequently I have pursued for more than 30 years. His class, too, followed the above mentioned principles and, looking back, they were enforced again when I joined the Monotype Drawing Office in 1989 as a fresh graduate. A series of strict exercises, devised by David Saunders, to train hand-eye coordination and the use of drawing tools further prepared me to design type digitally with bezier curves to a high and professional quality.

Today, I am increasingly directing my skills and experience toward accessibility in type and typography, and the philosophy that my teachers at Basel taught me is fundamental to understanding what that means. ‘I like it’ simply doesn’t do when it comes to accessibility. In the article ‘The three pillars of accessibility’ I define what you need to think about when you create, and the above mentioned design philosophy describes how you need to think about your design work. Design is not about self-fulfilment and chasing the next award; design is about finding solutions to a problem that benefits as broad a group of people as possible.

All images copyright of Bruno Maag

Writing and, by extension, reading are humanity’s greatest cultural achievement which happened approximately 5,000 to 5,500 years ago. From what we know today, it originated in ancient Egypt with the invention of hieroglyphics. Some believe Cuneiform, (the writing system of ancient Babylonia and Assyria), came first. But the earliest records date back “only” about 4,500 years. Either way, this article’s purpose is not to debate which came first but to explain the different concepts of writing systems.

Four basic types

When we speak of writing systems we mean the act of making marks, graphic symbols, on a surface using any kind of implement… even one’s finger. For the purpose of this article I will focus on visual writing systems but with an awareness that Braille is also a writing system, albeit requiring a tactile input to be read. I would not consider sign language a writing system but as a communication system — a different type of “language”.

Writing systems can broadly be categorised into four types: Alphabetic, Syllabic, Abjad and Ideographic. Of these, the first three represent the sounds of languages, and ideographs represent concepts. This is an important distinction as this has a bearing on the time it takes to learn how to read and write, and possibly on reading difficulties such as dyslexia.

Let’s look at the writing systems in a bit more detail:

Alphabetic

In an alphabet, each character represents one or more sounds of a language. Some languages require the addition of diacritics, or accents to modify the sound behaviour. Letter combinations are also used to express certain sounds of a language that otherwise would require a new character or additional accent. English is a great example of ‘how not to do it’ where often different sounds use the same letter combinations, and vowels can be modified by the either preceding or following consonant, or another vowel even. This can cause difficulties for learner readers and people with reading impairments.
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian are alphabets.

Syllabic

Syllabic writing systems in general represent the consonant sounds of a language with an inherent vowel, and modifier marks indicate the changed vowel sound following the consonant. It is not uncommon to see several variations of the same basic character, depending on the number of vowels present in that language. Some syllabic writing systems may also change the consonant shape when preceded by a vowel that has a specific dependency within the sentence syntax.Most Asian writing systems are syllabic and tend to have varying degrees of linguistic and grammatical complexity. The aforementioned Cuneiform is largely a syllabic writing system.

Abjad

These are in essence consonant-only writing systems and may have some basic distinct vowel characters. Vowel sounds are generally indicated with diacritic marks placed near the consonant that precedes the vowel. Vowel and other pronunciation marks are not commonly used in day-to-day writing, but instead to avoid word ambiguity. Classical and religious writing makes extensive use of diacritic marks as it is imperative that the words are read exactly as the author intended. Examples of modern abjad are Arabic and Hebrew.

Ideographic

Characters in this category of writing system, represent words or even entire expressions of a language. Each word requires a representation, and when new words enter the vocabulary, a new character has to be created. It is normal for a reader of an ideographic system to have to learn around 3,000 characters just for day-to-day communications. Ideographic systems are highly organised and consist of a core set of symbols that are combined to create new expressions. Newly created symbols must of course be learnt but a highly proficient reader may also be able to glean the meaning of the character simply by analysing its core elements. Examples of ideographic writing systems are Chinese and the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Korean is considered ideographic but contains alphabetic core elements that are combined into a single character to make the word or expression. Japanese is a mixture of alphabetic (Romani), syllabic (Kana) and ideographic (Kanji).

Our system is better than yours

The main advantage of learning to read and write sound-based systems over ideographic is that the learner has to memorise fewer characters. It takes a child of a European language approximately two years to gain reasonably confident and proficient literacy skills whereas a Chinese child may take up to six years. Once proficiency is attained the advantages of one system over another are gone. There is no better or worse way of writing; it is simply different and its ease depends on what we’re used to.

It’s also important to understand that a language can be written with any type of writing system. There are many examples of this occurring, even today: it is not uncommon that young Arab speakers use Latin letters to transliterate their language on mobile devices simply because it’s easier. In the 11th and 12th centuries Arabs occupied southern Spain, and Spanish would be written in Arabic. During the Soviet Union the Armenian and Georgian communities had to adopt the Cyrillic writing systems for their language. Turkish was written in Arabic until the 1930s when Ataturk changed it all to Latin. And until recently, Vietnamese used Chinese characters but today employs Latin.

The way we write is largely the result of humanity’s violent history and it continues to change. It’s the result of war, politics, religion and economy, and it’s entirely feasible that in decades or centuries to come we may write English in a different writing system, or even a new one. One thing is for certain: the way we write shapes our thinking.

At the movies

Science fiction and fantasy movies often depict writing systems from alien races or mythological peoples. What strikes me is that often these are alphabetically based systems and not surprisingly so. Western based producers and designers are immersed in alphabetical thinking and are unlikely to contemplate that there could be something else. Klingon is an alphabet, even though there is no reason why Klingons would use an alphabet considering their rather guttural language.

Elvish was devised by Tolkien for his Hobbit and Lord of the Rings stories. He took a holistic approach and created what could be considered an abjad system, consonant-only with vowel diacritics following the relevant consonant. Truly inspiring was the newly created writing system for ‘Arrival’. It is meta-level ideographic as it doesn’t only represent words or expressions but entire thought processes that transcend time and space, and capture emotions and facts all in one. But we are entering the realms of philosophy now…

On our wonderful planet

Many of us have a very limited knowledge of the existence of the myriad writing systems that are in use today. Around three dozen or so are used by more than 10 million people while others struggle for survival with only a handful of readers left. There are organisations and companies that actively work on preserving near extinct writing systems and to archive that particular piece of cultural heritage. There are also communities working to create new writing systems that better reflect their language and cultural heritage.

What is clear from this wonderful kaleidoscope of letter shapes is that writing is very closely tied to culture and to an extent to liberty. Dark chapters in human history have seen time and again wiping out a people by simply prohibiting a people’s way of writing. The era of Stalin saw Armenian and Georgian culture suppressed by banning their respective writing systems and enforcing Cyrillic. After the fall, both cultures reclaimed and now fiercely protect their writing culture.

Companies can contribute to building respect for other cultures by ensuring that they consider writing systems as part of their communications with their target audiences. This will build emotional, functional and technical accessibility. It will also increase the commercial benefits for the company that actively engages with readers of letterforms other than our own.

Notes: the typefaces shown above are: Aktiv Grotesk for alphabetic, abjad and ideographic, and Bressay for syllabic. Both are available from Dalton Maag.

It’s all squiggles to me was originally published in The Readability Group on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have always been a fan of gas hobs because once the pan is hot, temperature regulation is instant and easily controllable. I also like that you can put a wok on the largest ring and have the heat go on the sides of the pan rather than just the bottom, and this allows me to cook different foods at different times whilst keeping the already processed bits warm in the center. The gas hob also has decent sized knobs that you can grab and turn for temperature regulation. It’s tactile, it’s intuitive; the numbers on the knob are large enough and have good contrast with the colour of the hob. The symbols that indicate which knob controls which ring are clearly visible, or are even positioned in such a way that indicate which ring they belong to.

I now have an induction hob. In principle I am quite pleased with the performance of the actual cooking rings. An amount of water heats up in about half or two-thirds of the time it would take on a gas ring, and temperature control is instant, although I may have burnt the food by the time I have fiddled with the digital controls.

Every day I get into a mini-rage about those controls. The entire design of the hob surface is an accessibility Freddy-Krueger style nightmare, invoked by some smart-arse product designer with an utter disdain for users. Let’s start with the shiny mirror-like surface: nothing much wrong with that if you like looking at yourself when cooking but depending on ambient lighting conditions it is almost impossible to make out where the demarcations are for the cooking rings. They are a light-ish grey, about 1 mm thick.

Then I have the actual control interface for the rings. Same light-ish grey, with symbols for ring selection, thin-lined boxes around 3 mm square and a filled-in box for the ring selection; the dial for the amount of energy to be applied to the selected ring is designed in a similar fashion. This is a touch sensitive area.

Have you ever tried regulating a touch sensitive digital dial with wet or oily fingers?

Have you, product designer, have you?

With dry hands I need to power up the unit by pressing the ‘on’ button — easy enough. Then I need to select the cooking ring by pressing on the appropriate icon, but I have a smart cooker that senses if a pan is on a ring and will select it for me automatically (by this time the gas would already be burning, btw). Then I need to select the energy level, from 0 to 9 from the dial slider. If I don’t do that within about 5 seconds, the whole thing turns off and I start again. (This cooking malarkey is starting to feel like a game of snakes and ladders.)

If I have multiple pans on the cooker, I constantly need to juggle my digital dials by pressing the appropriate hob button, and then use the slider to regulate the energy. Imagine you have three things going, all of them ‘a-la-minute’, with butter fingers. Or try to imagine doing that with even minor motor-control issues. Oh, and if you happen to wipe your surface with a towel, because you want to keep it tidy and clean, you may inadvertently change the energy setting for the selected ring and burn your food.

By the way, all of the above is inaccessible to people with visual impairments. There are no tactile indicators that would help navigate the surface.

Thank you, product designer, for being so user friendly!

No! I don’t want some fancy digital user-useless interface that I can hardly see and is cumbersome to operate. I want knobs that I can turn to exactly where I want the heat to be, and that are arranged on the cooker in such a way that it is instantly clear to me which ring I am operating.

No, I don’t want a user-useless interface that has the logo of the maker displayed as the most important part, as a self-aggrandising symbol of smugness.

I want knobs.

I want analog.

I want a hob that cooks my food without having to perform quantum physics style feats first..

Aaaaarrrrghhh…

The visual system — a brief guide to anatomy and physiology in the context of typography

The vast majority of people would classify reading as a visual activity but it can also be a tactile experience such as Braille script or touch-sign language. This article focuses on the visual system and with an understanding of the visual system it may be easier to lower the accessibility barriers some people may experience.

The visual system can broadly be divided into two parts: ophthalmic and neurological. The ophthalmic part affects everything that is in the eyes, including the connection to the optic nerve. Any impairment or defect to the eye will have an effect on the quality of visual information that is transmitted to the brain to be processed accordingly. There are many ophthalmic conditions and many can be overcome with assistive technologies like glasses.

This article about the visual system describes the basic and broad concepts of where things are and how they work in the context of typography. For those interested in academic and medical detail of the visual system a good starting point can be found here.

Ophthalmic
Humans have two eyes set apart horizontally for depth perception which allows us to judge distances and make a 3D map of the world. Eye movement is controlled by a set of six muscles on each eye that allow for rotation of the eyeball, and the muscles are controlled by the brain’s motor systems. Each eye has a left field of vision (LFV) and a right field of vision (RFV), and each is connected to the respective optic nerve strand. The front of the eye, the part that is visible from the outside, is where light comes through. In essence, it functions very much like a photographic camera, with the iris regulating the amount of light that comes through, and the lens focussing the light projection to the back of the eye, the retina.

The back of the eye is covered by light receptors that convert light to electrical charges. There are two types of receptors: rods and cones. Rods are for contrast and black & white vision, while cones regulate colour vision that pick up the red, green and blue frequencies of light waves. The back of the eye has three distinct parts: the retina which is most of the back of the eye, the macula in a central position and within that the fovea at the very center.

The fovea and macula are our central vision; it is where ‘20/20’ vision occurs. The fovea holds the highest density of rods and cones, about 500,000 in a 1.77 mm/sq area, lessening a bit in the macular area. The further out from the retinal center, the less the density of light receptors, in particular cones. At the very peripheries it is mainly rods that make our vision, and although we think we see colour it is simply the brain compensating.

This focus on central vision necessitates saccadic eye movements, the constant micro movements of the eyeballs that capture snapshots of the world around us and are then assembled by the brain into a coherent image. Saccadic movements are also in place when we read text, in particular long form. In the Latin alphabet* the eyes fixate on a specific point in a line of text to capture about seven to nine letters of that line. This number of letters fits more or less into the fovea at a reading distance of approximately 30cm and a font size of about 9 to 11 point, depending on the design of the typeface. Once the letters are captured and sent to the brain via the optic nerve, the next saccade occurs. A change of size of letters in the fovea, either by changing the reading distance or font size, of course changes the number of letters captured in a saccade. The saccadic movements are controlled by the brain’s motor system which if impaired can severely impact the quality of vision. But this article is not the place to discuss the brain’s motor system.

Within the macula sits the ‘blind spot’ which is devoid of any receptors. This is the area that connects all the receptors to the optic nerve which carries the electrical charges to the back of the brain into the visual cortex. It is clear from the above very broad description of the eye that any damage or defect will have an impact on the quality of the signal that travels down the optic nerve.

*Other writing systems may have a different behaviour but I am not aware of any research in this area. Greek and Cyrillic are likely to be the same as Latin as they are both alphabetic and overall have proportional structures similar to Latin.

Neurological
Each eye has one optic nerve per eye, each made up of two strands of nerve fibres that are connected either to the LVF or RVF. The LVF nerve path traverses into the right hemisphere of the brain and the RVF into the left, and eventually end up in the visual cortex at the back located in the occipital lobe. The visual cortex receives all visual stimuli and also acts as a ‘sorting office’ to distribute different types of visual information to other parts of the brain for further processing. This may include facial recognition, object recognition, spatial orientation and written information.

The optic nerve carries sensory input, in this case visual information, of different types: colour, contrast, brightness. Light and accommodation reflexes are conducted by the optic nerve. At some point the optic nerve divides into the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways, each with specific functions. The magnocellular pathway primarily provides static, motion and depth information and is particularly sensitive to contrast. The parvocellular pathway primarily provides higher resolution and fine detail of the visual information.

The visual information arrives into the right part of the visual cortex from the LVF of the left eye via the optic chiasm, and vice versa, in essence leaving a ‘split’ image. For a composite image to appear in other parts of the brain part of the image has to cross the Corpus Callosum, the white matter tissue that connects the two hemispheres. When reading the visual information — the letters — are sent to the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) that is located at the base of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere primarily deals with linguistic functions in the majority of people. The right hemisphere handles many image areas as well as arithmetic functions.

The VWFA recognises and decodes letter shapes; letters are paired up, syllables are made and word shapes are formed. Some research suggests that the VWFA is also involved in some lexical processes but the visual shape of the word is sent to the lexical (semantic) area of the brain where meaning is attached. Depending on language the phonological area is also involved in detecting the accurate meaning of the written word shape. Although not strictly speaking part of the visual system, recent research indicates that the cerebellum also has an influence on our reading ability.

The entire reading process is hugely complex and involves multiple parts of the brain, many not part of the visual system but working in parallel to successfully make sense of the written content. The quality of the information that is first received in the fovea, then converted to electric charges that travel down the optic nerve and via the visual cortex to the VWFA is what determines how well we can read. It is here where legibility comes to life and readability is determined.

The VWFA does not care whether the letter has serifs or not, whether it is a Latin character or Mongolian; it cares about how clearly identifiable each character is, how much ambiguity there is between letters that are vaguely similar. If additional elements, such as serifs, in a typeface help to distinguish characters they should be used; if they are a hindrance, they should be avoided. Clarity of letter shapes is also determined by the spacing between letters. With tight letter spacing specific letter pair combinations like ‘r n’ can easily be decoded by the VWFA as ‘m’ which leads to the word shape having to be reevaluated as it doesn’t make sense as a word in itself, or within the context of a sentence.

Strictly speaking the VWFA is not part of the visual system as it is not so much acquiring and processing visual stimuli as it is decoding and interpreting the stimuli to facilitate linguistic abilities. But it is clear and inarguable that the design and clarity of a letter shape and its surroundings have a considerable impact on how well the VWFA can interpret that shape. From the point of view of design and accessibility, the VWFA should be considered part of the human visual system.

Vergence and Accommodation Conflict (VAC)
New technologies bring new problems and the emergence of the various new realities (Virtual, Mix, Augmented) has not made life easier for those who care about accessibility. The visual system as described above is obviously engaged in the same way as in other types of visual stimuli with the exception of the conflict mentioned in the title.

In the ‘real’ world your eyeballs rotate in such a way that the line of sight meets at the same spot for each eye: vergence. The reflex mechanism in the optic nerve flexes the lens depending on the distance of the object to the eyes: accommodation. The entire visual system and motor functions in the brain have evolved to be highly successful to see things with depth perception and in clear focus.

Using a new reality device fools your brain into a ‘correct’ vergence — looking at something in the distance or close by. At the same time your focus — accommodation — is exactly at the distance between the lens and the device surface. The brain and visual system therefore have two conflicting tasks to do. This is what causes fatigue, eye strain, headaches, dizziness and in some cases even nausea. Most people can use new reality devices only for a short period of time.

The window for success
This article only looks at the visual system, a tiny fraction of all the parts of the human anatomy and physiology that are involved to enable reading and, by extension, writing. Reading and Writing are some of the most complex and involved activities a human can do, requiring a large amount of resources from the brain, yet we take it all for granted. With a bit of imagination, this brief description of the visual system illustrates the many places things can go wrong and access to written information can be impaired or denied altogether. The window for accessibility success is very narrow, and designers and content creators must do all in their power to at least give the VWFA a small chance of correctly interpreting letter shapes.

The visual system — a brief guide to anatomy and physiology in the context of typography was originally published in The Readability Group on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The dropping of vowels is nothing new, even for us who use an alphabetic writing system; we do so regularly in text messages and yet nobody seems to complain about it. I personally find it annoying when I receive such a message but so far it has never led me to misunderstand the message. Proficient readers are perfectly capable of interpreting a consonant only approach since we recognise the context the message is in. Where there is great ambiguity in a consonant only word, simply place a vowel for clarity.

Moving to a primarily consonant only approach in writing would change our writing system from alphabetic to abjad. Arabic and Hebrew writing systems are examples of abjad, and the readers of those systems do not seem to have a problem with the clarity of the message in their day to day communications. At school, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and other speakers of languages using the Arabic writing system learn to write and read with vowel indicators and other pronunciation marks. Once they have mastered this they will move on to the more ‘simplified’ way of writing and reading. There is no reason this could not also be applied to languages using the Latin alphabet.

British English speakers who seem so incensed over ‘abrdn’ should take a look in the mirror and remember how our American cousins tend to pronounce Gloucester, Worcester and many other words that are spelled nothing like they are pronounced which, btw, does not help those with reading difficulties or learner readers.

Humans use many different ways of writing their language, and broadly we can categorise four types of writing systems: alphabetic, syllabic, abjad and ideographic. Out of the many dozens of systems I can think of only a handful that are alphabetic, the main ones being Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian.

As far as branding the organisation goes, it certainly has done the job: everyone is talking about it, and given a few more weeks the waves will have calmed and people will continue to call it ‘Aberdeen’ despite it being written ‘abrdn’. It’s worth noting that so far we have only seen the wordmark without the context of application. Will the organisation call itself ‘Aberdeen’ or ‘abrdn’ in running copy? I could imagine that a consonant only spelling will become annoying very quickly when everything else is written with vowels.

All the debates that are currently had over this — a storm in a teacup, frankly — do nothing but show our deep inherent cultural and personal biases toward one thing or another. It shows our tribalism and why branding works so well.

Using symbols that visualize language the purpose of writing is to communicate thought, across geography and time. Typography is a formalised and mechanised means of writing and still serves the purpose of transmitting an author’s thought to others without distraction to the reader. The typeface is the most basic element of typography defining the visual appearance of a font, the collection of glyphs. They are the very symbols that visualize language that may either represent the sound of a language or its concepts. The Latin alphabet or the Devanagari syllabary are examples of sound representation whereas Chinese symbols are an example of concept representation.

Emotional accessibility
When Gutenberg introduced printing with moveable type he cast several versions of each character to mimic the handwriting style, the calligraphy, that was used to write books at the time. His main concern was that readers would reject printed books if the letters were too consistent in appearance. By creating multiple versions of each glyph he provided emotional accessibility to potential readers who were used to seeing the irregular characters of hand written manuscripts..

In 1927 a study by Poffenberger & Francken established a direct emotional connection between type styles and subject matter, between type style and the emotional reaction the style evoked. We rarely notice when the choice of typeface is right for the subject matter but will strongly react when it isn’t as was illustrated when CERN chose Comic Sans to announce one of the most significant scientific discoveries in history.

The choice of typeface plays an important role to emotional accessibility; how the type is set is as important. Getting the typeface wrong may immediately turn the reader away from the content, however beautiful the setting and layout, and conversely, the most beautiful typeface cannot engage emotionally if the layout is wrong. Consider the newspaper: every day it has to attract the eye of the potential reader. It does so by deliberately employing typefaces and layout formatting, from large headlines, tightly set and bold, to the actual text giving a factual and calm impression engaging with us before we have even read a single word. When choosing the typeface today we often find that sans serif type styles with a constructed or geometric appearance are viewed as neutral, and in recent years have become synonymous with corporate branding blandness. Some serif type styles are perceived to be academic while others have an authoritative expression.

Blackletter — also known as Gothic type — has long been associated with the Third Reich and all its evils. This is not least because the rulers at the time declared this style, and many derivatives of it, the German type. Upon discovering that the Jewish community used Schwabacher, a subcategory of Blackletter, the German authorities declared it all Jewish type and immediately proceeded to adopt Roman style typefaces as their official typographic look. The younger generation today, born in the late 1990s and later no longer or only tentatively have that negative emotional connection. This generation uses Blackletter typography much more creatively and liberally to express different emotions.

Functional accessibility
It is not always easy to distinguish between functional and emotional accessibility since a functional deficiency can lead to emotional rejection before even a single word has been read. Yet there are some very clear definitions of what functional accessibility in typography constitutes. Legibility and readability are two clearly defined functional accessibility parameters that deal with the quick and correct identification of individual glyphs and with the smoothness by which paragraph can be read. The target audience plays an important factor in the typographic decision making. For example, over 50 year old people generally have a visual acuity of only about 20% of that of 20 year old people. That makes small type sizes, in a lighter style immediately less accessible, or even inaccessible at all. The older person literally cannot see it properly.

Sometimes the style of a typeface contains a lot of ambiguity between characters which makes it harder for the brain to decode individual glyphs (legibility), particularly at text sizes. Simply making text larger is not necessarily the answer as this may create other functional accessibility problems, so choosing a typeface with less ambiguity may alleviate ambiguity without the need of larger sizes or other graphic crutches to make content legible. It is also possible that the typeface cannot be changed for brand identity reasons. In such instances simple devices such as increasing letter spacing or, if the font family allows, an increased weight style may already alleviate accessibility issues.

Tight letter spacing is one of the most common functional accessibility hurdles in text sizes. Not only does it often elicit an emotional rejection but it also places a heavier burden on decoding characters due to visual crowding. One of the most obvious examples where visual crowding can become an actual barrier is the letter combination ‘r n’ which can easily be read as ‘m’. Some typefaces are designed with tighter letter spacing and they would benefit from a slight positive tracking but most, and in particular serif fonts, tend to have letter spacing that is designed for reading sizes. It has to be said here, that the larger the type is set, the tighter the letter spacing is required.

One area that is often overlooked, mostly through ignorance or thoughtlessness, is language support. This is a functional accessibility issue as much as technical, and can also create emotional acceptance or rejection. A word may use an accented character not present in the font, for a name for example, and that character is often substituted by another font with a stylistically different appearance. Or it may simply leave a ‘missing character box’ in the text. Not only does this disturb the look and feel of the text but it will create a readability bump. At the extreme end poor setting or poor choice of a font for more complex writing systems can create strong functional inaccessibility. Consider Arabic: it can be seen with typesetting that is made up of separated glyphs which is a complete functionality fail to the Arabic reader who expects the letters to join.

Technical accessibility
Linguistic support is also a considerable part of technical accessibility. The font must support the languages intended to be written, and the software used for setting the language must also be able to handle the sometimes very complex rendering of glyphs or glyph combinations. Too often, linguistic support is not considered at the beginning of a project which inevitably leads to a functional and technical accessibility failure.

There are many guidelines and legislative documents that deal with specifications for all sorts of typographic elements. Unfortunately, they are too simplistic at best, and outright poor or even wrong at worst. What it does allow is the ticking of accessibility boxes, irrespective of whether the result is emotionally or functionally accessible. Consider for a moment the stipulation that type should be specified at a minimum of 24px. This guideline in itself is a technical accessibility failure as it does not take into account the different height dimensions of typefaces depending on style. At 24px one font may perform perfectly fine, and may even be perceived large; yet another font at 24px will invite complaints that it is too small.

For print the typographer or graphic designer is largely in control of how the content will be presented to the audience. There may be a few minor parameters outside their control but nothing that would adversely affect typographic accessibility. Providing content that is both emotionally and functionally accessible in a digital environment is a near impossible task. The typographer or graphic designer has no or only limited control on how the typeface or layout is presented to the reader. Much of it depends on the platforms and programs that the reader uses, irrespective of how well a font meets the published technical specifications. Web browsers, for example, all tend to use their own interpretations of rasterizing software to convert font outlines into pixels. Sometimes, important data that the font developer included for better accessibility is ignored, or substituted by the browser. This inevitably leads to varying font behaviour depending on which browser content is displayed, and even which version of said browser.

The natural instinct would be to simply use a font that is installed on an operating system and then define fall-back font alternatives. On the surface that may tick the boxes, and appear like a solution but the reality is that emotional accessibility fails as the typeface no longer represents the look and feel the author or content creator intended. Functional accessibility may be compromised, too, by a poor choice of system font.

Words are important, how they are crafted into sentences and into messages. Poor typographic accessibility undermines typography’s primary purpose: to transmit thought from one person to another by means of symbols that visualize language, across both borders and time. It is impossible to achieve 100% accessibility, in any human undertaking, but it is possible, with careful consideration of the three components of accessibility to achieve optimum accessibility.

Follow @ReadabilityGrp for regular insights and discussions about accessibility in typography.

Typographic accessibility in more detail was originally published in The Readability Group on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Functional accessibility in typography includes legibility and readability among other things, and often the two terms are applied interchangeably. It is important to have a clear definition of what each does to be able to identify a potential accessibility hurdle. A great variety of factors can of course affect the legibility of a typeface and the readability of a typographic setting. For avoidance of misunderstanding, the below descriptions of legibility and readability are based on neuroscientific definitions and are used for objective testing.

Legibility is the definition of how quickly and accurately a reader can recognise a character in any given writing system, in any given language. This is purely about the shaping of a character and when legibility testing is applied, external factors such as reading conditions and the test participant abilities need to be taken into account. Legibility testing is usually carried out by presenting the participant with a single character starting with a very short duration of a few milliseconds. The duration is increased until the participant can correctly identify a series of characters. The lower the duration with a large count of correct answers, the better the legibility. Legibility is an objective measure and does not depend on emotional factors.

All writing systems contain characters that have likeness with one another and create ambiguity. The degree of ambiguity depends on the actual design of the typeface and the size at which characters are presented: smaller characters may need more effort than larger ones to be correctly identified.

Readability is the definition of how smoothly and quickly a reader can read a passage of text, irrespective of the content of that text. The choice of typeface is important in this context but more important are letter and line spacing. They determine how easily the eyes can fixate during a saccade. Smoothness of reading is dependent on regular and consecutive saccade flow, and is interrupted when the eyes have to jump back and forth on a line of text. Readability has a considerable impact on comprehension and the smoother the reading the higher the comprehension. Readability testing is usually carried out with the participant’s eye movements tracked. The test also measures the duration it takes the participant to read a passage of text and provides objective results.

As with legibility, readability applies to all writing systems but additional factors may contribute to effective readability beyond letter and line spacing. Highly complex systems with conjunctive shape changing, or complex Chinese ideographs, may affect how we have to measure and regard readability. Unfortunately, little to no research has been carried out for writing systems other than Latin.

Word Superiority Effect
The above definitions of legibility and readability apply to all types of reading, whether that is a single letter, a word or a passage of text. Individual letter shapes need to be correctly identified and entire words or sentences need to be smoothly read. A short word may only require a single fixation to capture the letter shapes but smoothness still is likely to apply in that there is no need for a further fixation to ascertain the correct identification of the letter shapes. We also have to consider the Word Superiority Effect (WSE) that allows the brain to allocate meaning to a word based on the broad visual shape of the word itself. The WSE is also responsible for why we sometimes do not ‘see’ a spelling mistake. It is important to note that numbers are read in a different part of the brain than regular letters.

Both legibility and readability can be impacted by surrounding and ambient conditions. A typeface can be highly legible under optimal conditions but can easily deteriorate to illegibility if conditions are suboptimal, or the impact of the display method has not been considered properly. Readability, too, is susceptible to ambient conditions but tends to be affected by poor typographic decision making like tightening the space between characters or between lines.

Good practice in typography
When setting type for good legibility and readability, contrast is one of the main factors that need to be considered, applicable to both typeface style and colour. High contrast typefaces set at reading sizes tend to create a striping effect due to their strong vertical emphasis. This can affect legibility in that ambiguity between characters may be increased. It certainly impacts readability as it is much harder for the eyes to find their fixations due to the striping which in turn creates a stroboscopic effect. It is therefore preferable to choose a lower contrast typeface that leaves a more even tone on the page. Titling and display sizes are less affected by high contrast type.

Colour contrast also needs to be considered and traditional book typography always sets type using off-black ink on off-white paper. Reduced fore-/background contrast is simply good design practice that has been in use in wayfinding and signage for a long time. In those environments, one can often find white type on dark blue, or black on yellow. There is no reason why those principles cannot be applied to text sizes in all typographic layouts.

Digital typography poses many challenges to legibility and readability, and of course to typographic accessibility at large. The creator or designer of a digital typographic layout may have the best intentions at heart but simply cannot control how this layout displays on a recipient’s device. When we design with the intention of good legibility and readability we must make use of the latest technologies but at the same time bear our audience in mind, some of whom may not have access to such latest technologies. Emotional, functional and technical accessibility have to be considered as one to provide the most optimal legibility and readability.

Follow the @ReadabilityGrp for regular insights and discussions about accessibility in typography.

About Legibility and Readability was originally published in The Readability Group on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The three pillars of accessibility

Accessibility means different things to different people but accessibility is not just a single thing. We can broadly divide it into three pillars: emotional, functional and technical. Each pillar must be accessible in itself but all must be considered together. We also have to accept that accessibility can never be perfect but it can be optimal.

The principle of the three pillars of accessibility can be applied to any type of work and is not limited to a specific industry. This is a guide to better understand the role of each:
Emotional accessibility is the first impression a person experiences when presented with a service or product. Does that person react positively or negatively, do they feel invited or rejected; in short, does the reaction meet the expectations of the original intent? Emotional accessibility and acceptance is a crucial incentive for the person to engage with the service or product. Without it, functional and technical accessibility are largely redundant.

Functional accessibility defines whether a service or product is designed in such a way that a person can easily understand and manage it. Does the person experience obstacles that prevent them from achieving the task presented to them? Functional accessibility must support the user in order for a service or product to be successful. Without functional accessibility the service or product is set to fail in the long term.

Technical accessibility refers to physical and software products that are engineered in such a way that they can fulfill the functional accessibility expectations. Does the user of a product experience limitations in accessing the product because of inherent faults in the product? A product that is compromised technically cannot support either of the other two accessibility components and the entire product fails.

The above description of the three pillars of accessibility can be applied to any human output but at The Readability Group we are concerned with accessibility in typography, from the choice of typeface and how written content is formatted. We are concerned with legibility and readability, and how these two are different, yet closely related. We are working to bring about a better understanding of how typography helps with better communication through research and studies. The findings of our work will provide the platform for informed discourse and definition of standards that at present are woefully inadequate and in some cases plain wrong.

Follow the @ReadabilityGrp for regular insights and discussions about accessibility in typography.

The three components of accessibility was originally published in The Readability Group on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“For our members, by our members” is also the driver for the structure of the new website. At the recent ATypI conference in Antwerp we presented our thinking and how it ties in with all the other activities the board is currently working on. The new website places you, our ATypI members, at its heart. The website will enable members around the world to make connections and communicate with each other. The new website is also a platform for corporate and educational organisations to interact with our membership, and in turn for individual members to interact with our institutional members and partners.

We aspire to strengthen the position of ATypI as the global forum for the type community and business, and build links with other design-focused organisations. We believe that ATypI can also serve as a link to non-design disciplines from the sciences and humanities that intersect typography. This will underline the relevance of type and typography to diverse disciplines, and benefit our individual and institutional members.

The new website design will comprise a main website that houses ATypI as an organisation built around membership, and supports the four key areas we have identified in conversation with many of our members. ATypI conferences will have their own microsite that exclusively deals with conference related activities and concerns. This approach allows each conference to have an individual identity alongside the main ATypI identity, and without confusion with other activities. This will also allow continuity in our comprehensive archiving of past events.

Crucially, the new ATypI website will be viewable in any current device environment. It will be possible to view your interactions with other ATypI members or your conference schedule on your mobile phone, on the go. This dynamic access is facilitated by a simple typographic design.

This design simplicity was achieved after researching related organisations. But the design does not only facilitate mobile-friendly viewing of the website. It goes further in that it enables contributors to submit their work in a manner that will help maintain a consistent look and feel, and consistency of our members’ information on the site and on event listings, without extensive manual work by our executive team.

“For our members, by our members” is the driver for all the changes at ATypI. Accordingly, the member pages on the website will be given particular attention. Registering details is open to all who are interested in type and typography, but only members will receive enhanced benefits such as access to value content, and specific details of members, and being able to participate in conversations and shaping the organisation. Member profiles will be administered by the individual. Personal details can be added, and interests can be tagged to help with search and other functions and all profiles have basic visibility to everyone, with members having further profile viewing access. We are aiming to grow the functions available to members through their profiles over time, after we roll out the first version and gather feedback. As an organisation we do have a legal obligation to ensure that content follows rules and guidelines which will of course be published.

ATypI is dedicated to support its community with as much free content as possible, much of which will be hosted on or through the new website. The main site, the organisation site, will contain all relevant information about ATypI, what we stand for, our goals, general content, links with partner organisations and much more. Microsites will exclusively host conference information, such as program, speakers, and activities around the conference.

We are aiming to launch the new website, and the new conference site in time for the ATypI Tokyo 2019 conference. In the time until Tokyo 2019 we are aiming to introduce elements of the website step-by-step to start rolling out the benefits of being an ATypI member. We are doing our best to fulfill our commitments to our members but it is important to remember that ATypI is run by volunteers, and everyone actively involved in the growth of the organisation also has day jobs which may lead to delays in delivering certain parts of our commitments to our members.

A new website for ATypI was originally published in ATypI notes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.