The battle of the sans-serif versus the serif font

If your communications director won't allow the use of a serif font in an appeal letter because the brand guidelines demand you use sans-serif Frutiger, here's a piece of research that might help you win them round.

Daniel Oppenheimer and two colleagues, Connor Diemand-Yauman and Erikka Vaughan, asked a group of college students between the ages of 18 and 40 to learn about two species of extra-terrestrials – the pangerish and the norgletti.

The pangerish profile was printed in a grey 12-point Bodoni font, whereas the norgletti profile was in a pure-black, 16-point Arial.

After 15 minutes of distraction, the students were tested. They recalled 87% of the pangerish facts versus 73% of the norgletti facts.

The researchers repeated the experiment with a study based at a high school in Ohio. For a complete term, 222 students were provided with learning materials in a selection of different fonts and the results were the same. The students reading Bodoni style fonts did better than those who were given the same information in Arial style fonts.

I say style, because the researchers used a selection of fonts in their experiments. They discovered that even the more complicated serif fonts such as Monotype Corsiva were better than Arial when it came to recall (but then again, so was Comic Sans).

They concluded that people remember more when they are reading smaller, less legible type because it causes them to slow down and read more carefully.

When questioned in the Harvard Business Review, David Oppenheimer went as far as to suggest that recall could be improved by regularly changing fonts in a publication (e.g. in every chapter of a book or every story in a newsletter).

But before you decide to print your next appeal in six-point Desdemona, he also pointed out that there was a cut-off point where the use of difficult to read type would cause the effect to be reversed, particularly with uninterested or unmotivated readers.

Some charities don't seem that bothered about the choice of fonts in fundraising materials, leaving the decision on what they use down to the designer who created the brand guidelines - whether they understand the needs of donors or not.

That might well be a mistake, particularly when you take into account that a different font might cause your reader to remember far more about your charity.

Comments

[Tom Ahern]

Greetings from across the pond, Mark. My own reference is the research done by Aussie editor, Colin Wheildon, in the early 1990s, which showed that body copy set in serif type faces such as Times New Roman was 400% easier/faster to read than body copy set in sans serif faces such as Arial. He drew no conclusions from this. He simply reported the lab results. My own interpretation (and though I can dress like a scientist, I am simply a writer gob) is that Western brains encounter far more serif typefaces than sans serif typefaces, in the school texts we grow up on, in the newspapers and magazines and books we read as adults. Hence, our brains become far more accustomed to (and speedy at) recognizing serif letterforms. At the anecdotal level, I've experienced this myself. Every so often I will pick up a book set in sans serif type ... and I find my reading slows to a crawl, at least for the first 20 pages or so, until my brain makes an adjustment. There is nothing intrinsic to serifs or the lack that makes body copy easier to comprehend. It's just what our brains are used to, I believe. And our brains are used to serifs.

[mark phillips]

Thanks Tom. Great point. The research team highlight the adjustment effect in their paper too, recommending that publishers switch fonts to help overcome it.

Typefaces are always such a contentious issue with brand teams. Your comments make a good deal of sense.

[John Lepp]

good comment Tom - and I don't disagree but i wonder as time moves on, and we get used to consuming more of our content from the online world (which is almost entirely sans serif) will our brains evolve to digesting sans serif better?

[Chris Stoddard]

PIRA, the Print Industries Research Association used to run a course for editors on print technologies. This included a section on why all books and most newspapers (at the time I went on the course) were printed in serif faces. The reason given was that the serifs (the little "feet" ) at the bottom of all vertical strokes of a letter, such as L, I, N, M etc create the illusion of an underlining, allowing the reader to read the material more quickly and take more in. I've always believed this to be true and the 2000 or more direct mail fundraising campaigns I've been involved in over the last 25 years have all been produced with serif faces. Followed by ( mostly) happy faces at the results.

[mark phillips]

Hi Chris and John

It always makes me scratch my head when a communications director dictates a sans-serif font should be used in a letter when the vast majority of evidence would seem to show this will reduce the amount of information absorbed and money donated.

Maybe over time, our use of the web will re-programme our brains, but it seems that the techniques we use for print media are beating those in use on-line at the moment...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2011/08/print_vs_online.html

Thanks for reading and commenting