Legibility

It's a property of the system as seen from above.

Legibility is a property of the system as seen from inside.

And users live inside.

If I were shipping this, and Daniel asked, I'd ship absolute offsets for the evening transition proportional for the dawn transition, and I'd document why.

So the month closes with a very unglamorous conclusion.

Legibility is career currency.

Yep.

If you can name the recurring pain, the boundary, the risk, and the small decision, you are closer to the real market than somebody refreshing a job board and calling that strategy.

William Morris held that all types should avoid hairlines, fussiness, and ugliness.

Legibility should have the right of way for most printed matter, especially children's books and newspapers.

If the latter desire compactness, they should condense their style, not their types.

A further important element which affects both the legibility and the durability of the book is the ink.

In all these studies, one obvious subject of investigation appears to have been overlooked, and that is the actual types of everyday print.

Do they vary greatly in legibility? Are some of them so bad that they ought to be rejected in toto? On the other hand, have the designers of certain types attained by distinct or by happy accident a degree of legibility that approximates the best to be hoped for? If so, can we trace the direction to be followed in seeking further improvement? To answer these questions, an extended investigation was undertaken at Clark University in nineteen eleven by Miss Barbara Elizabeth Rothlein under the direction of professor John Wallace Baird.

Her results were published by Clark University Library in January nineteen twelve under the title The Relative Legibility of Different Faces of Printing Types.

The pamphlet abounds in tables made clear by the use of the very types under consideration.