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Typography

The Staircase

·7 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

Kevin Larson and three colleagues gave twenty readers documents on screen, half set well and half badly, with electrodes over the muscle that draws the brows together.1 The readers frowned less over the better page and preferred it, and they understood it no better.1 When we first published this essay, it climbed in four steps from a carefully set page to a sale, and we asserted every step without measuring any of them. Larson’s is the one test built to judge typographic quality as a whole, and it stops the climb at the first step.1

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • How the chain was built
  • What moves a reading score
  • Twenty readers and four instruments
  • The grid’s claim about the reader
  • Where the advertising rules came from
  • Four rules we once called settled
  • A return that can be counted
  • Paying for the setting anyway

About the book

Notes

  1. Larson et al. 2007, Abstract and Conclusions (corrugator activation greater under poor typography in both studies); Results for the page-setting and OpenType studies: reading speed t(19) = 0.41, p = 0.69 and t(19) = 0.21, p = 0.84; comprehension t(19) = 0.96, p = 0.35 and t(19) = 0.18, p = 0.86; NASA-TLX workload; 90 per cent preference for the better page setting; Crossref record for Larson et al. 2007, DOI 10.1007/978-1-84628-664-3_4; People and Computers XX — Engage, pp. 41–56. Twenty participants in each of the two studies, reading on screen; conference proceedings rather than a refereed journal. The two studies varied page setting and typeface quality separately, and neither reading measure separated the conditions in either one. Evidence B: one credible study, or evidence with limits.

Sources

  • Larson, K., Hazlett, R. L., Chaparro, B. S. & Picard, R. W. (2007). Measuring the Aesthetics of Reading. In People and Computers XX - Engage (Proceedings of HCI 2006), pp. 41-56. microsoft.com
  • Crossref record for 'Measuring the Aesthetics of Reading'. api.crossref.org

Further reading