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Typography

The 67 Per Cent

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

Also available as a typeset book

Colin Wheildon edited an Australian motoring magazine, and he ran reading tests because he wanted to know whether readers understood his layouts.1 One of them produced the two numbers that have carried the case for serif body type for 30 years: 67 per cent good comprehension for a serif setting, 12 for a sans.2 It was a single test that the editor ran himself and never put to referees, and it has been reported as a decade of university research.1 The numbers can stay in the argument, provided the method travels with them.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • An editor’s test in Sydney
  • Ogilvy wrote the foreword
  • Change the serif and nothing else
  • The tramline theory
  • The Swiss set text in sans
  • An authority that never said it
  • Change the size before the face

About the book

Notes

  1. Wheildon 1990, Title line: Newspaper Advertising Bureau of Australia, Sydney, 1990; the 224 readers of the programme; Poole 2012, Dating of the report to 1984, its 1990 reprint, and the 1995 book; Open Library n.d., Strathmoor Press, Berkeley, 1995, 248 pp., LCCN 94048089; Open Library full-text search for RMIT, Full-text search for “Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology”: no Wheildon title among the hits. The report itself, and a search of its full text, carry no reference to Melbourne, to any institute, or to 1974. The only Melbourne connection is a later edition published there. Evidence A: strong or direct evidence.
  2. Wheildon 1990, “Serif versus sans serif body type”, Table 3; the specification of Corona and Helvetica at 8 on 9 pt over 12.5 picas. Graded as practice rather than research: the figures are transcribed correctly, but their source is an unrefereed in-house report, administered by the author, with no variance given. Good, fair and poor came out at 67, 19, 14 for the serif setting and 12, 23, 65 for the sans. Evidence C: professional practice or tradition.

Sources

  • Wheildon, C. (1990). Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes. Newspaper Advertising Bureau of Australia, Sydney (report first issued 1984). alexpoole.info
  • Poole, A. (8 March 2012). Fighting bad typography research. alexpoole.info (post and comment thread). alexpoole.info
  • Open Library. Editions of Colin Wheildon, 'Type & layout'. openlibrary.org
  • Open Library search-inside for the phrase 'Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology'. openlibrary.org

Further reading