The font of your letters spoils your life
- Transfer
In our blog, we already talked about ways to work with typography in the design of email newsletters , and today we present to your attention an adapted translation of the material from Bloomberg about why using the popular Helvetica and Arial fonts in letters may not be the best solution.
Helvetica, the most obvious choice for many brands and nerds from typography , is used by default in the Apple Mail app. Gmail uses Arial by default, a font that one designer called "Helvetica's ugly illegitimate son." If the browser does not support Arial, Gmail uses Helvetica instead.
Although Helvetica is a favorite option for many "design-minded" people, as it is relatively neutral, the insufficient distance between the font elements and their strong similarity make it difficult to read voluminous texts. “The letters begin to stick together,” says Nadine Chahine, a font designer at Monotype. “It makes the text too crowded.”
Arial, like Helvetica, has what font designers call elements “reflected along the vertical or horizontal axis” - this makes it difficult to distinguish letters in a line. “Remember the letters b and d, p and q - children often confuse them. They are reflections of each other, ”says font designer Bruno Maag. “This property is reinforced in fonts such as Arial, where the elements are literally obtained by mirroring one form or another.”
Notice how the letters b and d are similar in the figure below, and also that the distance between h and e for Helvetica is slightly larger than the distance between t and i. It may seem that these are insignificant trifles, but one and the other moment seriously complicate the readability of the texts, especially when the texts are voluminous, and you are forced to read them in large numbers (as often happens with e-mail).
But you really get a lot of letters. Americans spend about a third of their time checking and reading mail. If you work 40 hours a week, 11 of them you spend reading online correspondence, which uses fonts that are completely inappropriate for this purpose.
Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook (based on researchmore than a billion letters, it turned out that these email clients - the most popular for desktop PCs) usually use fonts from the sans serif group (sans-serif) like Helvetica, Arial and Calibri - this is the default font for Microsoft Outlook.
“Until relatively recently, most computers used in a corporate environment did not have a high enough screen resolution,” says typographer Jerry Leonidas. Simpler headsets, not burdened with small details and design elements that are found in serif fonts, were reproduced “cleaner” on such screens. But “over the past 4-5 years, the quality of the screens has grown so much that the distance between the font elements is clearly visible on them, the glyphs are reproduced clearly and do not merge with each other,” emphasizes Leonidas. Now, email clients have no reason to use sans-serif fonts.
However, the burden of the past years has forced developers to withstand possible changes - and this, according to Maag, is a real tragedy. “The notion that serif fonts are too clumsy for mail doesn't hold water anymore. You need a font whose different elements are not reflections of each other. ” Due to the characteristic serifs that are present in serif fonts, their elements are clearly different from each other. See how the serifs in the image below give each letter a personality.
The main advantage of a good font is its readability: a combination of speed and convenience in the reading process, as well as comprehensibility of the text, a kind of emotional acceptance of the font. The way the letters look, their size and the distance between them determines whether it will be easy to read the text.
“When we read, we don’t take each letter individually,” says Jose Scaglione, creator of Literata , one of the fonts for e-books on Google Play. “We recognize letters in groups, and our brain evaluates the nature of the interaction between the dark and light parts of the text.”
Bookerly , the new font created by Bruno Maag for the Kindle, is a series that many consider convenient for reading large volumes of text (however, the question of how much this or that series is more readable than sans-serif fonts remains open - 1 , 2 ) “Each glyph is unique,” says its creator, Bookerly. “Thanks to this, the font contains diverse and harmonious elements.” According to internationalAmazon’s tests ran Bookerly texts at 2% faster and more enjoyable than Amazon’s fonts.
The Literata font was designed with the same principles in mind. Designers lengthened the outer elements of letters (for example, d and p) to improve the visibility of one form or another. They also made the font elements a bit wider.
Although we often have to read so many letters that their volume would be enough for a whole novel, we interact with digital communications and the text of books in different ways - and ideally, the font should reflect these differences. Bookerly was designed to read large documents, and when it was created it was taken into account that the eyes of an attentive reader might get tired.
We read emails much less thoughtfully - as a rule, we simply run our eyes through a couple of paragraphs. The designers we interviewed agree that for such a “quick” reading it is very important that there is a lot of space between the letters. The serif font, among other things, will simplify the recognition of the letters themselves.
Even today, users are not required to “break their eyes” about Helvetica or Arial. In Gmail, you can choose one of six additional fonts and adjust the level of saturation of its style.
In fact, everyone who knows anything about fonts tries to change the default settings of applications. Maag uses Verdana (sans-serif) and Georgia (serif) fonts for emails: both have a more "open" form of signs than Helvetica and Arial. Verdana, as shown below, has a greater (and more uniform) character spacing. Scalion likes Georgia. Shaheen prefers fonts Calibri and Verdana. Leonidas used Verdana before, but after acquiring an HD monitor, he switched to a font called Input .
Maybe it's time for email clients to change the default settings. “I sincerely believe that companies can seriously improve the lives of their customers by introducing better fonts that will, of course, affect the way you read emails,” says Maag. But what if you suggest using Bookerly for e-mail? “In theory, this is a good idea. It can be used to read letters, ”confirms Scalione. Well, dreaming is not bad.
Font designers avoid choosing Helvetica and Arial. You should also be wary of them.
Helvetica, the most obvious choice for many brands and nerds from typography , is used by default in the Apple Mail app. Gmail uses Arial by default, a font that one designer called "Helvetica's ugly illegitimate son." If the browser does not support Arial, Gmail uses Helvetica instead.
Although Helvetica is a favorite option for many "design-minded" people, as it is relatively neutral, the insufficient distance between the font elements and their strong similarity make it difficult to read voluminous texts. “The letters begin to stick together,” says Nadine Chahine, a font designer at Monotype. “It makes the text too crowded.”
Arial, like Helvetica, has what font designers call elements “reflected along the vertical or horizontal axis” - this makes it difficult to distinguish letters in a line. “Remember the letters b and d, p and q - children often confuse them. They are reflections of each other, ”says font designer Bruno Maag. “This property is reinforced in fonts such as Arial, where the elements are literally obtained by mirroring one form or another.”
Notice how the letters b and d are similar in the figure below, and also that the distance between h and e for Helvetica is slightly larger than the distance between t and i. It may seem that these are insignificant trifles, but one and the other moment seriously complicate the readability of the texts, especially when the texts are voluminous, and you are forced to read them in large numbers (as often happens with e-mail).
But you really get a lot of letters. Americans spend about a third of their time checking and reading mail. If you work 40 hours a week, 11 of them you spend reading online correspondence, which uses fonts that are completely inappropriate for this purpose.
Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook (based on researchmore than a billion letters, it turned out that these email clients - the most popular for desktop PCs) usually use fonts from the sans serif group (sans-serif) like Helvetica, Arial and Calibri - this is the default font for Microsoft Outlook.
“Until relatively recently, most computers used in a corporate environment did not have a high enough screen resolution,” says typographer Jerry Leonidas. Simpler headsets, not burdened with small details and design elements that are found in serif fonts, were reproduced “cleaner” on such screens. But “over the past 4-5 years, the quality of the screens has grown so much that the distance between the font elements is clearly visible on them, the glyphs are reproduced clearly and do not merge with each other,” emphasizes Leonidas. Now, email clients have no reason to use sans-serif fonts.
However, the burden of the past years has forced developers to withstand possible changes - and this, according to Maag, is a real tragedy. “The notion that serif fonts are too clumsy for mail doesn't hold water anymore. You need a font whose different elements are not reflections of each other. ” Due to the characteristic serifs that are present in serif fonts, their elements are clearly different from each other. See how the serifs in the image below give each letter a personality.
The main advantage of a good font is its readability: a combination of speed and convenience in the reading process, as well as comprehensibility of the text, a kind of emotional acceptance of the font. The way the letters look, their size and the distance between them determines whether it will be easy to read the text.
“When we read, we don’t take each letter individually,” says Jose Scaglione, creator of Literata , one of the fonts for e-books on Google Play. “We recognize letters in groups, and our brain evaluates the nature of the interaction between the dark and light parts of the text.”
Bookerly , the new font created by Bruno Maag for the Kindle, is a series that many consider convenient for reading large volumes of text (however, the question of how much this or that series is more readable than sans-serif fonts remains open - 1 , 2 ) “Each glyph is unique,” says its creator, Bookerly. “Thanks to this, the font contains diverse and harmonious elements.” According to internationalAmazon’s tests ran Bookerly texts at 2% faster and more enjoyable than Amazon’s fonts.
The Literata font was designed with the same principles in mind. Designers lengthened the outer elements of letters (for example, d and p) to improve the visibility of one form or another. They also made the font elements a bit wider.
Although we often have to read so many letters that their volume would be enough for a whole novel, we interact with digital communications and the text of books in different ways - and ideally, the font should reflect these differences. Bookerly was designed to read large documents, and when it was created it was taken into account that the eyes of an attentive reader might get tired.
We read emails much less thoughtfully - as a rule, we simply run our eyes through a couple of paragraphs. The designers we interviewed agree that for such a “quick” reading it is very important that there is a lot of space between the letters. The serif font, among other things, will simplify the recognition of the letters themselves.
Even today, users are not required to “break their eyes” about Helvetica or Arial. In Gmail, you can choose one of six additional fonts and adjust the level of saturation of its style.
In fact, everyone who knows anything about fonts tries to change the default settings of applications. Maag uses Verdana (sans-serif) and Georgia (serif) fonts for emails: both have a more "open" form of signs than Helvetica and Arial. Verdana, as shown below, has a greater (and more uniform) character spacing. Scalion likes Georgia. Shaheen prefers fonts Calibri and Verdana. Leonidas used Verdana before, but after acquiring an HD monitor, he switched to a font called Input .
Maybe it's time for email clients to change the default settings. “I sincerely believe that companies can seriously improve the lives of their customers by introducing better fonts that will, of course, affect the way you read emails,” says Maag. But what if you suggest using Bookerly for e-mail? “In theory, this is a good idea. It can be used to read letters, ”confirms Scalione. Well, dreaming is not bad.
