Studio Brief 2: typeface legibilty research

In response to the group crit, I decided to focus some of my research into what makes a letter identifiable and which elements are needed the most. 

I cut the letters straight through the middle to see whether it was evident if the top or bottom was better at representing the whole letterform. 


I asked a group of people to tell me whether the top or bottom part of the letters made it more distinguishable for them. The majority responded by saying that the bottom of the letters were all too similar and could have represented more than one. It was also mentioned that if it was cute just below the centre of the letter then that helped to make it more obvious as to what letter it was because some letter have a crossbar and without that being evident, it would look like two separate letters. It was also pointed out that the 'E' and 'F' when split across the middle looked exactly the same. This was a problem that no solutions could be suggested for, but when designing my typeface I will need to keep this in mind and make sure I show the different characteristics of the two letters. 

Bubbles test

I found some research by Ralf Herrmann on the legibility of typefaces and he looked into which parts make the letter identifiable. The first column of the 'bubbles test' shows the skeleton parts of the letters and it was concluded that the line terminations were the most important features for letter identification. The crossbar of the 'e', the stroke endings or the 'c' and the ascenders/descenders are the parts that make the letters individual. Another finding was that a one-storey 'a' was often misread to be an 'o' or a 'q'. This means that a double-storey 'a' may work better ad improve the legibility.

Based on this research, I will need to make sure that I use the shapes to show where the ascenders and descenders are within each letter.