The great typography bake-off: comparing legibility at-a-glance

Figures & data

Figure 1. Samples of two typefaces we evaluated. Eurostile (top row) and Frutiger (bottom row), illustrate their key design differences. Eurostile’s tight spacing, closed letter shapes, and highly uniform contours and proportions contrast with those of Frutiger. The at-a-glance legibility methods described here can test the performance characteristics of each. Figure adapted from Reimer et al. (2014).

Figure 2. The eight commonly used sans serif typefaces assessed.

Figure 3. Legibility thresholds for the 8 typefaces under study (lower numbers indicate better legibility, and see Table 1), in order of best to worst in the present study. Error bars represent ±1 mean-adjusted standard error. Note that Frutiger outperforms Eurosile (Figure 1).

Table 1. Typeface by mean legibility threshold (in ms).

Typeface	Mean	SD
Frutiger	105.48	57.74
Meta	108.56	50.00
Speak	109.47	64.43
Avenir	109.59	44.24
Univers	110.96	55.01
Din	117.47	62.50
Eurostile	122.95	53.39
Gill sans	126.30	54.69

Table 2. Mixed model results.

Effect	F	Df	Df.res	p
Age	4.195	1	69	0.044*
Gender	0.796	1	69	0.375
Typeface	3.959	7	483	0.001***
Age × gender	1.021	1	69	0.316
Age × typeface	0.790	7	483	0.596
Gender × typeface	1.218	7	483	0.291
Age × gender × typeface	1.393	7	483	0.206

Reimer, Bryan, Bruce Mehler, Jonathan Dobres, Joseph F. Coughlin, Steve Matteson, David Gould, Nadine Chahine, and Vladimir Levantovsky. 2014. “Assessing the Impact of Typeface Design in a Text-Rich Automotive User Interface.” Ergonomics 57 (11): 1643–1658. doi:10.1080/00140139.2014.940000.

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