Readability and Legibility

Legibility (noun) 

Also called visibility. Typography. the quality of type that affects the perceptibility of a word, line, or paragraph of printed matter.

Readability (noun) 

Typography. the property of type that affects the ease with which printed matter can be read for a sustained period.

'Type is speech made visible'

Different typefaces have different personality's and qualities.

When doing the 'the quick brown fox' task we all found the typefaces that caused the most problems were the block and the script. But why do we actually need these?

They have qualities to them that we associate them to different things. For example the block typefaces are very harsh and are quite industrial used on Cat boots for example, where as script fonts are quite feminine and are used for perfume bottles ect. There are different uses for each font, they all collaborate well with an item and make us feel a certain way without us even realising. Sometimes when we see an image we immediately get an image in out heads or what the type is to go with this image, it is all about matching the content and the personality of the type.

Newspapers

Newspapers are a very good example of controlling where people look and how we read things in a certain way, the delivery of certain information.

Here I have chosen a page out of a paper and I looked at the type, what jumps out at me first, what they want me to read first and how they want me to read it.

The one thing I noticed strait away with this page is that there is a lot of focus on the new look advert, the advert is taking up three quarters of the page, drawing your eye strait to the image strait away. The next thing that immediately jumped out at me is the headline at the top in bright pink in bold about Dizzee Rascal. It was the colour and the boldness of the type that stood out to me most. Following that my eyes naturally got drawn down to the New Look advert again, but then naturally as you read from the left to right I saw the subheading on the left, I would of then read that body of text that was in a slightly bolder font. My eye then got drawn down to the next article below in the same font heading with a body copy what was in regular. Then once I had finished reading that my eye would of then of got drawn back to the New Look advert. Making me turn the page with my final thought being with the new look advert. This is all done on purpose.





Here again is showing the same cycle that your eye is flown through, I find this quite interesting and I didn't previously realise this, but everything is done for a reason. As this is the metro and a free paper they make all there money from putting a large amount of adverts in, this is what they need to catch the attention, as you read through the articles your eye is always drawn back to the advert and you usually turn the page with the advert being the main thought.