Ricardo,
Thanks for your interesting comments. My worry is that the advocates of almost any tool end up sounding like they think that tool can fix anything and everything. (I’m look ing at you, Terry.) I am far from dismissing the value of quantitative evidence but the old saw about the man who points at the sky then mistakes his finger for the moon often comes to mind in such discussions.
> On Jan 13, 2018, at 8:12 AM, Ricardo Martins <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
[snip]
> But nothing came close to the tools that are used by Economics and Marketing, like inferential statistics. It is quite different to say that 2 things are "related," such as the presence of serifs and readability, and to say that one thing "causes" the other, that is, the serif is definitely a factor that caused the improvement in reading.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read studies on serifs and readability that purport to prove a relationship. Causality is usually assumed but I’ve never even been convinced of the relationship itself.
The most common version is in the form of testing two typefaces (often Arial and Times) to determine whether serifs aid in reading. Such experiments strike me as if someone were claiming to test the difference between fiberglas and wood handles by comparing someone using a hatchet with a wood handle and a sledge hammer with a fiberglas handle.
If someone asked me to describe the difference between, say, Arial and Times, sans serif vs serif wouldn't be the top of the list of differences. Even weight vs thick-and-thin might be the most obvious thing to note. If we see that one or the other is, by some measure, more legible or more readable or more something we want. . . why would we conclude that the presence or absence of serifs is the salient factor?
[snip]
> Chandler, in his dissertation, presents several points of view concerning "research based on imagination" and the use of inadequate statistics:
[snip]
> He noted that there are significant methodological flaws in the research and that investigators need a background in typography before undertaking this type of research.
Yup.
> He also commented that the univariate model is particularly suspect and argues that multiple variables be examined simultaneously to more accurately understand the relationships between them (Buckingham, 1931).
It would be interesting to see how this might indicate something about specific features played out in a variety of faces. Any hopes of that should be tempered by the knowledge that the drawing of typefaces is every bit as complex as is analyzing them; typeface pairs like Avant Garde Gothic/Lublin Graph aside, typeface design doesn’t tend to allow the isolation of a single feature in a manner that is easy to universalize a conclusion about the effects of that feature.
> Another more recent critique of typographic research suggests that research needs to be as close to real-world conditions as possible and as similar to tasks completed by practitioners (Hartley & Burnhill, 1977).” – Chandler, S. (2001).
Yup, again. The real world of reading, the real world of typeface design, and the real world of graphic design.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
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+1 252 258-7006
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