A tremendous amount of reading is done to-day and
there should be no difficulties put in the way of the
reader. Some things have to be read from afar, and
letters must be visible from considerable distances. It
is not without reason that oculists use modern Sans type
when testing the state of the patient's eyesight.
Much has been written about the legibility of type.
Oculists can offer no definite proofs, because their
experiments are influenced by habits to which patients
are accustomed. For example, it is found that old
people with bad eyesight often read complicated Gothic
type more easily than clear Roman type, because they
are used to the former. But from research, however, it
has been concluded that the more the individual letters
resemble one another in shape, the less visible is the
type.
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This conclusion may be wrong, as it would be easy
to find type-faces in which the individual letters differ
very widely from one another, if that be the only
consideration. And then where shall we look for
harmon}' of form and the fundamental constructional
form of our types
Other research has established that whole groups of
lettersnot single letters, but words-are taken in by
the eye at one glance. If we carried this conclusion to
its logical end we should have optical word pictures
(similar to Chinese signs) and no type with separate
letters.
Personally, I believe in the following logical concep
tion: the simpler the shape of the letter, the easier is the
type to see, read, and learn.
Pairs of Old Style letters superimposed
Which of these two letters can you recognize more easily from a
distance
Which of these two letters can you draw by heart without difficulty
