In our context of practice lesson we were told to bring the phrase "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" in upper and lower-case in the following styled fonts:
- Block
- Gothic
- Script
- Roman
We were then told to arrange our fonts in order of easiest to read to hardest to read. Below is a photo of my results. I found that the serif typeface at the top had more characteristics and features that made it easy to recognise letterforms. The sans-serif gothic font was easy to read, although it would be hard to read fast, as the letters all start to look like random shapes and lines and take longer to recognise. I found that the counters on my block font were too thin, so made it hard to make out letterforms quickly. The script font was the hardest to read because of it's unconventional letterforms. The T is an upside down L, the Q is a sideways N.
We then compared results with everyone else in the class by sticking our most and least readable fonts on the wall. We found that:
- Sans-serif fonts work better in uppercase.
- Serif fonts are easier to read in lowercase.
- Script fonts were generally the hardest fonts to read.
- Uppercase is easier to read from a distance, whereas lowercase is easier to read up close.
- serif is far more likely to be used in books and road signs because of this.
We then cut out the letters from each of our fonts to spell out "The quick brown fox" 4 times with a diferent font for each word. This exercise is supposed to show us that the sentence won't read correctly because certain words stand out more than other. For example, the first line reads "brown the fox quick" or "brown the quick fox". The block font stands out more than the rest.
We have ben set the task to do for next weeks lesson, to recreate these 4 sentences with these 4 fonts as seen above, but scale and position the words to get them to read as well as possible.
