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[Music] typography is made to be read it must be legible and readable let's define those terms legibility is how easily text your individual characters are identified as texts or characters how easily a viewer identifies that the shapes are representations of language even a language the viewer can't read as long as the viewer understands these are language representations readability is what happens after legibility is satisfied and is a measure of how easily a viewer can read the text and understand its meaning let's look at some examples of difficult legibility how many of these can you easily instantly understand are in fact characters that can be read now squint how many can you instantly understand are readable latin-based characters with your eyes squinted stand up and take a step back say 6 or 10 feet now answer the same question how about these typefaces go ahead and sit back down the rules can be different when you're creating logo types or decorative text here I'm talking about setting type that you intend to be read when doing so your primary overarching goal is to present text that a person will read and understand typography is the science and art of creating a visual representation of information that needs to be read and understood that text needs to be legible at a variety of resolutions at a variety of distances and by a variety of different sets of eyes of different ages and acuity so looking at type and evaluating its legibility while you're sitting right in front of your computer or iPad or phone then by squinting and then by looking from 6 or 10 feet back helps you simulate the different scenarios in which that text will need to be legible short headline lengths such as these samples can sometimes be near instantly legible when a viewer has the time and motivation to spend an extra moment examining the type then using a typeface or design that is not instantly legible but is near instantly legible is acceptable such cases include designs that traditionally have more ornate text like wedding or other event invitations or wine bottle labels design heavy and artsy work such as album covers and posters and subheads pull quotes and other short small bits of text omits lots of less ordinate instantly legible and highly readable text longer passages of text however need to always be instantly legible or they hinder readability let's take some of the more legible of these samples and turn them into paragraphs of text how readable are these paragraphs the ones along the top may look cool but they aren't very readable set this paragraph from Pride and Prejudice and the typefaces along the top and you'll lose your audience faster than an audio book Pride and Prejudice read by Mike Tyson even the bottom middle with its lack of lowercase letters and unfamiliar archaic letter forms will be difficult to readers to stick with beyond a few sentences color can also strongly affect readability as you can see you need good contrast between foreground and background colors for good readability but you also need colors that don't clash with one another while contrasting look at the middle top one that's a myspace classic yellow text on a magenta background it's painful to read that obviously white on black is high contrast and decent readability but for a long period of reading that's going to start straining your readers eyes if a dark background is needed a better choice of type color would be not so starkly contrasting as white try different shades of gray or different shades of the background color and evaluate their color for comfort as you can see in the orange on blue and especially the two-tone gray contrast doesn't have to be extreme to create highly readable text the yellow-green block in the top left corner doesn't have enough contrast for long text but would work for short bits of text perhaps as much as a paragraph in the bottom right to little contrast is an obvious impediment to readability some viewers may not actually be able to discern a difference between the foreground and background colors on the right is a paragraph of text made readable on the left is the same paragraph with different formatting it's the fine print you'll find in some contracts contract fine print is called fine print because it's intentionally designed to reduce readability to a bare minimum that will intimidate and deter most people from reading legally speaking the paragraph on the left is readable practically speaking however almost no one will read it and those who do read it will find the task laborious I straining and psychologically intimidating which of course is the entire point of fine print specifically its readability is very low because the type is set in all caps in tiny text and with such tight letting that it's frustratingly easy for the readers eye to accidentally jump up or down a line while reading across the block the tight letting also causes a lack of white space and the human eye requires lots of white space while reading for resting places as well as to easily differentiate one word one line from the next we'll talk more about the do's and don'ts and wise and lots of everything in these samples and all the ones before and after later in this course here's a quick quiz which of these four samples is the most readable if you said the one on the bottom left you'd be correct though you'd be forgiven for choosing anything but the top left subtle differences separate the other three but the indents generous letting and full with characters make the bottom left the most comfortable for long reading this set has some different things going on they're both the same typeface size and letting the only differences between them are subtle which do you prefer admittedly these differences are more subjective than anything we've looked at up to this point moreover if you've read more than a milk carton in your life the style on the left is much more familiar to you familiarity however doesn't mean correctness the paragraph on the right employees - stylistic changes that make the text more readable those are numerals and all caps that fit within the seesaw up down capital lowercase rhythm of text notice on the Left how readily your eye is drawn to the acronyms and numbers if you glance not read the entire paragraph that shouldn't be the case all parts of the paragraph should bear equal visual importance and no part of another line of text should tug your eye away from the line you're reading readability is in part how easily a reader's eye moves in the correct direction in Latin based languages that means from left to right across a single line from word to word from character to character without being distracted and pulled to somewhere else in the text all caps acronyms and cap height numerals within paragraph text do that they can pull your eye out of one line of text into another the shape of letters have a lot to do with readability obviously here we have the same text set in a serif typeface on the left and sans-serif on the right serifs the little feet on the letters were designed specifically to help readers eyes to move smoothly from one letter form into the next send serif typefaces lack those trail guides serifs causing each letter to seem to stand more on its own and less a part of the greater whole of the word that also causes the readers eye to evaluate each character more is its own object lingering fractionally longer on San serif characters and thus slowing reading and comprehension speed serif typefaces are the better way to go for longer passages of text where the medium is high resolution when text appears at a lower resolution such as small type on webpages or phone apps the delicate features of serif type can often be blurred or pixelated actually reducing readability sometimes dramatically in those cases sans serifs are the better choice sans serifs are also good choices anytime the text will be large short and needs to be understood as quickly as possible and or from a distance many factors affect the readability of type all of them within your control as the designer your overarching absolute first priorities to satisfy our legibility and readability when you're setting type after those are satisfied and you have instantly legible text highly readable text then you can start looking at the voice of your text the design the visual appeal beyond legibility and readability [Music]