Typography can affect everything from the mood of a text to how convincing its arguments are. When self-publishing a thesis or working paper, or even in preparing a piece for review it’s good to follow these rules to make your texts as readible and visually pleasing as possible.
- Use a serif typeface (font) for the main text and a sans serif typeface for headings, tables and figures. Serif fonts are easier to read because the little feet guide the eye from one word to the next. Sans serif fonts are easier for reading short pieces of text.
- Use no more than two typefaces in a single document. Being consistent with typefaces makes a document feel polished and pulled together. And make sure the two fonts match.
- Use different weights and italics for emphasis but never underline. All typefaces today come with at least “Regular” or “Roman” and “Bold”. And a lot of modern typefaces have many different weights–Helvetica Neue automatically comes loaded with weights from ultra-light to bold to heavy. Using a good type with many available weights gives you more flexibility in emphasis. But never, never, never underline text; it’s a nasty hold-over from typewriters.
- Be conservative. A good font is like a good sofa: you don’t notice it but it’s comfortable. Good standby serif typefaces are: Garamond, Computer Modern (in LaTeX), Sabon, Bodoni, Caslon and Baskerville. Good conservative sans serif choices are Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Myriad Pro and Gill Sans.
- Adjust your margins so you have 50-60 characters per line. This is the optimal line number of characters for readability. Much longer and the reader gets tired from long lines. Much shorter disrupts the flow.
Academic workflows on a Mac 
Hi Jessica, thanks for the nice post. I cannot open the last link “optimal line number of characters for readability”
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Thanks Ale for catching that. It should work now.
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Speaking of weights and other font properties being used to add visual structure to text structure, I think it is also a good idea to only change as few properties as possible when emphasizing two adjacent levels of hierarchy. So for instance you want to distinguish Level 1 and Level 2 headings. Changing font size should suffice. Try to avoid changing the font itself or the weight or other properties (color). That would be confusing.
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Jessica,
Serifs hold the characters together creating a unified word. A kind of visual glue. Their function is not to move the eye to the next word.
Also, the more characters per line the greater the leading should be. Leading is measured from baseline on one line of type to the baseline of the next line of type. In typography it is measured in points. There are 72 points per inch.
So, when the eye reaches the end of one long line, the white space between that line and the next line serves as a guide to the beginning of the next line. Very short lines—such as those in newspaper columns—can get away with very little leading and thereby get more words per square inch.
Cliff
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Thanks a lot for your comments Cliff. There was consensus among designers that serifs helped guide the eye, however, more recently research has come out suggesting that our brains read in “chunks” – groups of words – in what are called saccadic movements. Since then, there’s been some empirical data that reading between serifs and sans typefaces do not show statistical differences in legibility.
So what does this mean for my type rules? I am conservative when it comes to type selections–particularly for academic texts. I still like to use one serif and one sans type for a document.
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I think what appears to be a good typeface choice in terms of serif vs. sans serif has a lot to do with how we have been ‘socialized’. Serif is being used for books, newspapers and any long pieces of text so we have been conditioned to like serif in those contexts. I am pretty sure it is a learned thing to a great extent.
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…originally they were simply the imitation of brush marks as stone carvers followed the painted guiding strokes on the stone. We added the “theory” of legibility later.
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Reblogged this on Musings on Interesting Things and commented:
Excellent and short article on Typography. Agree with everything said here.
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Reblogged this on Geo-chat.
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