According to the BBC, researchers at Princeton University recently found that when people read information that's presented in harder-to-read fonts, they can recall it better than information presented in clearer fonts. The researchers argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials. This also has interesting implications for designers.

The following is excerpted, roughly, from the BBC article:

28 volunteers in a Princeton study were given 90 seconds to try to memorize a list of seven features for three different species of alien. The idea was to re-create the kind of learning in a biology class. Aliens were chosen to be sure that none of the volunteers' prior knowledge interfered with the results.

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font. The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.

The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember. Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts recalled 14% more. They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to "deeper processing" and then "better retrieval" afterward.

Interesting information here for web and print designers, and an opportunity to reflect on some traditional design wisdom. The traditional strategy is to design all of the information you're presenting in a way that is as clear and easy to read as possible. This makes sense, I think, because most often designers are tasked with delivering information to an audience that is assumed to be at worst hostile and at best indifferent to the message.

But this policy may be self-defeating in non-advertising contexts. If this research is on to something, there may be circumstances where it makes sense to intentionally design things (think about, for example, instruction booklets, magazine articles, and so on) with fonts that obscure clarity. In cases where we're sure that the audience wants the information, we might be doing them a service by printing it in a less than perfectly clear font.

Food for thought.

So you need a typeface is an alternative way on how to choose fonts (or just be inspired) for a specific project, not just by browsing through the pages of FontBook. The list is (very loosely) based on the top 50 of the "Die 100 besten schriften".

An example; how Julian picked the font for the poster.

Via.

The idea is pretty simple: It's a zero-kerning dingbats font where the characters combine to form modular illustrations. Here, for example, is the string "Design Less Better":

Design Less Better wrought in Roberto Cecchi's Aierbazzi.

Neat!

Now that we've gone back and established (at least a rough and ready version) of why ethical criteria are required when evaluating a design, and what exactly we mean when we say design, I'm sure you'll agree it's high time that we start to address what those criteria might be.

Particularly faithful readers of BlogLESS will remember our discussion of accountability in design ethics last October. The net result of that discussion was that designs should be evaluated by means of the effects they have on the world. Basically, the way we evaluate whether some design is good should depend on whether the consequences that design has on humans are positive or negative.

It should strike you as uncertain, however, how exactly we are proposing that we evaluate whether the consequences of some design are "positive" or "negative". In other words: How do we know a design is right? That's what I'm going to start thinking about this week.

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