Determinants of a Font's Readability

Overview

Objectives/Goals This project is concerned with an experimental study of how certain characteristics of fonts affect their ability to be read, specifically thickness and the inclusion of brackets. Methods/Materials I printed out two pages of text with each page a different font. To test this, I assigned groups to read both pages Arial, first page Arial second page Georgia, etc. until all combinations with Arial and another font of Georgia, San Francisco, and Times New Roman have been read. I timed each page separately and analyzed the data through the ratio of the times of the pages, so the speed of their reading didn#t affect the results. Results I analyzed times using both pages having the group reading both Arial pages as a control, and found that the average in each category was: Arial-Arial = 1.113, Arial-Georgia = 1.124, Arial-San Francisco = 1.257, Arial-Times New Roman = 1.05 for Arial being the first page, and in the same order for Arial being the second page: 0.844, 0.868, 0.976, 0.83. Conclusions/Discussion These results show that San Francisco, the thick font without brackets, was the easiest to read. Arial, a medium thickness un-bracketed font, and Georgia, a thin bracketed font, were about equal. Times New Roman, a thin bracketed font, was the slowest.

Competition history

• CSEF 2017 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0717

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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