Design Regression

The Novel and the Familiar: Writing stories for readers with memory loss

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

It is well known that memory loss is a characteristic feature of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). I was therefore surprised to find that the individuals who kindly volunteered to take part in my studies (Leahy, 2021; 2022) were keen to be seen as readers. Books – especially fiction – had clearly been a great source of pleasure for many years, and while specially commissioned non-fiction titles are gradually appearing on the market (Leahy, 2025), fiction as an area remains largely unexplored.

Of course there are a number of illnesses besides dementia that can affect the brain’s ability to retain information – a stroke, for example, or long Covid, or even pre-eclampsia (Beier, 2012), but in the case of Alzheimer’s disease damage to the hippocampus and to the surrounding areas of the brain typically affects working memory (Crick Institute, 2025). For these individuals retaining detailed information as a story progresses is just too burdensome, the cognitive load is just too great (Stern, 2012).

However, long-term memory and imagination are known to be less affected in readers with a recent diagnosis (Patterson et al., 1994). My suggestion, therefore, is that if existing editorial practice and design skills could be combined with the insights into adult literacy now made possible by neuroscience (Hruby & Goswami, 2011; Kemmerer, 2022), more suitable books for this readership could be produced.

How to build a novel

All printed books are constructed. As the author’s Acknowledgements paragraph often makes clear, it can take a whole team of people to prepare a text then design it, get it printed and bound and put on display in a bookshop. It seems entirely appropriate, therefore, to reduce a novel to its constituent parts and consider how these might be fashioned to suit a particular market. The example is already there in the exacting brief given to writers of fiction for other non-typical readers. The stories for students of English as an additional language are heavily worked on by editors and designers before they are published, and titles intended for readers with limited literacy skills are similarly scrutinised for their readability. Even gifted authors can be required to rewrite (Leahy, 2021 ).

In his invaluable guide How novels work John Mullen (2006) explains how the novel developed from earlier literary genres (see Figure 1 for an example) and goes on to analyse the components that are the defining features of this form of text. Given that any new work of fiction will to a large extent be a reassembling of these components, it might be useful to consider Mullen’s explanation of the main aspects of the novel when commissioning texts for readers who have problems with their memory.

Figure 1: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719/1996) is considered to be one of the very earliest novels written in the English language. The text takes the form of a first-person account by the fictional narrator, Crusoe, and describes his extraordinary experiences as a castaway on a desert island. In some later editions the continuous text of the original was broken down into chapters with descriptive headings and illustrations were added. The engraved frontispiece appears in the first edition of the book.

The genre

Although works of fiction are primarily defined by their length and intention (the novel, novella, and short story), the number of genres used to describe them is more numerous encompassing romance, thrillers, crime, science fiction, historical fiction and literary fiction. All of these are stories. Readers are often conservative in their tastes and part of the enjoyment is likely to come from the fulfilment of their expectations. Starting any new book involves a heavy intellectual investment on the part of the reader and this is a reflection of the mental effort it takes to assimilate the information contained within each new paragraph (Castles et al., 2018). When a novel succeeds, the reader’s effort is rewarded. Indeed the active collaboration with the author is an essential part of the pleasure of solitary reading. In theory, works for readers with dementia may come from any genre but the burden placed on memory by a complex plot (see below) is likely to put certain types of story out of reach.

The plot

The plot is about causality, the chain of events that make up the structure of a story (Mullen, 2006, p. 170). E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel (1927, pp. 89–90) describes how the reader engages with the plot:

And over it, as it unfolds, will hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact, something which might have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it straight away it would never have been beautiful.

However, the sequential nature of a plot poses immediate problems for readers whose memory is challenged. In order to infer or deduce the significance of each new event the reader has to remember what has led up to it.

For this reason, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (2018; Figure 2) was a rather surprising recommendation made by Teresa Davies, a volunteer from the LikeMinded group in Mold, north east Wales, who spoke to me about fiction via Zoom on May 5, 2022. The autobiographical account of the long walk undertaken by Raynor Winn and her husband along the coastal path from Somerset to Dorset may well blur fact and fiction, but the structure of the narrative provides an insight into what a reader with an imperfect working memory can absorb. The text is episodic and repetitious, but it is full of separate incidents that are vividly and economically recounted. The story arc is clear, and the tone is hopeful and carries the reader forward. So beyond knowing broadly what the two characters set out to achieve at the outset, no memory of what happened in earlier chapters is required. Each success or disaster can be enjoyed separately as the story progresses.

Figure 2: The front cover of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (2018) published by Penguin. Although it was later criticised for its accuracy, the text provides a useful model for the construction of incident-rich narratives that progress in time and do not make excessive demands on the reader’s memory. The artwork is by Penguin Michael Joseph. Copyright © Raynor Winn, 2018. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited.

Literature is of course full of picaresque novels that adopt this approach in order to maintain the reader’s interest and Walter Ong suggests that its origin can be traced back to a purely oral tradition (Ong, 1982, pp. 140–141). However, in the context of reading with dementia, the lesson is that an incident-rich text need not overburden the memory if events are self-contained and presented sequentially.

The story-teller

Volunteers who took part in my research studies (Leahy, 2021) did not comment on the way a story was narrated. They showed no preference for a first person or a third person narrative although during a session that focused on fiction it was noted that the use of the “I” or the “we” form made the story seem personal and vivid (Teresa Davies). However, the choice of an omniscient narrator who claims to describe events as they happen to other people would allow writers more scope when devising texts for memory-challenged readers. A narrator who has an overview of the entire story can direct the reader’s understanding of the plot and can alert them to particularly significant events. By inserting little reflective asides (e.g., “she would come to regret this later”) the writer can support the reader’s grasp of the unfolding shape of the story.

The structure

The way the contents of a story is organised can help or hinder the reader’s understanding. The story arc, with the beginning, middle and end arranged in a chronological sequence is the most readily comprehensible since it reflects lived experience. Stories told with flashbacks were singled out by volunteer Teresa Davies as being particularly confusing. She comments:

So I’m finding this book a little bit difficult to follow. I’m enjoying it … I have to keep going back, you know, turning the page back and reading again to find, oh yes, well that must be him that’s talking now.

The same reader mentioned the difficulty of handling texts where different chapters give the viewpoint of different characters. It is a commonly used device, but it can place a heavy burden on a declining memory.

Dividing the story into short chapters is likely to be advantageous. For clarity, it would be best to separate the major events and use descriptive chapter titles to act as signposts indicating where the story is heading next. Some authors like to use their chapter titles as a trailer for what they are about to narrate. For example, Charles Dickens writes in his Pickwick Papers (1836–37/2011, p. 320):

CHAPTER XVII.

SHOWING THAT AN ATTACK OF RHEUMATISM, IN SOME CASES, ACTS AS A QUICKENER TO INVENTIVE GENIUS

and A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh (1988, p. 19), gives his readers a hint of the story ahead:

Chapter 2

In which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place

Numbering the chapters clearly – preferably with the more familiar Arabic numerals – also means that the contents page can serve as an aide-mémoire if the reader is resuming their reading after a break.

The setting

Volunteers clearly enjoyed the collaboration between writer and reader that lies at the heart of reading for pleasure. They continued to engage willingly with an author’s imaginings and fully appreciated the ability to evoke a scene by a deft arrangement of words.

Making a mental image of a described situation is referred to by psychologists as the construction of a situation model (Castles et al., 2018; Zwaan, 1999). Making a mental model requires a reader to draw on their memories in order to visualise events or places as they are portrayed. Keeping descriptions brief and grounding them in recognisable schemas using concrete and vivid language could help to make a story easier to retain.

The characters

The human interest in a story is based on the characters involved. As the story unfolds, we learn about them through their interactions and reactions (Douglas-Fairhurst, 2025, p. 5; Lodge, 2011, p. 5). However, too many characters can be taxing for the memory. As volunteer Teresa Davies noted “What helps as well is if you have a few characters in a book … it’s good to have on the chapter who’s taking part in that.” So restricting the number and building each chapter around key individuals could be a good move. In his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886/1979) marks out his story quite clearly. The second chapter (p. 35) has the heading:

Search for Mr Hyde

and the third chapter (p. 43) is headed:

Dr Jekyll was quite at ease

In this case the chapters are not numbered but, as already noted, including chapter numbers can make it easier for the reader to know where they are in a text.

Characters in a story need to be sharply delineated and their relationships to one another clearly spelled out. For example, at intervals it can be helpful to insert a reminder such as “Mary looked at her son John.” It is also best to refer consistently to Mr and Mrs Smith, for example, or to establish early on what forenames are to be used for each rather than alternate between the two. In fact, unless the story requires otherwise, it is helpful to use one name consistently for a protagonist. Shortened versions can introduce a momentary doubt in the mind of the reader especially where the name can refer to either a male or a female character.

Describing the appearance of each character vividly when they are first introduced can be a way of helping the reader construct a mental model to guide them as the story unfolds. Cratylic names, that is to say names that are memorable and appropriate to the individual’s nature, can help to fix them in memory (Mullen, 2006, p. 276 ). One thinks, for example, of:

the tenacious fiancée Miss Lucy Steele in Jane Austen’s, Sense and Sensibility (1811/2003).
Agnes Grey, the pious but resolute heroine of Anne Brontë’s novel by the same name (1847/2004).
the grim, bullying stepfather Mr Murdstone in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50/2007).
the ghastly, overbearing headmistress Miss Trunchbull and her gentle school teacher colleague Miss Honey in Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988/2013).

Writing style

Talking to readers with Alzheimer’s disease showed me that literacy skills are not lost in the order in which they are acquired. Whereas beginner readers may struggle to link sounds (phonemes) to symbols (graphemes) and thence to written words and their meaning (Castles et al., 2018), experienced readers with early-stage dementia appear to have no issues with word recognition or basic sentence comprehension (Patterson et al., 1994). They often retain a wide passive vocabulary and, crucially, according to Bayles and Kim (2003) “many investigators demonstrated that AD patients could recognize that which they cannot recall.” It is primarily the deficit in working memory that is the challenge. For example, when I queried the use of the word “mesmerised” in a book for readers with dementia, Teresa Davies commented:

Yes, well I find that ok. Yes, and they’re words … somebody, you know, you remember, you can remember what mesmerised means, you will, because you might have heard that word all your life. So they’re old words, aren’t they?

Research in the field of educational neuroscience demonstrates the steps involved in text decoding and reading comprehension (Hruby & Goswami, 2011). The findings generally support the heuristic practices of editorial departments and clarify why some styles of prose are inherently difficult to digest. Perkins and Jiang (2019) provide a helpful summary of grammatical features that copyeditors need to look out for in special needs writing. Their list includes sentences with too many clauses, sentences that do not follow the usual subject-verb-object structure, the passive voice, ellipsis, an over-reliance on inference, and grammatical ambiguity. All of these literary devices are thought to add to the load placed on working memory.

Ideally, therefore, story texts should be broken down into short chapters, with short paragraphs and carefully constructed sentences. The length of the sentence is less important than the predictability of its structure since, as is the case with spoken language, readers need to anticipate the shape of the sentence as it unfolds. Vocabulary may be rich and ideas wide-ranging (Leahy, 2021), perhaps with the regular but discreet recapitulation of salient events as an additional support to the reader’s memory. Repeating the speakers’ names in extensive exchanges of dialogue can reduce the need to go back and check who is speaking.

Illustration

There is no mention of book illustration in John Mullen’s analysis of the way novels work, and this is hardly surprising as continuous prose is generally perceived as being the final goal as far as the acquisition of literacy skills is concerned. Beginner readers typically progress from picture books to books combining large images and small amounts of text before they move on to chapter books as they master written English. Chapter books typically have a simple story broken down into short chapters with just a few supporting illustrations to make aspects of the story explicit and to aid flagging concentration. Fiction for readers with imperfect memories might well benefit from a similar approach. Illustrations in this case would act as landmarks and, if used opposite chapter openers, could help the reader find their place again after time away from the text. Simple black and white line drawings would be sufficient to summarise a scene or to highlight an important event. Avoiding giving the book a childish feel would be the essence of the brief to the artist as would a reminder that an illustration might merely suggest rather than make explicit. As the illustrations by Quentin Blake to Roald Dahl’s stories show, the reader’s imagination can be fired by just a few lines on the white page.

The use of family trees and stylised maps can also help to support the reader’s understanding. David Nicholls’s best-selling You Are Here (2024) describes a walking trip not unlike Raynor Winn’s event-packed Salt Path and both accounts provide simple sketch maps to allow the reader to visualise the distances so painfully covered. Positioning the maps opposite the relevant chapter opener or, better still, on the appropriate page would be a better option for the memory-challenged reader. This was clearly the designer’s strategy in a recent book about Thomas Bewick published by Open Ended Books (2024; Figure 3 ).

Figure 3: Page 20 of Bewick Tales. Stories from the Life and Work of Thomas Bewick by Sarah Lawrance (2024). To avoid taxing the reader’s memory, the simplified map of Bewick’s route home is positioned at its point of reference in the text.

Design

Readers who have dementia comment favourably on the tactile quality of printed books and it is precisely this aspect that publishers of fiction are currently choosing to emphasise. Alongside Kindle editions, publishers are now producing conspicuously large-format hardbacks with texts set in a generous, seriffed typeface with conspicuous line spacing, a page number inserted at the foot of the page and printed on bulky, off-white paper – all features which are intended to appeal to the traditional book buyer and to distance the product from the onscreen alternative.

The idea of consulting adult readers about the design of works of fiction is perhaps a new one. Bloomsbury have taken the lead with their autumn 2025 list, which features “an industry-first initiative that sees 11 iconic bestselling adult titles put into a format designed specifically to support adults with dyslexia.” Experienced readers with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease also tend to have specific literacy needs (Leahy, 2021). Aspects of the format chosen for the Bloomsbury books might well be relevant – the unjustified setting, for example, and the use of off-white paper to reduce contrast. However, the texts are printed in dark-blue ink, with a sans serif typeface and with bold type replacing italic. The non-fiction titles produced by Open Ended Books have reached different conclusions after close consultation with volunteer readers who have dementia. For these carefully illustrated books a serif typeface was chosen for the introductory narrative sections and italics were used wherever the experienced reader might expect them (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Page 30 of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Days by Sarah Lawrance (2025). The text has been broken down into short, readable sections which are distinguished by their type size and font. The punctuation marks and quotation marks are prominent, and italic type has been used for the title of the book by Thomas Bewick from which the engraving has been taken.

However, whether absorbing fiction or non-fiction, readers require minimal distraction from the content of the text. This can be helped by conservatively-designed typefaces, generous line spacing and the absence of gimmicks and decorative flourishes. Eye-tracking research suggests that even a mild cognitive impairment can cause erratic patterns of fixations and saccades (Fraser et al., 2017). The short paragraphs could therefore be laid out with unjustified lines of text, broken according to sense, and the prominent punctuation marks used in the Open Ended Books (see Figure 4).

In fact, as with all special needs design, every component of the book needs to be weighed up separately and together, starting with the author’s initial typescript and the careful editing of their prose, to the imaginative layout of the text and illustrations, and finally to the wrapping round of a distinctive coloured jacket with a bold, identifying spine. Designers are acutely aware that to succeed in the market the printed book must appeal visually and reward the reader’s investment.

Conclusion

Any successful design is the combination of the novel and the familiar. In the case of a work of fiction it is the artful, unpredictable expression of an idea in a recognisable literary form. Published stories are constructed from a number of components skilfuly arranged, but for readers with dementia, texts need to combine the imagination of the author with the insights of the neuropsychologist, the skills of an experienced book designer, and the input at every stage of the potential book user. So, unlikely as it may seem given the prevalence of digital media, now would be a good time for publishers to enter the fiction market for non-typical readers and bring together the many insights gained from interdisciplinary research.

The Government has declared 2026 to be the National Year of Reading. In its bold mission statement the Government proposes “a UK-wide campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives.” Readers with memory issues must not be forgotten. Simple guidelines given to authors and designers could make all the difference.

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References

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Beier, S. (2012). How my brain stopped reading. Visible Language, 46(3), 200–205.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Teresa Davies of LikeMinded, Mold, for her help with my research. I am grateful, too, to Sarah Lawrance of Open Ended Books/Equal Arts and to book designer Wendy Lewis for sharing with me their experience of publishing books for readers who have dementia. My thanks are also due to Dr Andrew Barker for his expert advice on typography and on fiction publishing in general.

What is a (universal) script grammar?

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

For myself, I always write about Dublin,
because if I can get to the heart of Dublin
I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.
In the particular is contained the universal.

― James Joyce (Ellman, 1959/1982, p. 50)

It could be argued that the success of machine learning owes much to the willingness of humans to use machines. This way humans produce content in a form that is natural to the machine; content that can be used in their training. It is worth exploring the nature of the human condition before it gets adapted to the technology. For, if not careful, we might end up thinking that the way the technology works is the way the human mind works.

This is particularly important with respect to digital technologies that embody writing. The assemblage of topics discussed attempts to map the relationship among the font technologies (such as font formats and font editors), the manual and educational origins of writing (in the sense of mark making), and human perception (namely character recognition). Would it be theoretically possible to derive basic morphological principles of scripts based on the human condition? And if so, why would we want to do that?

Although the focus is on scripts and character recognition, it is worth remembering that these exist in the wider context of reading. The contemporary consensus among cognitive psychologists is that we process individual letters in parallel to obtain character identities (Larson, 2005; Grainger et al., 2008), see also Figure 1. These are subsequently mapped to potential candidate words. The process of character identification/recognition is not perfect and there may be a need to confirm the identities from context, for example:

based on the content (Palmer, 1999, p. 428; Carreiras et al., 2014; Marcet & Perea, 2017), see also Figure 2, or
based on the overall appearance of the font (Sanocki, 1987; Gauthier et al., 2006; Walker, 2008; Sanocki & Dyson, 2012).

Figure 1: A diagram showing the obtaining of letter identities as a part of word recognition (after Larson, 2005). The stimulus (bottom row) is interpreted through a network of feature detectors (the third row) and associated character detectors (the second row) to select one of the potential word candidates (the first row). The correct candidate, the word “CORK”, is confirmed by virtue of all of its four characters being recognised in the correct order.

Figure 2: The geometrically identical shape is interpreted as two different character identities (“H” in the word “THE” and “A” in the word “CAT”) based on context (after Palmer 1999).

“a” is an “a” is an “a”

Most of us learned what the letter “a” should look like in elementary school. But where does this knowledge come from, originally? After all, the teachers were taught the same way we were. In the words of Gertrude Stein (1922, p. 178—188): the “a” is an “a” is an “a”. The convention is the curriculum.

There is a good reason for such a conservative epistemology. It ensures the stability of the scripts and writing systems in use, but it also has a downside. And to paraphrase further, this time Noam Chomsky in the documentary Manufacturing Consent (Achbar & Wintonick, 1992): reading acquisition can be seen as a system of imposed ignorance. Pupils are taught to read and write in a way that limits the potential shapes characters could have. Visual variation is repressed for the sake of effective communication. Many shapes are left to be ignored as non-characters. Is it possible that we repress some that would function well with respect to human requirements?

Figure 3, showing a variety of shapes for the letter “a”, is inspired by a similar overview by Douglas Hofstadter (1982). It shows the visual diversity of the notion of the letter “a”. Would our teachers approve of them all? How can we identify most of them without any additional instruction?

Clearly, what we learned in school is not the only source of truth about characters.

Figure 3: A variety of shapes for the letter “a” selected from contemporary digital fonts (Březina, 2024). For the whole collection, see the project All types of “a”.

Readability influencers

Conservative epistemology makes innovation hard, perhaps even impossible — a new font claiming superior readability cannot be easily confirmed or denied. The main course of innovation is experimentation based on subjective experience or preference. This can be illustrated by a rather extreme example of the lowercase letter “a” from the New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel (1967), see Figure 4. Clearly incomprehensible without any additional instruction or context, it was a part of a speculative proposal. The forms of the New Alphabet were considered on the basis of fashion and authority. An unknown designer presenting the same shape would hardly be noticed.

Figure 4: The letter “a” from the New Alphabet proposal by Wim Crouwel (1967). See the whole project at The Foundry Types website.

The potential to reform may be exhilarating for the radical artist within, but personal experience or preference are not solid grounds for the assessment of readability. Yet, on a daily basis, influential groups, schools of thought, fashion trends, or individuals affect readers’ perception of what is readable. Formed through education, reader’s expectations keep on evolving and adapting. The internal representations of character concepts in human minds are thus a social construct.

Script grammar

Although employed by languages, scripts are visual entities that can be studied in their own right (Vachek, 1945). Taking inspiration from linguistics and Chomsky’s search for language universals (1965), the idea of innate universal script principles would provide ways of studying the morphology and visual syntax of scripts, formally, in a unified way as a form of script grammar. Thus, the principles would feed into fields such as grammatology (Gelb, 1952/1963) and graphetics (Meletis, 2020a; 2020b), or typeface/font design. Below, I would like to illustrate why the idea of a script grammar is compelling and how we might go about defining it.

Conventionally within visual communication, the unit of a script is called a character. It may be defined as the smallest unit of writing that can be mapped to a unit of language (comparable to basic shapes in Meletis, 2020a). While fluent readers might be able to point out a particular letter from a line-up and consider it the simplest thing, representing a character within a script grammar requires consideration of the general population of its users and psychological processes involved in character recognition as well as processes of production.

In order to explain why we are extremely good at reading, which is a relatively novel invention on the evolutionary scale, neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen (2010) offer the hypothesis of neuronal recycling which proposes that during their lifetimes, humans reappropriate neuron centres in the brain that were originally developed for different purposes, most notably shape recognition.

The differences between shapes and character shapes have been recently summarised by Mary Dyson and the author (Dyson & Březina, 2024). From these, the most relevant to morphology are the human ability to unlearn mirror invariance and the positive effect of visual coherence across distinct characters (more about that in the next section).

Humans consider objects, such as faces or cars, identical to their mirrored images. This is not true for characters in some scripts of the world, such as Latin, where this invariance gets unlearned through education.

This can help us expose more nuance regarding the nature of a character. Looking at the picture of the lowercase letters “b” and “d” (see Figure 5) one may wonder whether these are mirrored images of each other. Attentive readers may note that, strictly speaking, they are not. There are clear geometrical differences between the two. Yet, they do seem mirrored on some level. How is it possible that two straightforward material images can be interpreted in two different ways?

Figure 5: Letters “b” and “d” and a mirror image of “d” on the right from a seriffed font.

There are two different ways we look at these letter shapes. Depending on the objective of the comparison, we choose one that better suits the task. In order to model these, we would need multiplicitous formal descriptions or two simple ones for either letter. Importantly, this also shows that there are conceptual differences between material characters and their corresponding internal representations.

The different character descriptions can be placed on a scale from material to more general (see Figure 6). There has been an increasing interest among scientists in formalising the internal representations and the processes involved across world scripts (Changizi & Shimojo, 2005; Changizi et al., 2006; Morin, 2018; Miton & Morin, 2021; Kim et al., 2025).

Figure 6: A diagram showing that characters can be modelled at different levels from specific material instances to more general descriptions. The top layer represents their identities as used in language.

The key question is what would be the right kind of general to describe a script grammar? Focusing on character identities in the graphemic sense provides no indication regarding their visual appearance (the linguistic units are associated with the visual units by convention). On the other hand, describing material character images in terms of their production might leave them disconnected from their use in language. Is there a way to formalise and connect the perceptual processes, including recognition and related top-down processes, to the material and production level? This would allow them to inform each other and connect more easily to the scripts’ socially-constructed nature. In fact, Blesser et al. (1973) suggested that a set of “grammar-like” rules could describe invariant similarity relationships among characters to predict human performance in character recognition.

The visual units of writing

A character is not necessarily the smallest unit of a script when considered independently of language. Calligraphers might argue that the smallest unit of writing should be a stroke as expressed in the work of Edward Johnston (1906/1958) and further formalised by Gerrit Noordzij (2005). On the other hand, developers of contemporary font editors might nominate a segment of a bézier curve or a shape component. Note, that the propositions made by either group are motivated by the technology they use to produce character shapes. Writing is seen as primarily a material artefact or a technological process.

In fact, the study of font production tools reveals a pool of diverse character decompositions motivated by efficiency and convenience. The Metafont system by Donald Knuth (1982) started off with a stroke-based paradigm derived from calligraphy. The Ikarus system developed by Peter Karow (1998) and his team in the early 1970s described character contours as a series of splines (curved segments). Barry Blesser et al. (1973) and Hofstadter (1982) elaborated on more notional features, see Figures 7 and 8. Debra Adams (1989) experimented with “primitive parts” (components) used to build whole characters, see Figure 9. Changyuan Hu and Roger Hersch (2001) proposed a hybrid approach that combines components of different kinds, see Figure 10.

Figure 7: Differences between physical, perceptual, and functional character attributes (after Blesser et al., 1973).

Figure 8: Hofstadter (1982) proposed the idea of a “role” to capture more notional design features. The illustration is from Gary McGraw and Douglas Hofstadter (1996).

Figure 9: To compose character shapes, the abcdefg system would recombine “primitive parts” (after Adams 1989). The top row shows decomposition of the letter “h” into primitive parts. The bottom row shows letterforms that could be theoretically produced using these parts (barring the dot above “i”).

Figure 10: To compose character shapes, CPFPage by Hu and Hersch (2001) combines qualitatively different components such as sweeps, stems, and serifs.

Although geometrically precise, these descriptions cannot by themselves warrant successful recognition — it is unclear what makes a sequence of strokes a rendering of a character. This cannot be determined solely by a brush or pen or font editor or rudimentary topological descriptions (so-called skeletons). The top-down processes of human perception are a necessary requirement.

However, it can be shown that some production concepts such as components and more general attributes and notions can be taken as similarity features and used to effectively model similarity judgements and coherence in fonts (Březina, 2018, see Figure 11. This suggests that by studying craft knowledge, we can start formalising internal character representations and their relationships.

Figure 11: Character models derived from craft knowledge were used to predict perceptual similarity judgements by readers (Březina, 2018). Above: diagrams showing the character shapes interpreted in terms of features on the basis of craft knowledge. Below: comparison of contextual judgements of character triplets collected from readers.

The universal principles

With methods to elicit features and confirm their perceptual relevance, we might describe characters in a way that is relevant to recognition and that allows critiquing and upgrading the script grammars as our understanding evolves.

While the script grammar can use more specific formal descriptions, the universal script principles would rely on more general requirements determined by the constraints of human perception and be globally applicable to all forms of writing. Here is an early draft of a few script principles that might hold as universal:

Spatially, characters are organised sequentially, in a predominantly linear way.
Although they can touch or connect, characters occupy their own space with minimal overlaps.
Character identities are invariant to size, rotation, position, and colour.
Characters can be represented as configurations of more or less specific features.
The features within a character are organised spatially in a non-linear way, typically in two dimensions.
The features of a character enable its recognition, overall visual coherence, or both. The recognition relies on sufficiently distinct sets of features being used for different characters while the visual coherence emerges as an effect of features shared across different characters.

Notably, any of these principles can be compromised which may impede the effectivity of character recognition or overall visual coherence. For example, one might have difficulty reading a distant or rotated sign or artistic calligraphic piece with numerous letter overlaps.

The tools we make and the tools that make us

Describing scripts in a unified way allows their comparison regardless of language or technology. It provides tools to answer questions regarding scripts’ evolution, relatedness, and effectivity in conveying information. Like Thomas Milo (2009) we can use a script grammar to compare technological implementations or argue for their improvements. The universal script principles can be used to critique the tools and production workflows in a more general sense.

Understanding the scripts at this level may help us develop the tools we need to become better designers. After all, our font editors and large parametric design systems such as Metafont (Knuth, 1982) or Prototypo (Mathey & Babé, 2014) seek to provide means of implementing a script grammar to create fonts.

Exploring the ways in which character shapes differ from other shapes may help in the development of better tools and design skills. For example, the way character recognition benefits from visual coherence suggests that the principle of a component or its more flexible iterations in contemporary font editors such as Glyphs (Seifert et al., 2020), FontLab (FontLab Ltd., 2022), or Fontra (Black[Foundry] & Van Rossum, 2025), is a critical line for future development. The ways these components transform, combine, and position themselves next to each other can be developed even further away from the current status quo. The notion of what is a component can be challenged as well. Moreover, the existence of visual and notional features suggests that type designers may benefit from incorporating degrees of abstract thinking in their creative processes.

We are all designing the same font

By writing Ulysses James Joyce (1922) showed that we are all telling the same story. Building on the work of Ferdinand De Saussure (1916/1972) and other structuralists, Chomsky (1965) proposed the universal language grammar to show that all languages follow the same principles. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958/1963) explored the universal myth and the philosopher Mircea Eliade (1952/1961) argued for shared universal principles in the world’s religions. Perhaps, we (designers) may also try to entertain the idea that in some way we are all designing the same font.

Many designers have heard the cliché that every font is a revival, referring to the fact that new designs tend to follow historical and conventional forms in order to be more easily readable. However, the notion of universal script principles is saying more than that. By mapping the individual character features, it uncovers the substrate which is used to make our writing and the fonts same or different in the same way the individual blocks of DNA are used to create the myriad combinations of all living things. Designing a new font is a creative act that, like storytelling, works with expectations. Changing a single feature can create something surprisingly new. By seeing our work as inherently related to all others we may understand the act as well as the product better. We can have clearer, and perhaps kinder, arguments for innovation and originality.

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Can we selectively attend to the top halves of letters and ignore the bottom halves?

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Background to the study

We presented this work at the ICTVC 8 conference in Thessaloniki in July 2022. A primary aim of the online study was to find out if letters are processed holistically. This would mean that we attend to all parts of a letter at the same time, we cannot selectively attend, and we are sensitive to spatial relations among parts. Research on face perception has demonstrated that faces are perceived holistically (e.g. Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka, 1998).

A second motivation for the study was to see whether designers differ from non-designers in how they process letters, holistically or as separate features. Research with art students has found less holistic processing of faces than ordinary observers (Zhou, Cheng, Zang & Wong, 2012). This is explained by the art students’ additional experience in drawing faces and attending to parts of a face. In a similar manner, letter designers (e.g. typeface designers, calligraphers, lettering artists) attend to parts of letters. We therefore predicted that designers, and in particular letter designers, might not process letters holistically, whereas non-designers would process letters holistically.

What we did

Tasks

We asked participants in the study to categorise themselves as a non-designer or a graphic designer, typographer, letter designer, or other designer.

Participants were asked to look at a series of two letters, presented one after the other, with a pattern mask in between. The task was to say whether the top halves of the two letters were identical. The response options were ‘Sure same’, ‘Probably same’, ‘Probably different’, ‘Sure different’. To avoid any ambiguity as to what was meant by the top half, there was a horizontal line through the middle of the letters. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Two letters where the top halves are different, and the bottom halves are also different.

The letters

A variable font was designed that varied contrast (low to high) and terminals (simple cut-off terminals to flared to serifs). Letters were composed of two halves and designed so the tops and the bottoms of all combinations connect smoothly in the middle. They were designed as monospaced letters for consistency of presentation in the task. See Figure 2.

Figure 2: Reading across the rows, the top halves of the letters remain the same and the bottom changes. Reading down the columns, the top halves of the letters change, and the bottom halves remain the same. The diagonal, from top left to bottom right, contains letters where the variation is applied to both the top and bottom of the letter. These are labelled ‘normal’ letters in contrast to the ‘composite’ letters where the top and bottom come from different versions of the normal letters. Highlighted in grey are letters that were used to create the pairs described in figures 3a–d below.

To test for holistic processing, a comparison is made between two conditions:

pairs of letters where the relationship between the two bottom halves of the letters is inconsistent with the relationship between the top halves (incongruent letter pairs)
pairs of letters where there is a consistent relationship (congruent letter pairs)

If we are able to attend to only the top halves of letters, and ignore the bottom halves of letters, then we should not be confused by 1) where there is an incongruence.
If we process letters holistically, and we cannot not attend to the bottom halves (we attend to the whole letter) then we will make more errors in 1) than in 2).

The four categories of letter pairs are shown in Figures 3a–3d :

Figure 3a: Two ‘same’ congruent pairs (top halves identical and bottom halves identical)

Figure 3b: Two ‘different’ congruent pairs (top halves and bottom halves different)

Figure 3c: One ‘same’ incongruent pair (top halves identical but bottom halves different)

Figure 3d: One ‘different’ incongruent pair (top halves different but bottom halves the same)

Timing

The study included a practice set of trials followed by the main session. The practice was included to familiarise participants with the procedure and to set the pace of presenting the letters (presentation rate). It was important to ensure that the task was neither too easy nor too difficult. By piloting the study, we realised that there might be quite big differences in the level of difficulty between designers and non-designers; the latter are less used to discriminating between fonts.

We included 16 practice trials using letters “d”, “u”, and “i” where we varied the rate at which we presented the letters starting at 800 msecs, then increasing the rate in steps to 200 msecs and then back to 800 msecs. The proportion of correct responses was calculated, and this was used to set a consistent rate for the main part of the study. The main part used a different set of letters: “a, b, c, e, h, j, l, n, p, q, r, t, z”.

Figure 4: An example trial from the study. Click on arrows to proceed. Participants were asked to look at a series of two letters, presented one after the other, with a pattern mask in between. The transition was automatic after a defined period of time for each letter and mask. The response options were shown, and the letters hidden, after both letters had been shown. The task was to say whether the top halves of the two letters were identical.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Figure 5: All letters and their variants used in the study.

Participants

A total of 229 people completed the online study and were broken down into:

	Count
Non-designers	118
Graphic designers	47
Letter designers	36
Typographers	7
Other designers	21

Repository

We have made the study website and data available on GitHub and licensed them under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

What we found

Holistic processing

The ability to discriminate between same and different pairs is measured using AUC which is free of response bias, such as responding ‘same’ most of the time. Overall, the congruent pairs were easier to discriminate than the incongruent pairs. This means that the letters were processed holistically.

The results broken down by participant group are shown in Figure 6. Although the size of the difference between congruent and incongruent pairs varies across groups, the only statistically significant differences are between:

graphic designers and other designers
letter designers and other designers

In both cases, there is a larger difference between congruent and incongruent pairs in other designers, i.e. stronger evidence of holistic processing in other designers. There is larger variation among other designers with the incongruent pairs which suggests that some participants may have found this condition particularly challenging.

Although typographers appear not to process letters holistically (similar discrimination of congruent and incongruent pairs), this result is not reliably different from the other groups because there are so few participants who categorised themselves as typographers (N=7).

The difference between congruent and incongruent pairs for all of the designer groups is not significantly smaller than the difference for non-designers. Designers generally process letters in a similar manner to non-designers, holistically, rather than attending to parts of the letter.

Figure 6: Mean AUC scores for each group of participants, comparing discrimination between same and different letters in congruent and incongruent pairs. A higher score for congruent pairs compared with incongruent indicates holistic processing. The standard error bars represent the amount of variation among participants.

Further comparisons across groups of participants

Although we aimed to achieve a similar level of performance in designers and non-designers, by adjusting the presentation rate of the letters, we did find that graphic designers, letter designers, and typographers were better at detecting the differences than non-designers. Letter designers were better than graphic designers and other designers. See Figure 7.

Figure 7: Overall AUC scores for each group of participants, combining congruent and incongruent letter pairs.

The presentation rate of the letters can also be compared across groups (Figure 8). The non-designers received longer presentation times than graphic designers and letter designers. This is expected as they would be likely to get fewer correct responses during the practice trials. Other designers also received longer presentation times than letter designers.

Figure 8: Presentation rates in miliseconds (based on practice trials) for each group of participants.

Possible explanations

We found evidence for holistic processing of letters in non-designers and designers. The responses of other designers appear to be rather different from the rest of the designer groups. But as we do not have any further information on the characteristics of this group, it is difficult to explain the results.

We may conclude that designers and non-designers process letters in the same way. However, an alternative interpretation is that, although the outcomes are the same, they are achieved by using different strategies. As experts in the analysis of letters, letter/typographic/graphic designers may have focused on the spatial relationships between letter features, e.g. the relative position of thick and thin strokes. As experts in letter perception, non-designers may have viewed the whole letter, as in reading, because it is a familiar shape.

Future work may explore whether changes to the nature of the task reveal differences in strategy.

What did you think?

What did you think of the article? We would sincerely appreciate your feedback.

[email protected]?subject=Comment on Can we selectively attend to the top halves of letters and ignore the bottom halves?">Send a comment

References

Farah, M. J., Wilson, K. D., Drain, M., & Tanaka, J. N. (1998). What is “special” about face perception? Psychological Review, 105(3), 482–498. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.105.3.482

Zhou, G. M., Cheng, Z. J., Zhang, X. D., & Wong, A. C. N. (2012). Smaller holistic processing of faces associated with face drawing experience. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(2), 157–62. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0174-x

Examining the research methods used by legibility legends Tinker and Paterson

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In a previous article I described revisiting research on line length, having come across some interesting findings which didn’t fit with a commonly held view. It seems that long line lengths may not be as problematic as we thought. Going back to research by Tinker and Paterson, questions were raised over the validity of their methods. This article takes a closer and critical look at what they did as their work is frequently cited in educational design literature and by other legibility researchers.

Motivation

Why am I so concerned about the studies conducted by Tinker and Paterson? Because until I read about a flaw in their method (Parker, 2019; Parker et al., 2019), I had considered their work to be a solid foundation for subsequent legibility research. Tinker is described as “an internationally recognized authority on legibility of print” (Tinker, 1963, p. iv). Having been alerted to this potential problem, I sought out the original articles, realising that I had previously been over-reliant on the summaries (e.g. Tinker, 1963; 1965). I also looked to see if other researchers and writers had critiqued their method.

Test material

Essentially the same experimental design was used throughout all Tinker and Paterson’s studies measuring speed of reading. A standardized test provided the reading material: the Chapman-Cook speed of reading test. The test involves reading paragraphs of two sentences and underlining the word which spoils the meaning. The number of paragraphs read in 1 minute and 45 seconds is measured. Sets of paragraphs are printed as individual forms and each form has different content, i.e. a unique set of paragraphs. See Figure 1 for an example of one form (Form B).

Tinker and Paterson (1929): an example of their experimental method

Their first published study into line length reviewed the existing results from experiments and the opinions of advertisers to conclude that “the problem of optimal line length is in a very unsatisfactory state” (Tinker & Paterson, 1929, pp. 209–210). In this study, the paragraphs were printed in 10pt Scotch Roman, varying the line length from 59 mm to 186 mm, set solid. They compared line lengths by using a standard: a line length of 80 mm. See Figure 2 for a simulation of part of the two forms. Each pair (standard and test line length) was tested on a different group of 80 university students adding up to a total of 560 participants, across 7 comparisons (see Table 1).

Figure 1: Form B of Chapman-Cook Speed of Reading. The image is taken from Cobb (1944, p. 37). This example has a time limit of two and a half minutes.

They stated that in all 7 groups, the line length of 80 mm was read faster than the alternative, only one of which was shorter (59 mm); the rest were longer than 80 mm. All differences except one (80 mm versus 97 mm) were reported as statistically significant.

	Test form	Standard line length	Test form	Test line length
Group 1	Form A	80 mm	Form B	59 mm
Group 2	Form A	80 mm	Form B	97 mm
Group 3	Form A	80 mm	Form B	114 mm
Group 4	Form A	80 mm	Form B	136 mm
Group 5	Form A	80 mm	Form B	152 mm
Group 6	Form A	80 mm	Form B	168 mm
Group 7	Form A	80 mm	Form B	186 mm

Table 1: Line lengths given to 7 groups of students. Each group first receives the standard line length of 80 mm and then the test line length. (Tinker and Paterson, 1929, p. 210)

Figure 2: Simulation of two of the paragraphs from Form A (80 mm) and two from Form B (7 different test line lengths).

The flaw

As mentioned above, each form of the Chapman-Cook test (Form A and Form B) has different content, i.e. a different set of paragraphs. As Table 1 shows, in each group Form A is used for the standard (line length of 80 mm) and Form B for the alternative, the test line length. Material set in each pair of line lengths was read by a different group of participants who always read Form B after Form A and the test line length always followed the standard. This means that the content of each form is confounded with line length. Faster reading of the 80 mm line length could be attributed to Form A having paragraphs that are easier to read than those of Form B. Moreover, the effect of practice is not controlled.

Their control condition

Recognising this potential problem, Tinker and Paterson’s solution was to include what they considered to be a control condition where one group receives Forms A and B set in the same line length (80 mm). Any difference due to practice or lack of equivalence of content is then used as a “correction factor” (Paterson & Tinker 1940, p. 42) that is applied to correct for potential effects of the order and content of the forms. (See Table 2 for an example of how the correction is applied). This correction was considered adequate to conclude that a difference in reading speed could be attributed to the typographical arrangement, rather than the test procedure.

Group (1)	Test form (2)	Typeface (3)	Average number of paragraphs read (4)	Difference between A and B (5)	Corrected difference between A and B (6)
1	A	Scotch Roman	19.1	0.71	0
	B	Scotch Roman	18.39
2	A	Scotch Roman	18.78	0.64	-0.07
	B	Garamont	18.14
3	A	Scotch Roman	18.81	0.74	0.03
	B	Antique	18.07
4	A	Scotch Roman	19.42	0.91	0.2
	B	Bodoni	18.51
5	A	Scotch Roman	19.03	0.91	0.2
	B	Old Style	18.12
6	A	Scotch Roman	18.43	0.94	0.23
	B	Caslon O.S.	17.49
7	A	Scotch Roman	19.06	1.13	0.42
	B	Kabel Lite	17.93

Table 2: Group 1 works as the control group and the difference between the number of paragraphs read in Form A and Form B of Group 1 is 0.71 (column 5). This number functions as the correction factor and is subtracted from each of the differences found between other comparisons, resulting in the numbers in column 6. Note that the size of the difference between Form A and Form B is therefore reduced. The data in this table is a subset of the data in Table 1 from Paterson and Tinker (1932, pp. 610–611).

No control group was used in the 1929 line length study which explains why there are more significant differences described in the 1929 paper than summarised in the subsequent book (Paterson & Tinker, 1940, p. 42) where the correction factor is applied (reducing the size of the differences). In the 1940 publication, variations in line length between 80 mm and 152 mm (i.e. 80, 97, 114, 136, 152 mm) are said to have little or no effect on speed of reading. An unusually short line (59 mm) may slow reading. At line lengths of 168 and 186 mm “the evidence is clear that reading speed is significantly retarded” (Paterson & Tinker, 1940, p. 43). Here is a statement that long lines slow down reading. See Table 3 for both the uncorrected and corrected data.

This control group technique is questionable because the correction factor is obtained from one group of readers and then applied to different groups of readers. Even if the experiment conditions are the same for all groups, the variability among readers may mean that the correction factor is not appropriate for them. It is perfectly valid to compare different groups of readers, known as between subject comparisons, but the data do not seem to be analysed in this manner.

Their response to criticism

Tinker and Paterson were aware of their “methodological difficulties” and published a paper on methodological considerations (Tinker & Paterson, 1936). This paper describes a series of “special experiments” they conducted to address all the issues they could think of. These include discussion of the control condition and differences among participant groups. They explore the differences and decide they are within suitable limits (Tinker & Paterson, 1936, p. 135). This is questionable (see note 5). Subsequently, Paterson and Tinker (1940, p. 188) acknowledge that “Some critics might believe that these differences would affect the typographical comparisons involved in any one study”. I believe that this is a possibility; I am unconvinced by the data they use to support their argument that the variations in the average scores of the 7 groups do not affect their results. But we do not know how the results might be affected.

Group (1)	Form (2)	Line length (3)	Average number of paragraphs read (4)	Difference between A and B (5)	Corrected difference between A and B (6)	Percent difference after correction (7)
1	A	80 mm	18.31	1.25	0.75	-4.1
	B	59 mm	17.06
2	A	80 mm	18.46	0.5	0	0
	B	97 mm	17.96
3	A	80 mm	18.19	0.96	0.46	-2.5
	B	114 mm	17.23
4	A	80 mm	18.98	0.93	0.43	-2.3
	B	136 mm	18.05
5	A	80 mm	18.94	1.14	0.64	-3.4
	B	152 mm	17.8
6	A	80 mm	18.88	1.47	0.97	-5.1
	B	168 mm	17.41
7	A	80 mm	18.31	1.88	1.38	-7.5
	B	186 mm	16.43

Table 3: The numbers in columns 4 and 5 are taken from Table 1 of Tinker and Paterson (1929, p. 211). The numbers in column 7 are taken from Table 14 of Paterson and Tinker, (1940, p. 42). The negative difference in this final column indicates that the test line length is read slower than the standard (80 mm). I have added column 6 to indicate the effect of the correction factor (0.5) on the difference in the number of paragraphs read. Note that the correction factor comes from a comparison of Form A in 80 mm and Form B in 97 mm, and not both forms in 80 mm.

A better solution to the flaw in their method

Tinker and Paterson spent considerable effort justifying their methods rather than addressing the problem by counterbalancing the conditions across different groups of participants. Counterbalancing avoids confounding the content of the forms with line length and balances out effects of practice. As a consequence, the results will have greater validity because they are measuring the effects of line length and not other unintended factors.

To counterbalance the conditions:

the standard and test line lengths are both paired with Form A and B (to address the confound)
Form A is read first and second (balancing practice effects).

Instead of using their single configuration:

Group	1st form	Line length	2nd form	Line length
Group 1	Form A	Standard line length	Form B	Test line length

three other configurations are added to create a balanced design, with different groups of participants assigned to each configuration:

Group	1st form	Line length	2nd form	Line length
Group 1a	Form A	Standard line length	Form B	Test line length
Group 1b	Form B	Standard line length	Form A	Test line length
Group 1c	Form A	Test line length	Form B	Standard line length
Group 1d	Form B	Test line length	Form A	Standard line length

As I tried to work out possible reasons why Tinker and Paterson hadn’t used this experimental design, I was surprised to find that they had. In an earlier paper (Tinker & Paterson, 1928) they explain why they use this design, which they describe as the A B B A method of sequence, addressing the criticisms outlined above. They state that this method avoids “differences due to difficulty of the alternate forms A and B” and avoids “the presence of any marked practice effect in passing from one trial to the second” (Tinker & Paterson, 1928, p. 362).

Why did they stop using this experimental design? They justify abandoning the A B B A sequence method to permit “a simpler and more straightforward comparison” (Paterson & Tinker, 1929, p. 125). It’s possible that the A B B A configuration may have introduced some practical difficulties when administering the test in a classroom, or the cost of producing the test material may have been prohibitive at that time. But in retrospect, their approach seems somewhat misguided.

Conclusion

This critique of Tinker and Paterson’s research addresses a very specific issue from the perspective of current experimental psychology, which now has more sophisticated statistical methods than those available at the time of the studies. Nevertheless, their method was criticised by their contemporaries. More recent criticism (Berkson & Enneson, 2013), though questioning Tinker’s methodological principles and results, does not refer to the lack of counterbalancing.

From a designer’s perspective, there may be more general and relevant criticisms that could be levelled at these speed of reading tests, such as:

the paragraphs are too short
reading is interrupted by crossing out words
measuring reading ease or comfort would be better that measuring reading speed

But ultimately, when the design of the study questions the validity of the results, other objections are less relevant.

Some implications for designers and researchers

Tinker and Paterson’s findings on line length are consistent with typographer’s recommendations for good printing practice (e.g. Bringhurst, 2019). These recommendations may be based on the research (e.g. Spencer, 1968; Schriver, 1997) or the “inherited experience of five hundred years of printing history” (McLean, 1980, p. 47). This agreement suggests that designers should continue observing guidance provided by practitioners unless new research contradicts our current conventions. As I mentioned in my previous article, there have been few studies into line length in print following Tinker and Paterson’s work. Now seems to be a good time for researchers to conduct new studies.

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References

Berkson, W., & Enneson, P. (2013). Readability: Discovery and disputation. Typography Papers, 9, 117–151. http://typography.network/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Berkson_Enneson_TypPp_9_Readability_discovery_and_disputation.pdf

Bringhurst, R. (2019). The elements of typographic style (4th ed.). Hartley & Marks.

Cobb, E. K. (1944). The relation between certain phases of reading ability and speed and accuracy in typewriting [Master of Science dissertation, North Carolina University]. NC Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship. https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/cobb_emma_1944.pdf

McLean, R. (1980). The Thames and Hudson manual of typography. Thames and Hudson.

Parker, A. J. (2019). The return-sweep in reading [Doctoral thesis, Bournemouth University]. BURO. http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/32170/

Parker, A. J., Nikolova, M., Slattery, T. J., Liversedge, S. P., & Kirkby, J. A. (2019). Binocular coordination and return-sweep saccades among skilled adult readers. Journal of Vision, 19(6), 10. https://doi.org/10.1167/19.6.10

Paterson, D. G., & Tinker, M. A. (1929). Studies of typographical factors influencing speed of reading. II. Size of type. Journal of Applied Psychology, 13(2), 120–130. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0074167

Paterson, D. G., & Tinker, M. A. (1932). Studies of typographical factors influencing speed of reading: X. Style of type face. Journal of Applied Psychology, 16(6), 605–613. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0070644

Paterson, D. G., & Tinker, M. A. (1940). How to make type readable. Harper and Row.

Schriver, K. A. (1997). Dynamics in document design: Creating text for readers. Wiley.

Spencer, H. (1968). The visible word. Royal College of Art.

Tinker, M. A. (1963). Legibility of print. Iowa State University Press.

Tinker, M. A. (1965). Bases for effective reading. Lund Press.

Tinker, M. A., & Paterson, D. G. (1928). Influence of type form on speed of reading. Journal of Applied Psychology, 12, 359–368. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0073699

Tinker, M. A., & Paterson, D. G. (1929). Studies of typographical factors influencing speed of reading: III. Length of line. Journal of Applied Psychology, 13, 205–219. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0073597

Tinker, M. A., & Paterson, D. G. (1936). Studies of typographical factors influencing speed of reading. XIII. Methodological considerations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 20(1), 132–145. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054333

Online book “Legibility: how and why typography affects ease of reading” by Mary Dyson

Wed, 03 May 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Design Regression is pleased to announce the publication of Mary Dyson’s book Legibility: how and why typography affects ease of reading in a new, digital edition, in English and Spanish.

The invention of typography, print, and more recently digitization and the internet brought about an abundance of documents and made the need for legible communication unquestionable. Or vice versa: illegibility creates barriers and makes documents unapproachable. The stakes are as high as the numbers of documents and readers. Professional or not, we all in one way or another design documents thus affecting their ease of reading. But what exactly is legibility and how can we design documents that are easier to read?

Traditional typographic knowledge based on conventions, technology, and personal or shared experience claims reliable answers proven by generations. Next to this, there has been a growing body of scientific research aiming to provide testable theories to critically assess such answers. Often scattered across journals and scholarly monographs, contemporary research may have been hard to access and digest by non-researchers.

Mary Dyson spent most of her academic life at the renowned Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading (UK) and dedicated her career to research into reading and typography, writing numerous papers on the subject. Her book is a comprehensive attempt to make descriptions of research more accessible to those who can benefit: practitioners, students, enthusiasts.

One cannot overstate the importance of its publication online. It is now a prime resource on typographic legibility available on the web, licensed permissively (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) like all other texts on Design Regression. I believe it will have a profound impact on web typography and typographic discourse online, but it would be just as fine if you find it useful for your thinking, practice, or research.

The project would not be possible without the generosity of the original publisher and editor María González de Cossío from Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Diseño (Puebla, México) and financial support of Google Fonts. The production work for the digital edition was done under the auspices of Rosetta Type with most of the heavy lifting executed by Johannes Neumeier. With further thanks to Sofie Beier, Jeanne-Louise Moys, Carlos Pérez Cerón, Kevin Larson, and Tania Chacana (see acknowledgements in the book itself).

The book is now available from: https://legible-typography.com

p.s. We do have improvements planned and would sincerely appreciate your feedback.

Design Regression

The Novel and the Familiar: Writing stories for readers with memory loss

How to build a novel

The genre

The plot

The story-teller

The structure

The setting

The characters

Writing style

Illustration

Design

Conclusion

What did you think?

Enjoyed the article?

References

Acknowledgements

What is a (universal) script grammar?

“a” is an “a” is an “a”

Readability influencers

Script grammar

The visual units of writing

The universal principles

The tools we make and the tools that make us

We are all designing the same font

What did you think?

Enjoyed the article?

References

Can we selectively attend to the top halves of letters and ignore the bottom halves?

Background to the study

What we did

Tasks

The letters

Timing

Participants

Repository

What we found

Holistic processing

Further comparisons across groups of participants

Possible explanations

What did you think?

Enjoyed the article?

References

Examining the research methods used by legibility legends Tinker and Paterson

Motivation

Test material

Tinker and Paterson (1929): an example of their experimental method

The flaw

Their control condition

Their response to criticism

A better solution to the flaw in their method

Conclusion

Some implications for designers and researchers

What did you think?

Enjoyed the article?

References

Online book “Legibility: how and why typography affects ease of reading” by Mary Dyson