Fred Smei­jers, the award-​winning designer of FF Quadraat and fonts for Our­Type, and author of “Coun­ter­punch,” describes the trou­ble with “leg­i­bil­ity” — not just in achiev­ing it as a goal, but describ­ing it as a con­cept.

It is pos­si­ble, for anyone and cer­tainly for a type­designer, to expe­ri­ence aha! moments when it con­cerns leg­i­bil­ity. It has hap­pened to me many times and it still goes on. My leg­i­bil­ity instinct became very strong and, I am afraid, it will never go away. This is a real pro­fes­sional defor­ma­tion which, in real life, means that I can hardly look at any text with­out first shap­ing an opin­ion about the typeface/letters in use, the gen­eral layout, qual­ity of print, etc. It usu­ally takes at least a few sec­onds to scan all these before I can start to read. It is quite a relief to real­ize this acquired reflex can be sup­pressed in crit­i­cal sit­u­a­tions, like look­ing for the right check-​in gate in a hurry.

A type designer often has to con­front him­self with the leg­i­bil­ity prob­lem on var­i­ous levels. Onscreen rep­re­sen­ta­tion of type­faces, for exam­ple, is a field were you will often face it in rather unfor­giv­ing cir­cum­stances. In the mid-’80s I had to exper­i­ment with the then so-​called “soft-​fonts” — screen fonts with greyscal­ing. The grayscal­ing effect, when applied well, deliv­ered such a strik­ing leg­i­bil­ity improve­ment that it simply made me feel very, very happy and con­tent. I was whistling while riding back home from work.

Another exam­ple, maybe less obvi­ous than the one just given, but also very impor­tant to me, was during the devel­op­ment of the Arnhem type­face. Orig­i­nally Arnhem was a custom-​made type design for Staatscour­ant — a news­pa­per of the Dutch Gov­ern­ment. During the design process, I was in the lucky cir­cum­stance to have the oppor­tu­nity to test in print as many trial fonts as I thought were nec­es­sary. We are talk­ing about real con­ven­tional leg­i­bil­ity here, mean­ing news­pa­per print, econ­omy, small sizes while main­tain­ing char­ac­ter and beauty. During test­ing, one of the things I dis­cov­ered was that the simple tra­di­tional triangular-​shaped top serifs func­tioned better than all the other subtle vari­a­tions I could come up with. This is, of course, no golden rule. If it is, it only counts for a cer­tain class of con­ven­tional type­faces and even then, only when set­ting large amounts of text in small point size.

So, there we go, talk­ing about leg­i­bil­ity means in the first place that you have to be extremely spe­cific about the cir­cum­stances in which the read­ing takes place. The “triangular-​serif story” might con­tain some truth, but it is not nec­es­sar­ily true when it comes to a bill­board or when just two words are set in small type size.
The cir­cum­stances in which people can and do read nowa­days can be so diverse that I have hardly any hope for the gen­eral leg­i­bilty tests and their con­clu­sions, as we knew them from a few decades ago. Read­ing habits do change and they change, I am afraid, faster than some­one like Stan­ley Mori­son made us once believe. People adapt and accept a lot when it comes down to read­ing — or better said: scan­ning — all kinds of messages.

Of course, there are still many of down to earth do’s and don’t’s within typog­ra­phy. These little laws and rules will often hold ground. But that is not leg­i­bil­ity, per se — that is gen­eral design knowl­edge which, in prin­ci­ple, has to lead to better and more read­able results. So, in the end, what does leg­i­bil­ity exactly mean today for gen­eral graphic design? I find that very hard to tell.

On the other hand, I am almost sure that cer­tain prod­ucts which deal with infor­ma­tion trans­fer are being devel­oped in lab-​like cir­cum­stances. These prod­ucts are also being tested for leg­i­bil­ity. But leg­i­bil­ity there means in the first place not just the let­ters, but ease of use in gen­eral. Layout and user inter­face struc­ture are in such cases often more deci­sive than a pixel more or less. — Fred Smeijers

Fred Smei­jers is a type designer who spe­cial­izes in typo­graphic research and devel­op­ment for prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ers. Among his type­face designs are FF Quadraat and Quadraat Sans, TEFF Renard, and the Our­Type Arnhem, Fresco and Sansa. Born in the Nether­lands, Smei­jers stud­ied graphic design at the Acad­emy of Art in Arnhem. His first prac­tice came in the mid-1980s with the firm of Océ, just then enter­ing the field of typog­ra­phy with laser print­ers. This set the pat­tern for Smeijers’s long engage­ment with type design in its most func­tional appli­ca­tions, as part of prod­uct design. After five years he left to work in graphic design, help­ing to estab­lish the group Quadraat (in Arnhem). The name of the design group was also given to his first pub­lished type­face: FF Quadraat, launched by FontShop Inter­na­tional in 1992. His work of the 1990s included the expan­sion of the Quadraat family, type and let­ter­ing design jobs for Philips, col­lab­o­ra­tion on Martin Majoor’s Tele­font type design, type­faces such as TEFF Renard and Roma­nee, and his first book “Coun­ter­punch.” With the award of the Gerrit Noordzij Prize in 2000, Smeijers’s achieve­ments in the field of prac­tice, research, and edu­ca­tion were for­mally rec­og­nized. This prize included a ret­ro­spec­tive exhi­bi­tion of his work, held in The Hague in 2003. His book “Type now” was also pub­lished then, as part of the award. That year also saw the launch of the label he co-​runs: Our­Type. In 2004, Smei­jers was appointed Pro­fes­sor of Dig­i­tal Typog­ra­phy at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig.