Why would people compare Georgia and Verdana and assume they were comparing "typefaces with, and without serifs" as opposed to faces that set wider vs. narrower or faces that did or did not have strong weight variation?

Gunnar

Might have something to do with the fact that they have the same designer, and were both designed for screen recogition, and I assume as part of the same commission. I think that these probably are two quite useful faces to study in that regard.

Gerald

Gerald,

The scientific method is to try to disprove your assumptions. If you find that Georgia reads better under some circumstance than Verdana does and you think it is probably a serif thing, wouldn't you automatically do three things?:

1) Try other serif/sans comparisons to see if there is a pattern

2) Try to find out if the effect is repeatable under a range of conditions (i.e., try to identify the specific effect rather than speak about it as a general effect without knowing that is the case)

3) Try to examine other factors that might explain the effect--evenly weighted serif faces, non-evenly weighted sans, different counter sizes, set widths, etc.

The fact that people publish crap with half-assed assumptions in the expectation of getting tenure out of it is sad. If academia had any pride, the authors of many of these papers would be sent back to undergraduate study of logic and methodology.

Gunnar

Gerald,

The scientific method is to try to disprove your assumptions. If you find that Georgia reads better under some circumstance than Verdana does and you think it is probably a serif thing, wouldn't you automatically do three things?:

1) Try other serif/sans comparisons to see if there is a pattern

2) Try to find out if the effect is repeatable under a range of conditions (i.e., try to identify the specific effect rather than speak about it as a general effect without knowing that is the case)

3) Try to examine other factors that might explain the effect--evenly weighted serif faces, non-evenly weighted sans, different counter sizes, set widths, etc.

The fact that people publish crap with half-assed assumptions in the expectation of getting tenure out of it is sad. If academia had any pride, the authors of many of these papers would be sent back to undergraduate study of logic and methodology.

Gunnar

Might have something to do with the fact that they have the same designer, and were both designed for screen recogition, and I assume as part of the same commission. I think that these probably are two quite useful faces to study in that regard.

Gerald

Gunnar Swanson wrote:

Why would people compare Georgia and Verdana and assume they were comparing "typefaces with, and without serifs" as opposed to faces that set wider vs. narrower or faces that did or did not have strong weight variation?