SERIF FOR STORIES SANS SERIF FOR INFO
Serif for Stories
Serif fonts, like Times, Palatino and Garamond are very effective when utilized in stories. Stories are sequences of words usually longer than one line. Most traditional newspapers print their front page news columns in one of these fonts.
The reason for this is that serif fonts closely resembles the cursive characters we learned in primary school which are one connected to the other through small ligaments. Such little legs and arms extending each letter to hook into the next help tremendously the eye in making words when we are learning or when as adults the conditions for legibility deteriorate.
That is why we see a large use of serif fonts in small type on the front page of newspapers. The text is indeed very small, and the reading conditions for a newspaper are not generally ideal (one may read it while traveling, or sitting in a bar) and therefore the use of highly legible serif characters at a small size is the perfect choice for "stories".
Serif fonts have come to acquire over time an old-fashioned, classical, conservative and formal look. These fonts are best used for your main content inside a slide as well as for typical bullet ed text. Appropriate use is also typically inside tables where each cell contains a small paragraph of text.
What is info?, Info is everything else that is not "stories": Titles, subtitles, callouts, captions, figure numbers, legendsetc. All of these short, burst-like information packets that we use everywhere inside presentations can be best made accessible and readable through the use of Sans Serif fonts like Arial, Verdana and Helvetica.
Sans Serif fonts do not have curly ligaments at the end of their legs and these characters look rather stick-like. The look of Sans-Serif fonts is modern and informal. They are best used in titles of presentations and inside legends and callouts when using statistical graphs, maps and diagrams. Sans serif fonts work also very well for numbers inside tables and spreadsheets as well as inside charts and stats.
Among Sans Serif fonts Verdana is the best one to use when you have the following conditions:
- output to an electronic screen (monitor, video projector)
- very small size (below 10pt)
As such Verdana is an ideal
font to be used for small "info" text inside a presentation. Once again, callouts, captions, legends maybe some of the best applications.
With time and experience you will notice that Verdana works really best, both visually and aesthetically only when the text is really small. As a matter of fact in all other instances I would suggest to use Arial.
Arial and Verdana guarantee as a pair also the highest degree of compatibility with other operating systems and computer platforms offering therefore the safest and most reliable choice in terms of readability, accessibility and compatibility among all Sans Serif fonts.
By Luigi Canali De Rossi
