Applied Linguistics at KMUTT

FROM: Stuart Towns (05/03/13 3:38 AM PST)
SUBJECT: RE: Higgs and Comic Sans

Dougal: Blasphemy!

Opps, sorry. We are in the language department not the graphic design department. I got a little carried away there

FROM: Dougal Graham (04/19/13 12:43 AM PST) SUBJECT:

Font choices are very important and something I think about when making websites, but I think they are not considered important to the majority of people.

Was Comic Sans chosen not for it's (lack of) style, but because it is considered a highly readable font for people with reading impairments? (eg dyslexia?) I also read that supposedly things can be better remembered if the font is slightly more difficult to read.

FROM: Stuart Towns (04/19/13 10:28 PM PST)
SUBJECT: desirable difficulties

There is a lot of recent Psychology research about the effects of different font faces and styles on memory. One study showed that disfluency (which the paper defined as "the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations") caused by hard to read fonts actually helped students remember more. As you said, the idea is that if you force the brain to work harder, then it remembers better. The paper called this a "desirable difficulty". But it also warns that this could also adversely affect a student's motivation. If they think that the font choice makes things too difficult, they might give up and not learn at all (Diemand-Yauman, et al., 2010).


Reference

Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Vaughan, E. B. (2011). Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118(1), 111-5.

Desirable difficulty could perhaps be linked with the ability to recall information. It appears that the presence of serif markings has a correlation with information recall. Apparently, texts written with serif appear more straight, and thus easier to read (and remember). This was found true for longer texts.

Thinking of long texts that I had written last year, I remember the QA report I completed back in October. The whole report was about 50 pages long and I remember the chief assessor mentioned that she did not like how the report was presented. Perhaps it is because it was difficult to follow due to its length plus it used Calibri - a font that is (almost) sans serif. Aside from the ability to recall, maybe what I am seeing here is 'desirable difficulty' at play - where the chief assessor has no motivation because of the lack of serifs to help with the pace of the reading, and the use of sans serif fonts which are yet to be common to long texts.

Reference
Gasser, M., Boeke, J., Haffernan, M., & Tan, R. (2005). The influence of font type on information recall. North American journal of psychology, 7(2), 181-188.

We tend to focus on the verbal language and ignore the importance of the non-verbal one.
I agree with Stuart that the use of Comic Sans font helps lighten up dull presentation. It makes the reading more accessible or at least more appealing to the general audience. Some kind of heavy content like scientific issues can be toned down through the use of semiotic resources not just the fonts but also something like visual design.

I like this facebook page which simplifies the hard science through the use of visuals ...

If you guys are interested in analysing the fonts,I recommend you to read Kress' Leeuwen's article (2006) http://ixdcth.se.hemsida.eu/courses/201 ... graphy.pdf

Have you seen this twist? In this research (which I can only find a summary of https://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/06/02/co ... w_HwkaiS5t) the findings have indicated that 'hard to read' fonts like comic sans actually improve reading comprehension, because it requires greater concentration. Personally I quite like comic sans, though I understand that by saying so publicly may mean being banished to the seventh level of Dante's inferno. I might even use it on my next powerpoint presentation to improve everyone's retention rates, or alternatively to discourage them from reading the slides at all.