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comment by ecib
ecib  ·  4323 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Serif Readability Myth

    Isn't the question of legibility somewhat moot?

I was going to say yes, but then I realized it depends.

At the heart of it, on a base level, symbolic language is just that, - symbolic. Meaning is conveyed via symbols, and the purpose of the written word is to convey this meaning. As long as meaning is conveyed, the written word is doing its job so to speak. There have been plenty of studies where letters were completely removed from words where the meaning of the phrase containing them didn't suffer.

But in reality, letters and words convey more than literal meaning. Any designer can tell you that the form of the characters themselves convey a range of emotions and stances. Serious, playful, businesslike, nostalgic, etc. Maybe legibility falls more into the design and emotive camp for letters than the literal conveying of meaning camp?





StephenBuckley  ·  4323 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That makes sense. As long as we're viewing this as an aesthetic and not a quantitative difference then I can understand what we're talking about.

ecib  ·  4323 days ago  ·  link  ·  

At the end of the day though, the terms are not really well defined...