Design Principles Task: Size and Position Effecting Legibility

The task we were set at the last design principles seminar was to manipulate the miss matched fonts that we put together during the seminar and shown below.

To start with the most obvious thing to do seemed to be a decrease in size as the line progressed. However, as can be seen below, the fonts' variation and the odd changes from capitol to lower case meant that the words quick and brown were the first to be noticed by the eye.

The next attempt plays on the way we all automatically read left to right, this was done by putting the more legible words slightly to the left behind the line created by the end of the first word (the) to challenge and disrupt the eye. 

With the next arrangement didn't seem to work with the same approach because of the line weight variations between the roman, gothic and sable fonts.

Another way to control the order in which the words are read seemed to be interrupting the upper half of the words by overlaying it with the one before it. This seemed to work particularly well with the lower case letters because the ascenders are essential to their legibility. This is shown in the word fox below which in its legibility was over powering the other words in the image.

The delicate forms of the roman font meant that it needed to be the largest on the page to be read first. The legibility of the gothic font was tuned down by placing it above the much larger 'the' disrupting rhythm of the line. The capitals of the word 'fox' made the word over powering on the page and so its reduction in size was intended to counteract this. 

At larger sizes the italic font becomes very imposing, clearly the strongest on the page. The strength of legibility found in the gothic font was counteracted by the two words arranged in order to obscure it.