Typophile - Childhood lettering - Comments

When I was about five or six

rlynch — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:33:39 -0700

When I was about five or six I was told by my teacher that I clearly hadn’t done my homework (simple writing exercises) myself, since my letters were more cursive-looking than they apparently should have been. I was unwittingly mimicking my parents’ handwriting.

Ross

I don’t use double story

Asvetic — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:09:20 -0700

I don’t use double story a’s or g’s, I never learned how to write them fluidly. However, I’ve only started adding a cross stroke to my 7’s and a hard top to my 3’s because I think it looks cool.

I’ve never seen anyone actually write double story letters until recently. I caught one of my co-workers doing it. Needless to say, it seemed weird to see him write that way.

It’s pretty evident, that

aszszelp — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:38:05 -0700

It’s pretty evident, that “readability” depends on training and that some might read allcaps better than lowercase (supposing they read little modern printed matter, and by some chance read a lot of uppercase text).

lowercase and uppercase are just two sets of forms for the same idea (which incidentally have common roots). Similar to different styles:

We have late medieval, early modern accounts of Dutch and German readers not coping with Antiqua. Probably one could find newer ones from the 19th century as well.
On the contrary, nowadays most untrained readers of today have serious problems with Fraktur.

It’s all a question of practice.

Actually, what I discovered after developing a secret alphabet as a child was, that not only was it possible, that someone is more proficient in reading than writing (this is evident. So many people read, but can barely write, or if so, unrecognizibly), but you can also be more proficient in writing than reading! I mostly took some notes in my secret alphabet when I was scribbling something (in boredom) and others should not be able to read it, so I rarely read it. Even though I made up the alphabet myself, I could fluently write it, but only decipher it sign-by-sign!

It was quite a relevation on how the human mind works!

Actually, we know, that medieval copyists worked the following way: one read (aloud), many wrote (that was time-saving... multi-tasking/parallel processing, if you will). I would not be surprised, if the latter were less fluent in reading (of course depending on how much they read in the time not spent with writing).

I think Mr Gill said the

russellm — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:25:19 -0700

I think Mr Gill said the same thing (... only differently.) :o)

-=®=-

Ah, thankyou Dan. I had a

James Arboghast — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 13:43:07 -0700

Ah, thankyou Dan. I had a growing suspicion I had those two words swapped around.

Ha!

j a m e s

I think that he means that

dan_reynolds — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 13:17:10 -0700

I think that he means that your quote is out of order, not that the idea is wrong! Didn’t she write “we read best what we read most”?

Cheers Chris. Thanks for

James Arboghast — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:44:29 -0700

Cheers Chris. Thanks for posting that information.

I think you’ll have to strike and reverse again!

No, Kevin Larson’s research supports Licko’s Maxim. Can you find fault with it, and if so please explain?

j a m e s

I can’t find fault with

eliason — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:32:21 -0700

I can’t find fault with Zuzana Licko’s maxim, “We read most what we read best”

I think you’ll have to strike and reverse again!

James, Here is Quote from

dezcom — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:27:59 -0700

James,
Here is Quote from Kevin Larson’s paper, “The Science of Word Recognition, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma”

“The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975).”

ChrisL

Dan, What “rule” about

James Arboghast — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:15:11 -0700

Dan,
What “rule” about not setting things in all caps do you mean? I guess you mean the generally accepted notion that all caps typography is less readable than lower case.

That one applies more to type than handwriting. The flipside (and here we go again with topic drift into a discussion of readability) is the matter of familiarity. Despite Hrant’s non-acceptance of the idea, I can’t find fault with Zuzana Licko’s maxim, “We read most what we read best”, because it’s basically true. I have met people who insist that lower case type is harder for them to read than all caps. It turns out these individuals read very little book typography and write in “printed capitals”, and these handwritten caps are the principal form of lettering they read. By near-complete lack of exposure to what we know as typography (book settings using lower case with caps for capitalised words), these people read best the form of lettering thay are most familiar with. It makes sense. I think Hrant’s rejection of Zuzana’s maxim has more to do with his unfortunate experience with one of Emigre’s fonts than his capacity for rationale and readability theory.

Notwithstanding, lower case forms are inherently more legible and inherently more readable on both a technical and aesthetic basis. This much we know. So what an individual finds more legible or readable is a matter of personal experience.

In the example above there’s a lot of rounded corners, gently curved straights, and variation of alignment, and I’m sure those factors help make it more readable than type capitals with their profusion of straight lines.

I devised a test one time where I took a seriffed roman font I was working on and ran a grunge filter on it—-a combination of randomize nodes and envelope. That grunged all the letters up nicely, thinning them in spots, thickening in other spots, warping of straight lines, size variation, off-zenith alignment, and characters moved off the baseline. The auto-grunged font was easier to read than the straight one I had arrived at purely by design.

Did Hrant or someone else at some point offer up a theory as to how randomness, noise and distortion (in the right amounts) enhances the readability of a font?

j a m e s

I used to put serifs on all

Chipman223 — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:20:10 -0700

I used to put serifs on all my papers’ titles back when I was still handwriting 1-page essays in 3-5th grade, but I only had one teacher tell me to “stop being silly” or something like that. I thought that’s what “real” letters were supposed to look like, and I was under the impression that there was one master typeface that existed for the alphabet (something that looked like times or garamond i guess. In college, I made myself write two-story a’s and eyeglass g’s, but by then, everything I passed in to teachers was typed.

>>Caps take longer than

DanGayle — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:08:45 -0700

>>Caps take longer than miniscules to write but I love the neatness of capital letterforms.

Is it just me, or does the rule about not setting things in all caps NOT apply to handwriting? It seems to me that I can read something written in all caps just fine. It doesn’t seem like it’s screaming all the time like in text. Also, there’s greater variation of “bouma”.

Look at alexhb’s example above, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not hard to read at all.

Hee-hee! Oh yeah, Chris. I

James Arboghast — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:59:41 -0700

Hee-hee! Oh yeah, Chris. I was the blasphemer with the funny (to them) ways of doing things. I was attracted to things unorthodox from a young age. My unorthodox color sense won me the easter egg competition in 1st grade, and when the other kids discovered my favorite planet was Saturn I had to switch to Neptune because they all jumped to Saturn. Copy cats.

j a m e s

Sounds like they thought you

dezcom — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:37:38 -0700

Sounds like they thought you were quite a heinous criminal at such a young age, James :-)

ChrisL

I too was taught to write in

James Arboghast — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:37:36 -0700

I too was taught to write in connected miniscule forms, “running writing” as they called it, but after high school I switched to writing with “printed capitals” and have written that way ever since. Caps take longer than miniscules to write but I love the neatness of capital letterforms. That probably has something to do with becoming a type designer—-fascination with structure.

j a m e s

Childhood lettering

James Puckett — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:19:58 -0700

How many of you got in trouble when you were kids for drawing the letter a with two stories instead of one?