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Description: | Graphics The case for research by Dennis Cheetham, Christopher Poulton and Brian Grimbly There are constant predictions that the printed word, with its companion illustrations, will become less and less important. But it stubbornly refuses to be superseded; and in certain specialised fields-such as the production of technical information for industry and the professions-it daily swells in volume and importance. The recent supplement to DESIGN 190, for instance, demonstrated how vital to Britain's export life-line properly produced printed material could be. But how much is really known about the effectiveness of printed graphic design? There are plenty of opinions, plenty of guesses but how much soundly based fact? This article presents the case for a thorough programme of research into the whole area of graphic design. (caption) Dr Christopher Poulton, co-author of this article, has degrees in both experimental psychology and medicine. He is assistant director of the Applied Psychology Research Unit of the Medical Research Council, Cambridge. He has probably done more work on the readability of type than anyone e/se in this country, and devised the comparative readability tests for DESIGN's recent analysis of the Univers type face As society has become more sophisticated and more complex, so its means of communication have become more and more varied. As recently as 100 years ago available forms of communication were comparatively few and simple. The last century has seen a growth in the number of communications systems. Most of these in some way involve design - it is not, after all, merely out of deference to fashionable jargon that the graphic designer likes to think of himself as a 'communications' expert. But how much do designers know about the effectiveness of their work ? The consumer goods industries have in recent years been increasingly concerned for their lack of knowledge about how their products are used and judged by the public; and - with the considerable aid of a variety of consumer organisations - a certain amount of information is now being channelled back to the manufacturer and occasionally to his designer. But the graphic design world, whose real raison d'etre is to make the most direct contact with the public, and which is quite without the help of any kind of consumer bodies, apparently lacks any machinery for discovering whether or not its work is successful. As DESIGN discovered in its own recent analysis of the Univers typeface 2186/60-71), there is no real body of knowledge about graphic design slogans substitute for fact: "Sans serifs are unreadable", "Baskerville is best", and so on. Designers seemed to fear, first, that scientific testing would not be sensitive enough to tell them nything of value about their work; and second, that if it did lead to ny firm results, then those results would have a limiting effect on their creative freedom. As it happened, the Univers tests were sensitive enough to allow us to make certain conjectures about the actors making fortypefacereadability; while the fact that what we offered was conjecture rather than dogma (plus the fact that our results could free designers from a self-imposed restriction on the use sans serif faces in text settings) seemed to suggest that scientific methods were both less rigid and more creative than had been thought. A crucial problem The success of our experiments with Univers showed us that with core sensitive testing we could obtain results that would be more reliable statistically for a greater range of type faces; it also led us to consider the importance of type design in the context of graphic design as a whole. For, despite the increasing variety of communications media, it seems to us that the printed word still plays the major role. Developments such as film, television, teaching machines, audio-visual aids and so on always seem at first to threaten the dominance of print, but end up by becoming complementary to it. {et, even here, the printed word, diagram or illustration has an important part to play - in scripts, technical instructions, credit titles and supporting and publicity literature, for example. In roposing what we hope would ultimately be a comprehensive rogramme of graphic research, we have therefore concentrated on uggesting that initial investigations should be into type faces and hose layout factors which affect their readability. A new approach Despite what we have already said about the lack of tangible research on graphic subjects, there can be no doubt that attitudes toward graphic design, and in particular toward type face design, ave changed considerably in the last few decades, and have ecome both more analytical and more concerned with function. Most f these new attitudes can be traced directly to the Bauhaus, whose evolutionary approach to many forms of design chiefly consisted of turning the disciplines of previous centuries into an almost mechanistic functionalism. Much of the anti-Bauhaus feeling has been based on criticisms of this functionalism; and yet it did force designers, almost for the first time, to realise that behind every problem there lay a body of knowledge which had to be examined in order that the solution to that problem could be as accurate as possible. Although this notion of functionalism could - and did become doctrinaire, it also provided a theory which gave scope for a ast amount of necessary research. Pre-Bauhaus typography was purely empirical. The traditional Roman letter was an inscriptional form designed to be read as a series of greys as light caused shadows to appear in the cuts that made up the letter; the traditional Gothic letter form was a direct copy from fourteenth century manuscripts. Neither of them bore much relation to the demands of printing ink, paper and impression; and because of the rudimentary cutting and press work of preindustrial revolution printing, in neither case did the finished results resemble very closely their original. Further technical developments simply led type design further and further away from its models: the engravers' increasing skill in cutting small sizes encouraged them to use type faces as a display for their individual talents, and fine hair lines and fine serifs were introduced to give a feeling of delicacy that was purely aesthetic The Bauhaus cometh The Bauhaus, however, stopped considering type as a form of fine art, and looked at it in terms which made it more of an engineering problem: it asked what was the minimum structure through which the message could be conveyed. Bauhaus developments were ased on existing sans serif faces (since these were the simplest letter forms available), a proceeding which was so un-historical that academic and traditional typographers promptly refused to consider sans serif as at all readable, particularly since they were designed as advertising faces and stood right outside the humanist tradition. They have largely maintained this position to the present day. DESIGN's readability tests, however, produced a set of results which showed certain sans serif faces to be quite as readable as (and perhaps more readable than) certain serifs. This suggests both that the Bauhaus ideal of returning to first principles is atleast as fruitful as a dependence on continuing tradition, and that, although we do not know what makes type readable, readability is susceptible to measurement, and can even be broken down into factors which can be independently analysed. Factors affecting readability There is a large number of factors affecting type readability. Some relate to the design of the typeface: shape of letters, relationship of x-height to ascenders and descenders, width of characters, family resemblance of all characters in a single alphabet, width of stroke, presence of serifs, etc. Some relate to the way in which the type face is set on the page: amount of leading between lines, column width, justification (filling the whole width of the column or letting lines run 'ragged'), size of type, etc. Some relate to the layout of a whole page: size, positioning and emphasis of pictures, diagrams or charts, width of margins between columns, depth of columns, importance of headings and subheadings, positioning of captions, relationship of caption type face to text type face, etc. Just as these three categories overlap and are interdependent, so the factors within those categories are also not to be considered separately. In order to make testing for readability a practicable proposition, therefore, it is necessary to discover if any of these factors have had their areas of maximum performance defined. The first two extensive series of investigations on type faces and formats were carried out between the world wars. Most of the factors listed above as deriving from the design of type were accepted; but no attempt was made to examine experimentally the constituents of the individual units. Effects of size on design This parametric approach was clearly an over-simplification. Small letters are not simply large letters reduced in size. Normally, the type designer has to redesign his letters for every change of about 2 points in size. The spaces enclosed within small letters have to be relatively large, while in larger letters the lines can occupy some of this space, and are thus relatively thicker. In the same way, the type designer has to redesign his letters as he changes from normal weight to medium-bold or bold, and from roman to italic. However, it could be argued - perhaps with some justification that until the turn of the century similar rules for the transformations were followed by most type designers, and that the characters of different families of type faces all had more or less the same proportions. Thus, when it was found that, for Scotch Roman, 'normal weight' roman letters of a size of about 10 points with 2 point leading in a line about 3 inches long were read most quickly, it may have been reasonable to assume, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, that this was also true of other type faces in general use. But clearly this is not necessarily so today, when type designers are deliberately trying out new proportions. It has been found that the available area of paper can be put to better use by making the x-height (or the rounded part of the letter excluding the ascenders and descenders) a greater proportion of the total letter height. The lengths of the ascenders and descenders are reduced in proportion, and the letters are thus made to look much larger without reducing the number of printed lines per page. In other words, the nominal 10 point size - quoted above for Scotch Roman conceals the variable proportions of ascenders, x-height, descenders, and interlinear spacing: so that a modern type face at 8 point, for example, can appear to be as large as a 10 point face. There may, however, be fewer letters per line, since the greater x-height often calls for a wider letter. Also, if the lengths of the ascenders and descenders are reduced too much, extra leading may be needed to separate the lines adequately.Thus,theassumptionofthelast generation of experimentalists that style of type was independent of size, length of line and leading no longer holds even approximately with recent typefaces. Putting the same point rather differently, size of type can still be defined in the conventional way as the vertical distance occupied by a line of print when no leading is used. But it can also be defined in no less than two newer ways which are partly dependent upon the design of the letters themselves: the x-height or apparent size, and the number of letters which can be fitted into a fixed area of paper. Equating two type faces using one of the definitions no longer necessarily equates them using either of the other two definitions. Thus there is now no single unitary variable of size of type. A new experimental approach These developments call for a new experimental approach in evaluating the claims of rival type faces to be easy to read. The experimentalist should set out each design in the size, with the leading, and in the length of line which suits it best, rather than demanding uniformity in all parameters other than style. This is not such a stupid suggestion as it may at first seem, since there is an optimal region along each parameter. Thus, at the normal reading distance, letters can be too large to read quickly as well as too small. And, in reading, both a great excess of leading and no leading at all slow up the transition from one line to the next. Although one must accept that each type face virtually constructs its own experimental conditions, there are a few very broad factors on which previous experimentalists have reached a large measure of agreement -that individual characters should resemble as closely as possible their traditional forms (to put it simply, that an a should look like an a); that the best size for text faces (de, the size that can be read in blocks of copy over a long period without fatigue to the reader) is somewhere between 9 and 14 points; that stroke width should be in the region of that of existing text faces; that line length should be about 22 to 3 alphabets; that, for analytic purposes, the top half of a line of type has a higher recognition value than the bottom half. These factors can be used as guides in setting upend evaluating future experiments. They have, however, been tested only in relation to book readability; and may not apply in newspaper, magazine or other specialist conditions involving a large number of non-type factors. Layout factors Although we have already pointed out that the amount of research into type design has been very small, layout has received even less attention. If a reader could be expected to start with the top left hand word of a page, and read every word in order until he reached the bottom right hand word of the page, it could be argued that ease of continuous reading is the most important thing to aim at. But the picture of the diligent reader needs to be replaced by the picture of the busy reader who has, perhaps, 10 minutes to get what information he can from an article. Even the reader of text books is taught today to skim a chapter to get a general idea of what it contains before he starts his detailed study. Once it is accepted that the reader has a right to know what he is going to read before he starts serious reading, the layout of the page assumes a new importance. Although controlled experiments have been carried out on the comprehension of graphs, charts and tables, we know of no comparable experimental work on the layout of the page. It simply seems to be assumed that a page of print broken up by illustrations, headings and subheadings is preferable to a page not so broken up. While the assumption is probably correct, it would be of considerable interest to know the saving of time to the reader which really good layout can effect. DESIGN's own attitude toward layout has been, in the absence of any reliable information, to adopt a compromise strategy. Certain general principles of layout are normally adhered to: in laying out a spread, the magazine follows as closely as possible the conventions of reading, proceeding from left to right and from top to bottom. When illustrations are combined with text, the copy is often put in the key left hand corner. Multiple illustrations are grouped horizontally rather than vertically, with their captions immediately below them if this is feasible. Before the start of a major article, a full page illustration - of general rather than specific interest - may be placed on the left hand page to act as a lead-in. These general principles are followed in the hope that they make for easier reading;they also give a unity of style to different articles, and maintain the sense of a magazine which has been designed as a whole. On the other hand, where the subject matter of an article demands its own particular layout which may well be at odds with the general principles the magazine has evolved -the style is changed. Although this means breaking the style of the book as a whole, it is done to make a particular article more telling or more comprehensible. But these rules are very much haphazard ones - rules which are intuitive rather than logically proven. Clearly they are not the only general principles which could be followed. Other magazine editors have adopted other principles, presumably with good reason. What is required is an objective experiment to show which type of layout is easiestfor the reader. Again, it must be emphasised that the last thing that is wanted is a rigid set of rules which would make every page of every book, magazine or paper look the same; what is needed is a guide to the way in which readers search for their information, and a guide to the more effective ways in which such searches could be most readily assisted. Aims and methods It cannot be emphasised too much that any set of experiments in graphic design is of use only if the results are positive enough to establish an approach to design. The basis of the investigation which we are at present suggesting would be a development of general principles governing the design of type and the way in which it is laid out. Similarly, with type design itself, two related problems which face the type designer who wishes to produce a really efficient type face are: first, how to apportion the available paper between the heights and widths of the characters; and second, how to divide up the height between the x-height, the ascenders, the descenders and the leading (eg, since it is known that the top halves of the letters supply more usable information than the bottom halves, should the ascenders be taller than the descenders ? Also, it would be surprising if the optimal proportions did not vary with the overall size of the letters: but should not this supposition be tested by measurement ?). Another problem is to make the different characters more easily distinguishable from each other without making them look too unfamiliar. There could well be an optimal region on these dimensions bounded on one side by letter forms which are too much alike, and on the other by letter forms which are too unfamiliar. In all these cases, the intention of the research would tee to produce not one particular immutable design, but rather set of parameters which would be applicable to wide varieties of different type faces and layout conditions. As any investigation of leading must incorporate in some way the part played by habit, and as habit has so far proved not to be susceptible of measurement, any general principles would have to take into account the aesthetic factors involved in type and layout. Once more is known about printed communication, it is evident atfurtherwork,probably using the general principles evolved in the study of type and layout design, can be carried out in other fields graphic design: either in areas where print is still involved, but here visibility and impact are more important than mprehensibility (eg, posters, sign systems); or in areas where print has been superseded by other methods of reproduction (eg, revision and film, machine controls, symbology). In fact, the whole the graphic designer's territory is so far comparatively uncharted; is hard to believe that some accurate maps of the area would not be immense value. Greater experimental activity And yet, despite the amount of work which could be done, the initial stages of the investigation - ie, into type design and layout - seem to us to be eminently practicable. DESIGN's analysis of the Univers type face represents a tentative model of the sort of experiment by which type designs can be tested for readability. For this approach to be a success, it is simply necessary to use a more sensitive experimental design than has yet been the practice. If six type faces are to be compared, at most only two passages are normally printed in each style: a total of 12 printings. If one of the passages is used in the introductory phase of the experiment, this leaves only the second passage for the experiment proper. A separate group of readers is therefore required for each style, since a passage can only be read once by each person. Normally a group comprises 50-80 readers, but even so the chance differences between the groups are likely to be almost as large as the differences to be expected between the various styles read. Making the groups four times as large only halves the chance differences between them. To eliminate individual differences in the rate and adequacy of reading, it is necessary to have more passages printed in each style. If six passages were printed in each of six styles, a total of 36 printings, it would be possible to compare all the styles at once on the same individuals, so that the comparisons would not be confounded by chance differences between groups. Each person could then read one passage per day printed in a particular style, preceded by a passage in the same style to familiarise him with it. The particular combination of passage, style and day upon which it was read could be balanced over the individuals in the group, so that differences between styles could be examined independently of differences between passages and practice. Using such an experimental technique, it should be possible to rank the typefaces according to rate of comprehension with greater statistical confidence than has hitherto been possible. With a group of as few as 72 readers, even relatively small differences should prove statistically reliable. Once this had been done, type designers could compare the high with the low scoring designs, attempt by insight to discover which factor in the designs had made them more or less readable, and redesign the high scoring faces to make them even better. A second round of precise experimental evaluation could then be undertaken. This process of scientific evaluation followed by intuitive design followed by scientific evaluation would continue until some extremely readable typefaces had been developed. Considering only the cost of printing, this new kind of experiment will clearly cost a good deal more than the older kind. However, to the extent that a lot of the old uncontrolled variability has been eliminated from the results, the cost per reliable item of information could in fact be considerably less with the new design. Layout testing A similar technique could be used for testing the effectiveness of different kinds of layout. The first experiment might compare just two alternatives. Two comparable articles would be required, each of which would have to be printed in both formats. One group of readers would start on the first article printed in format A, and then proceed to the second article printed in format B. Another group of readers would study the first article printed in format B and then the second article printed in format A. Two further groups would be required to study the articles in reverse order. Before looking at an article, the reader would be given a list of questions to be answered. This would correspond to the information he might be searching for. After the reader had studied the questions, he would start searching the article for the answers. The time he took to do this would be measured, and should reflect the difficulty of the layout. Alternatively, he could be given a fixed time for his answers, and the number of correct answers produced in the time could be used as the measure of the layout's comprehensibility. Organisation These methods of testing involve two distinct phases; the first, the setting up of expert meets to evaluate existing type faces and selected layouts, and subsequently to evaluate designs based on the findings of the preceding set of expert meets, would need to be carried out by an expert body - such as the Applied Psychology Research Unit of the Medical Research Council at Cambridge, which carried out the Univers tests for DESIGN. The second phase, the analysis of the results of tests and the consequent designing or modification of type faces and layouts, involves creative work which cannot accurately be programmed; this part of the research seems most suited to a school of design in which postgraduate students would work under the general direction of a teacher or research fellow. Because creative research of this kind depends to a large extent on the personal following up of intuitive theories, it would clearly bean advantage if two or three colleges were involved - not as rivals, but in order that different (even, perhaps, conflicting) theories could be followed up simultaneously and independently. It is, of course, extremely difficult to give any sort of costing for a project which remains at present in a tentative form, but it is probable that printing could be carried out free of cost as part of an MRC unit's services; while, for the creative part of the research, three colleges each providing a pair of postgraduate students under the part-time guidance of a head of department or research fellow would require an annual sum of some £10,000.To ensure that the project as a whole continued to develop along the right lines, there would need to be a co-ordinating or steering committee consisting of at least one member of each of the directly interested parties plus, probably, an administrative chairman. Ultimate responsibility for the progress of the research (though not the financial responsibility, which would remain in the hands of the participating bodies) would belong to an independent but interested body -for which the ColD would seem an obvious candidate. Such a project, ambitious though it sounds, is quite practicable - and, if the figures tentatively supplied above are at all accurate, it could be carried out for what, by most research project standards, is a comparatively small sum. The amount of knowledge about communication design that it could produce, on the other hand, seems both long overdue and of an importance beyond all proportion to the sum of money needed to secure it. | Source: | Vads | Creator: | Artist: Dennis Cheetham, Christopher Poulton and Brian Grimbly | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=8288... | Go to resource |
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Bauhaus
This volume examines a variety…
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