Comparison of Popular Fonts Online
I’ve been looking for such a study for quite a while and I finally came across this one, which begins to be old craic (2 years-old): Usability News.
Legibility
In this study, though effective reading times are not any different according to fonts, the perceived legibility is best with Courier, Comic, Verdana, Georgia and Times. Surprisingly, there is no difference serif vs. sans serif, even if it has to be pointed out that the tests have been done with the same size for fonts (12 points).
Personality and Elegance
Fonts such as Bradley and Corsivia are the fonts perceived as conveying “personality”, leaving Times far behind, probably because lots of sites were still typeset in Times at that time. Comic, strikingly follows right behind, and is regarded as the most “fun and youthful”: righteo, that’s its aim, even if this font tends to unfortunately spread like a bad joke on serious websites.
Even more puzzling is the fact that Courier gives a somewhat business-like appearance to a website, together with Times. Whereas this is easily understandable for Times, Courier’s perception is rather hard to figure out.
General Preference
And the winner is… Verdana! No wonder. On screen, it does look better than any other font. Next follow Arial and Comic, two other sans. Sans serifs do not alias like serifs on screen and do appear much nicer. And the 4th one is Georgia, which does look good on screen two and is spreading quickly on new websites. Georgia being the first serif font, we have the classic pairs in today’s design, Verdana and Georgia, or Arial and Georgia.
Those two fonts, Verdana and Georgia have been designed by Matthew Carter and Tom Rickner specifically for the Web. Verdana has indeed very round letter-forms, along with a somewhat large inter-letter spacing that makes it an easy font to read. Georgia is announced by Microsoft as being the “serifed counterpart of Verdana” and therefore works damn well with it.
However, I really should think of carrying these tests myself, as recommanded by the article. Maybe wait until WebFonts is coming out to really have a genuine overview of what users want. And need.
