#Baskerville typeface test how to

On the perception of truth be assessed objectively?īenjamin Berman (who designed the Multics emulation for my Times articleĭid My Brother Invent Email with Tom Van Vleck?”) created a program that changes the typeface of the David Deutsch I wondered: is there an experiment that could decide this once and for all? Or barring that, at least throw some empirical light on the situation? Could the effect of typography You never know just how loudly a font speaks.īut Renaud’s results are anecdotal. So, be mindful of your target audience when you’re marking up a document, whether it’s a university essay or a commercial website. Print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it’s not as easy to read in Georgia is enough like Times to retain itsĪcademic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Who has to wade through a collection of them Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn’t set off any subconscious triggers.

This got me thinking as to why that might be: maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do. Well, would you believe it? My essays written in Georgia did the best overall. The Times New Roman papers earned an average grade of A-, but the Trebuchet papers could Eleven were set in Times New Roman, 18 in Trebuchet MS, and the remaining 23 in Georgia.

Then it hits me: the only thing I’ve really changed since I’ve been getting these grades is… I’m probably even spending less time with them now than I did earlier in my studies, and while I guess you couldĪrgue that I’m probably just being a great example of practice making perfect, I’ve got my doubts I even used to take courses concentrating on writing better essays, and in the time surrounding I haven’t drastically changed the amount of effort I’m putting into my writing. Still, ever the skeptic, I start to wonder: what exactly am I doing differently now to be getting all these A-range paper grades all of the sudden? “essay alley,” wherein all my courses require a term paper or two, and getting my results back telling me that I’m doing much better than usual.Īt first, I’m just relieved to be doing so well. I’m nearing the end of my sixth semester of university, and things are going pretty well: I’m clearing a decent grade point average, enjoying my major, and just having wrapped up my semester’s Ruby on Rails, xhtml/css, ajax, and a whole lotta love.” He recommended a blog post, “The Secret Life of Fonts,” written by Phil Renaud, self-described as “a Canadianīlog design and web design enthusiast, with a particular admiration for web standards and CSS innovation. I asked a friend, the psychologist Marc Hauser, about experimental results on typefaces. Rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic? Or malefaction? Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways - many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. īut for the moment, I was interested in something somewhat less apocalyptic. I wouldn’t want to dismiss even the most outrageous of millenarian fantasies, including Mayan predictions of the end of the world.

Overpopulation choking off life on the planet, etc.

I do not mean to dismiss the possibility of global catastrophe from asteroids or global warming or a host of other possible calamities - bioengineered viruses spreading out of control, Malthusian nightmares of How confident are you in your conclusion?

#Baskerville typeface test how to

Live in an era of unprecedented safety: the twenty-first century is the first ever moment when we have known how to defend ourselves from such impacts, whichĭo you think Deutsch’s claim is true? Is it true that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety”? If a one-kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth on a collision course at any time in human history before the early twenty-first century, it would have killed at least a substantial proportion of all humans. I picked a passage from David Deutsch’s second book, “The Beginning of Infinity” - a passage about “unprecedented safety” - and embedded it in my quiz for The Times, Are there certain typefaces that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true? Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. It was a test of the effect of typefaces on truth. My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. Wikimedia Commons The Torino Impact Hazard Scale