Is there any reason not to use it?

just wondering how and why its lasted so long? what kept it going?

The need of spreading old good books, for example, so that Giggles can read them ?

what have you got against the poor serif, miss g? it seems that you've got a vendetta against the poor thing!

Paul you read my mind. Miss G seems to be on a personal mission to do away with the serif. And didn't she already ask this question (in one way or another)

Easier to read, more formal, classic. Reading a novel or a newspaper in sans would make your eyes hurt. No matter how beautiful the font.

Miss G, in addition to defending the serif which you seem so eager to consign to the dust heap of history, I'd also like to recommend you acquaint yourself with another archaic throwback to an earlier era, the Shift key. It's just to the left of the z on your keyboard. Like the serif, it can make your text more reader friendly.

missgiggles seems to suffer from seriphobia.

I keep wondering why I still use my voice.

I type much faster than I speak. There are excellent synthesizers out there with much better diction and volume than I manage. I'd be far more effective if I sounded like that "in a world" guy from the movie trailers. Why am I still using my voice?

> Easier to read, more formal, classic.

Triple bingo.

On the other hand:
1) Some people use it out of pretension (although the same applies to sans).
2) We should find out as much as possible concerning why it helps reading.

Long live the serif!

hhp

Kristen,
Just keep singing instead of talking :-)

ChrisL

Why am I still using my voice?

It has the most unique personality?

On the other hand, clients and their users are not really interested in the designer's personality (at least not explicitly) which is fine because if they are I'd worry. We have enough problems with the cult of personality in the west without obsessing about it in the design of useful things.

hhp

Why do we keep taking the bait?

Miss Giggles, if you could articulate all of your thoughts into one cohesive statement -- even if it is several paragraphs long -- we might understand where you are coming from.

The serif isn't a problem. Heaven forbid the day when we only have sans to choose from. I for one, as a graphic designer and typographer, would lash out and rebel should this happen. I relish have choice, even if it is a subtle choice between serif and sans.

personality

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, not a bare neck prompting axe grinding.

okay Tiffany, the whole point of asking thsi question was because i am trying to figure out the development of the serif from the Romans to the Runaissance and beyond to this day and trying to analyse the whole developing process ofit and how its been expanding etc. i have major events that i have pin pointed which are very important to the serif development like:
- Roman inscriptions,stone chiselled serif letters.
- Trajan column
-Roman numerals
-Tory Geoffory (student of Leonardo da Vinci and Durer) who designed serif with great precision.
-Classical fonts like Garamond, Bembo, Caslon, Didot, Baskerville, Times, Bodoni and trying to understand how they expanded into the type families they are today but i'm missing information beyond Renaissance so i'm wondering what happened between then and now? What major developments took place? and why and how the serif is used today. thats all. i guess i should have said all this in the first place rather than ask separate questions. sorry people.

I don't actually get from miss g. that she wants the serif gone. They are questions. It sounds like she wants to understand why the tradition is so strong.

So, Miss G, here are some clues: Tradition?, "Who Kept Them Alive", and "For What Purpose".... Those are your best questions to ask. Unfortunately none of us can rattle off textbook answers. It's easier to explain where they came from and how they changed over the centuries, but this question of "why" is kind of unanswerable.

Worth noting: there were those in the early 20th century who predicted it would be the century of the sans serif. They were correct. Look at the type from 1900-2000. However, if they also said or implied that the serif would go away forever, they were wrong. Look at the type of 1950-2006.

The pluralism of graphic options could be seen as biodiversity; users of type tend to want a lot of variety once they realize they can have choices. Even if we can't explain the purpose of serifs, they seem to satisfy something very basic for us; you'd have a revolution on your hands if you tried to ban serifed type. Clearly they are not "vestigial" or unnecessary as some have proposed. If they are, then it's tradition keeping them alive.

Expecting only the "most functional" type to survive is probably misguided.

> Runaissance

Ah, new satirical term: Renuisance Man. :-)

hhp

crossgrove, i dont want a ban on serifs. why would i want that for? its probably the tone of voice that i have conveyed in my question that made you think that. is liek you said: who kept them alive and for what purpose is what i am really after. how come it is still living strong after so many centuries, tahst all. sorry for the misunderstanding.

No, I don't think that. Read the thread; everyone else seems to think that. I'm trying to answer your questions as you've asked them. Is there static on this line?

Miss Giggles that is such a broad question! Simple answer: the serif still alive because people like it and it's easy to read. And appropriate, visually, to a broad range of applications. Sometimes the sans is simply too hard edged, cold, or modern to work properly. Why overthink?

Not to mention that design - like everything else - is cyclical. Things fall out of fashion, get revived and dusted off and have a new life. The trends that endure are those that are timeless and not too tied to a specific era or movement. Like the good pair of boots that you wear year after year because they are comfortable and durable and go with everything.

But of course there's also room for a pair of pink sparkly pumps to liven things up on occasion.

untested hypothesis: serifs produce better boumas.

Designing anything that is meant to be read is necessarily conservative. The reading public has little tolerance for innovation, and besides historically most innovations have owed as much to changes in technology as to the desires of type designers to express their personality, if not more.

Different type styles, different letterforms, or different writing systems altogether may be vastly superior in readability, but the reading public comes with a strongly built-in bias towards what it is accustomed to.

So if serif faces have been used in setting Roman text for centuries, the question to ask is not why is it still used today, but why innovations are introduced at all. The history of type for immersive reading really is about these little innovations that somehow defy the staticity and inertia of the reading public's preferences, whatever the reasons behind them might be.

So in short, it is not that people have worked hard to keep the serif alive all this time. It would have been much, much harder to force people to abandon the serif.

I think the conservativeness of the reading public is generally over-stated, and it's entirely possible to deploy innovation that "flies under the radar" of possible conscious layman rejection.

hhp

...type designers to express their personality...

What I meant was the personality of the typeface, eg its individuality.

With serifs, it's possible to also incorporate stroke variation in a type design, without getting excessive sparkle. Stroke variation, not necessarily for reading functionality, but as a means of providing variety of personality in at typeface.

So, serif faces have more personality than sans serifs, more options for variety -- which can be use by typographers to match the variety of uses, the different personalities of products, of typographers, and of different media.

Of course, if you're a really good graphic designer, you can use Helvetica for everything and make it look brilliant all the time.~

Miss Giggles, have you happened to read any of the suggested books yet?

Renuisance Man.
Thanks hrant, that put me into ... helpless giggles.

yes i have but origin of serif is on it's way but they all make me cinfused coz i'm reading too much and forgetting what goes where and i cant relate things together and link them coz there's just too much history to read. i'm trying my best though.i have 7 books im reading all on typography and history and they got different dates to somethings though so i dont know what it should be but i do my best. am i asking questions that are unreasonable? is that why u asking?

Why do we keep taking the bait?

Because there's nothing good on TV, at least not until Inside Washington at 8:30. I can't decide what's funnier; Krauhammer's insanity, Totenberg's outfits, or Miss Giggles baiting people into a conversation about the worth of serifs.

yes i have but origin of serif is on it’s way but they all make me cinfused coz i’m reading too much and forgetting what goes where and i cant relate things together and link them coz there’s just too much history to read

That's not hard to identify with. I find reading design books one at a time has become a necessity.

am i asking questions that are unreasonable? is that why u asking?

I don't think it's necessarily the questions you ask, but the way you ask them. They tend to be written like above-average text messages, which makes them rather offbeat for typophile, as well as a little confusing.

Miss Giggles, when I have done historical writing and I needed to track a timeline I used small postcards and would write the date (year) at the top large, and then the event smaller underneath it. After a while I was able to see a timeline form because of these dates. You might try that. You can tape them to your wall, move them around, add more information as you find it. Very useful.

Post-it-notes work well for me with convoluted project management timelines, why not type history too?

ChrisL

Good answer, Dez.

Why do we keep taking the bait?

Because some people have a pathological need to respond to obviously stupid questions.

Giggles is wasting time and bandwidth, folks. Do what most of have done: ignore her....

LOL

Is she really that bad?

hhp

Sure her questions are naive, but that can be refreshing. I found "Are there movements..." quite thought-provoking.

For your purpose question I would suggest that you try carving some characters in stone, explore in a physical way why serifs might be practical to a carver, you don't have to be skilled to reach some conclusions. You also can't discard the aesthetic, it needn't be entirely practical that a character is shaped the way it is, despite the base shape having an established form. Also don't assume that all Roman writing used serifs, stone is not indestructible but it has longevity advantages over other mediums.

Perhaps you should look at your question from another direction, why did sans come about; what purpose did it serve; were there any technological advances that might have contributed to it; also why, if you have a choice, would you remove one of your options &c. &c.

For a timeline you could look here
http://www.xs4all.nl/~knops/timetab.html

btw Geofroy Tory are you sure he was a student of both da Vinci and Dürer or do you mean he studied their work?

Tim

>from the Romans to the Renaissance and beyond to this day

>“Who Kept Them Alive”, and “For What Purpose”

Maybe there is a textbook answer, if there can be such a thing outside of the existence of said textbook.

It's not just the *serifs*, but the forms of serif designs which bring a unique thing to type. This unique thing comes from the details of designs of the serif -ed type which allow the differentiation of features between characters more broadly than most sans serif designs are capable of, (without looking like you just cut serifs off;). And thus, it is thought by this uniqueness in detail that serif designs aid the reading process for some people in some documents.

The serifs in particular, and for the most part, are part of our familiarity with the rest of the serif forms they are attached to, so, for the most part, we *kept* them for reading purposes. But then, as time went by, broader uses of the serif style came along as signage and book work sought timeless and classical appearances.

>Renaissance and beyond to this day
My milestones are:
1. Design of Romans suited for letterpress.
2. Design of Romans for mass and personal mechanical composition.
3. Legibility Series by Linotype.
4. Democratization of the Romans by PostScript/Fontographer.

Er@least that's what I think. Cheers!

Giggles is wasting time and bandwidth, folks. Do what most of have done: ignore her….

Ouch, Linda! :) But as James said, its not so much what questions she asks, as how she asks them. However thought provoking the questions are, many are not complete thoughts, or complete sentences. Asking questions is not a stream of consciousness writing exercise in a chat room. There have been way too many good, intelligent well formulated questions that have been asked on Typophile that have been virtually ignored.

I don't understand why many of you are so patient with someone who doesn't even attempt to capitalize or punctuate sentences properly, while many great questions and good portions of the critique section get treated like a red-headed stepchild. There are too many people who come on Typohpile who work hard at finding the answers, before they ask them.

I think this is a terrific and fundamental topic. It’s incurious to dismiss it.

I agree with others that the Catich’s The Origin of the Serif is a worthwhile book. He makes a compelling argument that serifs did not come from stone cutting. My two sentence summary is that serifs are a result of reed writing. The reeds were cut at a slant to allow a writer to have vertical stems that were thicker than horizontal stems (to compensate for a visual perception illusion). Serifs on the left side of a letter were necessary for even ink distribution across the reed while the right side serifs were needed to keep the ink from smudging.

No matter what the origin of the serif, I think it’s an interesting question to ask why it’s around today. Some propose that it improves word recognition, though I have not seen compelling evidence that serifs help or hinder word recognition. Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text. I agree with Nick that the most plausible explanation is to convey personality differences.

Cheers, Kevin

>The reeds were cut at a slant to allow a writer to have vertical stems that were thicker than horizontal stems (to compensate for a visual perception illusion).

I don't think this can be correct as the Aramaic script, now used for Hebrew, is very ancient, is pen written, and has thick horizontals and thin verticals, the opposite of latin script. It also has serifs, though they are generally vertical. I agree that serifs are a natural result of writing with a pen.

>Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text.

I agree with this, an important point to me.

>With serifs, it’s possible to also incorporate stroke variation in a type design, without getting excessive sparkle.

Yes! I never liked Optima that much…

Serifs can reduce the "gap" between the letters or in other words, helping to connect the different letterforms and at the same time, helping to separate the letterforms from eachother – don't know if somebody can follow me – ok, i'm far from being a scientist or typedesigner. I just love antiquas and love to read it!

>if somebody can follow me

Yes, I have argued a similar point here before. My argument is that serifs can achieve adequate space between letters while achieving even color. With a sans, you tend to have to tighten the spacing to get even color--to the point that it hurts readability, expecially in faces with wide counters, like Helvetica. (The ratio between the space within counters and between letters is important to readability.)

I suspect that there are other benefits as well, such as defining the line of text clearly, and others.

I

"Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text."

This is what I'm calling logicalistic; It sounds like it's logical but it's only a convenient supposition that is generally accepted in place of an explanation. It isn't an explanation at all.

Has it occurred to you that the line of text itself, the alignment of the typeface and its spacing draw your eye across? Look at a page of text. The letters aren't all in a jumble, equidistant from each other in every direction. They're in lines already. What about your lifetime habit of reading left to right? Could that help "guide the eye"? Or Notan, gelling letters into words? Could any of these obviously functional realities have any more bearing on reading than this fantasy rightward momentum? Finally, How about the fact (!!) that we read in saccades? If that's true, and we have space between lines of text, and the typeface is well-spaced, then why would we need serifs to "guide" our eyes?

This is too much like the persistent human tendency to anthropomorphize animal behavior, because it's convenient. Since an ostrich can't tell you their real motivations and impulses, you can conveniently project your own neuroses and blindnesses on it. Since there isn't a dazzling scientific factoid to replace it, we can continue to chant this silliness about serifs guiding the eye.

"With a sans, you tend to have to tighten the spacing to get even color—to the point that it hurts readability, expecially in faces with wide counters, like Helvetica."

Bill, Helvetica is badly spaced. Other grotesque sans designs are not. Then there are the other categories of sans. The lack of serifs doesn't compel a type designer to space a typeface tightly. This is more paralogic, something to say that fills the space where a real explanation should go. When you design a sans typeface you can revisit this idea.

"With serifs, it’s possible to also incorporate stroke variation in a type design, without getting excessive sparkle"

Hogwash. Optima isn't the only sans with contrast. Another logicalistic leap.

I am perfectly willing to believe that serifs have a function, but hearing people parrot the same, logicalistic idea is just more hot air at this point. Kevin, who is a reading scientist, has already pointed out that nothing supports these theories. If he's not convinced, why are you? I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but people need to think harder about this.

Hogwash. Optima isn’t the only sans with contrast. Another logicalistic leap.

Not at all. Perhaps I should have qualified "incorporate" by "easily", though.

Why there are so few sans faces with contrast, compared to the masses of serifed faces with contrast? The fact is, the combination of serifs with contrasted strokes provides a huge canvas for creating all kinds of stylistic variety.
Sure, contrasted sans faces are possible, and can be effective (as you have demonstrated with Beorcana), but the genre is small because it is problematic. It is difficult to make an effective contrasted sans, but just add serifs, and it makes things a lot easier. There is nothing "logicalistic" about this line of reasoning, and it has nothing to do with reading science, as sparkle is a phenomenon which predates that considerably (going back at least to Ben Franklin's Caslon-Baskerville prank). My observation is "practicalistic" and based on typology and type culture.

The smallness of the slab serif genre also bears this out: there is not so much design room in the genre for stroke contrast between the main stems and the serifs, because the serifs are already substantial. So again, lack of stroke contrast = small genre.

Adrian Frutiger makes some interesting associations regarding the development and acceptance of sans serif designs in his article, The History of Linear, Sans Serif Typefaces:

It was not until the birth of modernism that architects ventured to introduce a naked column, made of concrete. The fear that a line without boundaries might flow on forever gave way to a worldview defined by rationality – heralding the beginning of widespread use of sans serif typefaces

@crossgrove

If something displays in a horizontal direction (serifs) on the same line (in vertical position) over and over again – to what effect can it lead to?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - is this a line?

If something has a lot of horizontal direction, that doesn't make it type. Type is made of more than serifs. What are you talking about?

>Some claim that the serifs help draw the reader’s eye across a line of text.
About this

"There is no scientific evidence that there are two kinds of reading, immersive and non-immersive..." [ Nick ]

You're right, no, there isn't.

There is, or might be, however, an agreement--or social contract--to call the engaged, motivated reading of long texts by experienced readers 'immersive reading', and the deliberative process the reader engages in during immersive reading when an unfamiliar word or phrase of acronym is encountered, 'letterwise decipherment.' The perceptual processing routine that is the norm for each of these is hypothesized to be different, and there are perceptual processing reasons to think this is a sustainable hypothesis: when we meet an unfamiliar word during immersion we do something different, often involving a regressive saccade and a prolonged (in microsecond terms) visual search within the bounded map, as well as a deliberative sequential sounding out on the basis of our learned knowledge of symbol to sound rules, before moving on.

Both processing routines are learned, and become to various degrees automatic.

What happens in captions, headlines, decks and way-finding? We connect with these kinds of texts in browsing or way-finding, or 'referential-frame establishing' situations. We automatically resort to the same two processing routines (sub-routines) used in immersive reading, but without as large a benefit perhaps of the preview and semantic context advantages that are maximized at text sizes with longer texts. The response biases of the perceptual system retain their skew to a processing routine not premised on letter-wise slot-processing, or so I believe.

The perceptual processing impact of serifs at display sizes is a different story. At display sizes their gestural-atmospheric import perhaps plays a more imortant role than their optical-grammatical function in inhibiting slot-processing.

What doesn't make sense, to me at least, is aligning the binaries immersive / deliberative directly along the reference axis text / display. A processing routine learned (sub-attentively) during the aquisition of 'fluency in immersive reading' becomes the preferred line of attack whenever and wherever text is encountered in the life-world of the reader.

Bill, I agree that eye-fatigue is not what you are after. I think the premise of your 'sustainability of immersion with robust comprehension' test is that there might be additional 'computation costs,' (or at least, costly pitfuls) in the visual cortex associated with the sans serif when used at text sizes. And that the force of these costs is such that they disturb the most effective allocation of neuronal resources for comprehension, so that is one area where there force is expressed.

Think giggles is still reading???

:-D

regarding: serifs creating a neat crisp effect [Nick] as the reason for their introduction / assimilation into type design

my view: the serif in roman lower case types is, or represents, (factor#1) the formalization--in a new (non-scriptorial) technology or ecology of text production, namely punchcutting--of scriptorial conventions of stroke termination, within (factor#2) a humanistic classicistic cultural sphere dispositionally oriented to the carolinian miniscule and its pairing with the Roman inscriptional capital. (With the formalization being subject to, or under, (factor#3) the countervailing pressures of constraints introduced by the technical requirements of sidebearings, the trueness of the resultant impression, and the necessity of preserving the integrity of the word image.)

Right Peter, I wasn't proposing crispness as the main or only reason. I think that there are always multiple reasons for design. In fact I had already posited factor#2 based on the Roman resistance to Sweynhem & Pannartz's northern style of type.

Is your "the trueness of the resultant impression" the same as my "neat crisp effect"?

'Giggles is wasting time and bandwidth, folks. Do what most of have done: ignore her….'
Fine Miss Cunningham! If you think your so good then why do you even bother with my questions? Dont if you dont want to! no ones telling you to and it's not my fault i haven't reached your level of knowledge in typography so stop being so nasty. Bet you were worst than me at my level. Leave me alone and stop bullying! Were you never told that bullying was wrong and nasty? Dear me, even i know that and anyway, who said this site is ONLY for people at the top end of typography? i have i right to be on here just as much as you do no matter what level. By the way, remember- students ARE the future designers.

There is more detail in each character in a serif face than in a san serif face -- and that is why we teach our school children in "Century Schoolbook" as they learn to recognize the alphabet as they read.

Amazingly, as we age and still read -- it is so instilled in us, we have no problem recognizing letter formations. Go back to Type 101 and remember - cut your serif type in half - and you can still read the sentences easily.

We use it for ease of recognition -- and therefore, we shall continue using serif faces for reading purposes. (Help you get through many manuscripts, books, newspapers, etc.)

P.S. It doesn't matter what level you are on. History is important, and this is part of the history of typefaces. My all-time favorite face is still Goudy Old Style. Each letter is beautiful -- every bit of punctuation was well thought out. (I hate what digitized typefonts did to those "diamonds.") Personally, I wouldn't want to lose that sense of style, design or history.

i agree that the digital versions should be as original and accurate as could be. It loses its originality thus its quaulity.

Using serif in a contemporary context is so terribly postmodern. We need to live in our own time. The only reason serifs are 'more legible' is because we have become accustomed to them. May they die a fiery death. Long live Helvetica Neue Bold Outline!

Okay I know this is an old thread that was randomly resurrected, but I wasn't around for the original and do have something to add :)

About a year and half or two ago, I attended a dinner featuring a second language education researcher from Florida State University (I think it was FSU, might have been UF, one of the two heh). One of the parts of his research involved understanding how foreign language learners read and understand texts, in this case, specifically L1 English students learning Spanish. While conventional wisdom would have it that students are most confused in Spanish by the conjugations, they found actually that students tend to focus the majority of their effort on word stems. They did this by studying how the did various worksheets/tests/etc while in some mechanism that allowed eye tracking, so they could see exactly where and for how long students were studying different parts of the words. IIRC, the students would read words backwards, that is, read the conjugation quickly, and then backtrack to study the base word, eg, in "acaeciésemos", they would focus on "-iésemos" (1st Pl. Past Subj. -se form) and then later spend time on "acaec-" (acaecer, to happen) figuring out what it means, rather than the other way around was would native speakers.

It would seem to me that a similar approach could be used to judge reading texts between serif and sans serif.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Is Spanish read from left to right or the other way round? Could that be a reason as to why they read that way? Why wa sit just tested on the Spanish. Should have tried people who read arabic. They read from right to left. Hmm...

The initial question is a fair one, but so much research over so many years has established that the funkiness, contrast, and sheer visual interest of serifs are why they are preferred for reading. Sans-serifs overall have less variety as a species than serifs as a species. If you collect the most beautiful examples of type over the years, or just since 1970, serifs will outnumber sans-serifs by a comfortable margin. In book and magazine design, there's a reason serifs have always been preferred, though some on this board deny all that empirical evidence whenever the question comes up.

A world without serifs would be like a world condemned to sixties architecture with no relief! I'd rather die!

"so much research over so many years has established that the funkiness, contrast, and sheer visual interest of serifs are why they are preferred for reading [my emphasis]"

Your sources?

I'll admit it - I haven't read the whole thread. But has anyone ask the question yet --

Miss Giggles - which class is this question for?

Your teachers always come up with some interesting questions for their students to ponder....

Wow - old thread... just saw that -- so the question would have been

Miss Giggles - which class was this for?

And better yet - what came out of the class discussion....?

Like all other languages written with the Latin writing system (including English), Spanish is written and read left to right.

It's interesting that the non-native readers made this mistake, given that their native language is read in the same direction and has the same property of having verb conjugations that change the ending of the word (-ed, -ing, -s).

It would be much less surprising/interesting to learn that people made equivalently basic errors if there was a larger difference between their native language and the new language - as would be the case with Spanish vs Arabic or English vs Arabic.

Cheers,

T

It's not really that it's a mistake. The students in the study were only just learning Spanish, so they weren't anywhere near a fluency level, just trying to make sense of it (the idea was to see how students were reading and adjust education materials accordingly). They weren't reading it backwards, just separating the two units and interpreting them internally out of order.

By reading the second half of the word first, it shows they're still latching on to the English "I need a person before I can interpret a verb" approach, where as in Spanish it's flexible and can be other SV or VS. When you mix in object pronouns, a sentence can end up SOV, SVO, VOS, or OVS.

It was just done on Spanish because the Unievrsity had an ample supply of L1 English students learning Spanish :) It would, of course be interesting on seeing it with Arabic. I know the students at my school (kids 3-8) do get veritably confused when they are learning both Latin and Arabic script at the same time, they can't separate the written, but spoken they speak both Spanish and Arabic (well, I assume on the second) perfectly and are the best English students in the school.

But I would really be interested to see how our reading of texts changes based on a variety of factors, serif size, degree of contrast, size of text, spacing and kerning, etc. Take a sample of 100 people an analyze how each changes their reading of things, how they move their eyes, what they focus on, etc. Much like the highway font experiment but instead of for long-distance reading, for short distance and both for long and short term reading (eg, display words/titles v body text).

Perhaps in doing so we might find that the eye seems to track along a the base line in a serif font, giving weight to the idea that serifs guide the reader and make it easier, or we might find that they distract to an extent. Or we might find they really don't make much of a difference. Anyone wanna set up an experiment? :)

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

One thing about a Miss Giggles question is that it brings out all my favorite folks to answer that question. I like that a lot.

Carl your points about logicalistic arguments are spot on.

Personally the serifs leading the eye is a theory I don't buy. It's a little too much like the idea that horses are pulling the sun across the sky.

Nick, I don't agree with your idea that using the word "immersive" leading. When you read, just like when you watch a film you enter the processing of that media by degrees. In both cases you can forget anything else is going on and thus become "immersed" in the media. In film this is called suspension of disbelief. I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea that reading in an immersed state may be different from reading prior to that state might differ perhaps subtle but meaningful ways. Nick's magazine example is false I think because I don't know that I would become immersed in such a short text- and if I did I would be jolted out of it by the question headers.

The idea that the serif is not of our time or that the sans is more modern is bunk. Sheer unmitigated nonsense. If you read about this subject on Typophile or do any research into western letter history you will find abundant reasons as to why.

My pet logicalistic theory is that serifs provide extra data for the brain to use when recognizing either letters or word shapes as the case may be. The shape of a letter with serifs is more complex and there fore data rich. With a relative surplus of data perhaps recognition may be be accomplished slightly faster. If brains were really slow like a very old computer chip it would take longer - but that isn't the case. The mere presence of a serif is not enough however - it's a a matrix of factors that combine to make a text easy or hard to read. There are plenty of serif fonts that would be a nightmare to read long texts in. Maybe this idea is equivalent to but a more mushy way of saying serifs enhance "slot processing".

The idea that the serif is not of our time or that the sans is more modern is bunk. Sheer unmitigated nonsense. If you read about this subject on Typophile or do any research into western letter history you will find abundant reasons as why.

you obviously need to familiarize yourself with modernism.

Pfff!! What you have there is a true-ism. It isn't true at all, but it is commonly assumed to be true. So it seems "self evident".

I will explain why if you want. But first, when does this "modern" period begin? 20's 30's 40's 50's? Start there & we can go on.

Or, as I said before, do a search of typophile and you will quickly find out why I say this is so.

-e.

I will explain why if you want. But first, when does this “modern” period begin? 20’s 30’s 40’s 50’s? Start there & we can go on.

So right. The word can hardly be pinned down. In my common usage it ended in 1954. What’s going on now? My guess would be it isn't modernism or even post-modernism. And what IS up with the post thing anyway. I can't believe we will just be stuck adding one more post to recycled theory for the rest of our post-post-post-post-post historical existence. Maybe neo-primitive will actually just be primitive again and we can use sans not because it is more modern than serif but because we reinvented it.

Well exactly, there is the problem of the word but more crucially there is the problem of the supposed relationship of the Sans to the modern. That doesn't hold up either.

Long life to Miss Giggles and her shoes.
I hosted Mr. Patur last Friday, a humble dedicated self-taught calligrapher, a great remind for why serif is still used and important today. The students were hypnotized and that made my day.
You can also define what is classic to decide upon what’s modern.
We should also keep in mind that the contemporary trend (or duty) is to have well-thought collaborative serif/sans families.

simple answer from a simple mind: Be there a practical or functional reason to keep or discard the serif or not, One flavour of type would be boring.

-=®=-

If we had only one beautiful sans-serif the world would be a much prettier place.

Given the profile "Gutenburgz" has (click on the name) I think we probably shouldn't take him too seriously.

Quoting Eben:
"My pet logicalistic theory is that serifs provide extra data for the brain to use when recognizing either letters or word shapes as the case may be. The shape of a letter with serifs is more complex and there fore data rich. With a relative surplus of data perhaps recognition may be be accomplished slightly faster."

Just my personal experience leads me to trust Eben. I find that I can read even blackletter better than sans.
(No, we were not trained to read blackletter at school, and yes, I love grotesque and hope to see the day when it is politically correct to buy Akzidenz.)

Interesting ideas come out such debates but sometimes it can get very complicated for a student like me. It wasn't a discussion in class. It was just my thoughts, nothing more. I like type a lot.