Investigating typographic differentiation: Italics are more subtle than bold for emphasis

Mary C. Dyson

Sofie Beier

Text designers are likely to benefit from guidance on how to use typographic differentiation for emphasis. Three experiments use purposely-designed fonts to explore the size and nature of differences in the stylistic characteristics of fonts (weight, width, contrast, italic) which affect letter identification. Results indicate that words set in bold and expanded fonts, when alternated with words set in a Neutral test font, may impair performance, whereas changing to italic does not. Possible explanations are explored through measuring the physical and perceptual similarities of the test fonts.

Keywords: typography, salience, typeface, legibility

Published online: 28 July 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.22.1.02dys

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Cited by other publications

Beier, Sofie & Chiron A.T. Oderkerk

2019. Smaller visual angles show greater benefit of letter boldness than larger visual angles. Acta Psychologica 199 ► pp. 102904 ff.

Bigelow, Charles

2019. Typeface features and legibility research. Vision Research 165 ► pp. 162 ff.

Chow, Kenny K. N. & Kin Wai Michael Siu

2018. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems, ► pp. 303 ff.

Thiessen, Myra, Sofie Beier & Hannah Keage

2020. A Review of the Cognitive Effects of Disfluent Typography on Functional Reading. The Design Journal 23:5 ► pp. 797 ff.

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