Maarten Renckens
Belgium
maarten.r2@gmail.com
WG Member – WG2, WG4
Position Paper
As future Ph.D. students of dr. Ann Bessemans (starting our research projects in september/october 2015), our main interests revolve around typeface legibility and legibility research. These two topics cover all typographic aspects of reading, going from the letter shapes themselves up to the ways in which the letters are processed in the brains. Little research is done in the past into the typefaces used for digital reading devices. This could be an item (important legibility matter) for the ergonomics of reading in WG4. An example that clearly shows the need for a more thorough investigation is the fact that on smartphones, for instance, only a sans serif font is used, while within paper books serif typefaces are used (unless the books are for children). The discussion about the legibility of serif versus sans serif typefaces seems an endless debate in current literature. It is assumable that, depending on the medium and/or the reading materials, one typeface is better than another. Furthermore, studying the use of different parameters in a typeface, related to the visual rendering on the screen of e-reading devices, may be an interesting path.