Chapter 4 Reading Response

Chapter 4 talks about the importance of typographic legibility. It firsts mentions how typographic legibility is widely misunderstood and neglected by designers. That's why it is a subject that requires careful study and constant evaluation. The most legible typefaces are characterized by three qualities upon which legibility is dependent upon; contrast, simplicity, and proportion. I've never thought of it that way until I read this chapter. Then I began to understand that legible typefaces like Times New Roman are proportionate to one another. I also learned that the perception of the letter is based upon the form/counterform relationship. Counterforms are as significant to legibility as the shapes of the letters themselves. I like the example of the dancer they used in the book. With the dancer, they showed how she manipulated the space she had in order to make a shape of a letter. I felt that example was showing how a designer can correctly manipulate space in order to have the letter to be legible. With space, there are two kinds; interletter and interword. Interletter spacing talks about the spacing between each letter. It mentions that too much or too little spacing between letters can destroy the normal texture intended by the typeface designer. Interword spacing is the spacing between each word. In the book, it talks about how misfit letter combinations can cause spatial inconsistency with words. Overall, I thought that this chapter was very interesting because it talks about the importance of legibility. Legibility is something very basic but at the same time, not a lot of people think about it. In typeface design, it's extremely important.