Did you know some fonts are more believable than others?
Writer and filmmaker Errol Morris recently did a very interesting experiment on the New York Times website. He polled about 45,000 readers and asked them how they felt about a quote on the likelihood of earth being destroyed by an asteroid. Unknown to the readers, he wasn’t interested in their answer per se, but he was doing an experiment.
Readers viewed the question in five different fonts: Georgia, Comic sans, Helvetica, Trebucket and Baskerville.
Morris wanted to know if the font in which they viewed the quoted impacted its believability.
His results were astonishing to say the least.
Baskerville scored the best with a statistically significant difference of 1.5%. Now, we may have expected Comic sans to score low (after all, that font should be eliminated and outlawed once and for all), but the difference between the other fonts is fascinating. It seems that Baskerville is a more believable font than the others used in this poll.
I’d really encourage you to read the two articles on the New York Times site where Morris explains the experiment and how he got to it. He shares lots of fascinating info and anecdotes. It certainly got me thinking about the fonts I use, especially in more formal and serious publications.
The takeaway? Some fonts are more believable than others. But which exactly and why that is, is to be decided still.
Have you ever felt certain fonts were more serious or believable?
How do you go about picking a font for your publications?
Karen Rainwater says
Maybe it’s because I’m an artist, but I love Comic Sans, and I just don’t understand the hostility towards it. But, I do primarily use Georgia, if given a choice. I tend to use Comic Sans for fun, or to highlight something. I find it very interesting that font is being treated almost as though it has a life of its own, rather than being an inanimate tool.
Jonathan Assink says
I steer clear of Comic Sans not because I personally fall into the “Ban Comic Sans” camp, but because that is the position of a majority of the internet, and if your church is putting out content with Comic Sans (or Papyrus) you will not be taken seriously. If the event is a toddler party in the nursery, ok, maybe. But even then, only maybe. Anywhere else on your website though? No. It may seem fun and playful, but it’s interpreted by many as a joke.
Georgia is good, that’s what I usually use for serif fonts. I tend to use Franklin Gothic Book for sans serif, and occasionally Century Gothic for banners or headlines.
Rachel Blom says
I think Comic Sans falls into that interesting category of love-it-or-hate-it, there seems to be no middle ground…No idea why, just one of the mysteries of life I guess 🙂