Are you exhausted of people pointing out you are “just a writer“? Everything is fine until you hear one of these: “Hey Steve, are you real about the timesheet you just gave me? Your job certainly took less time. It’s just three lines of copy.“
I feel your rage, writers. I have a couple of bad experiences under my belt as well. I heard it all from “We're gonna go with my wife's idea” to “I will write it myself. I had English at school too.”
Let them be, writers. Those people are not worth it. I can assure you. Ungrateful clients are just like your toxic ex. They aaaalways come back. (After their wife will sink the whole business with her dancing whale idea.)
And when they slide into your dm's again? Let's show them that passing an English class is certainly not enough to be a great writer. We all have to educate ourselves on psychology, sociology, UX, and even design as well.
Speaking of design, every writer could benefit from knowing how the visual side of things influences the written word. And the easiest starting point is to study fonts. Are you interested? Keep reading.
Difficult-to-read font increases memorability
In the Princeton experiment (2010) Daniel Oppenheimer asked 28 participants to learn about 3 species of aliens, each of them having 7 features. He divided people into two groups. One received information in an easy-to-read font, the other in a more… creative one.
Example of the content from Oppenheimer's research:
The norgletti | the pangerish |
Two feet tall | ten feet tall |
Eats flower’s petals and pollen | eats green, leafy vegetables |
Has brown eyes | has blue eyes |
When he later quizzed people, he discovered that the easy-to-read font group memorised only 73% of the information compared to 87% memorised by the italics font people. Whaaat? Let me explain.
If you use a slight mental friction, the reader’s brain is forced to pay attention and work. Easy-to-read font can soothe us into blessed ignorance.
We all know the state when you finish reading a page and have absolutely no clue what was written there. Because all that time you were thinking about sushi for lunch.
Use a slightly difficult-to-read font if you want to increase and support memorability.
Easy-to-read fonts encourage action
In 2008 Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz from The University of Michigan asked 20 people to “tuck your chin into your chest and then lift your chin upwards as far as possible. 6-10 repetitions.“
Half of the participants get the instructions written in easy Arial, 12 points. The other half in a curly Brush, 12 points.
The results? People with easy-to-read instructions were done with the exercise in 8,2 minutes on average. The second group, though… they needed 15,1 minutes on average.
Why? People connected the difficulty of reading the instructions with the expected difficulty of the exercise. To put it plainly. No, they did not need an extra 7 minutes to read the instructions. They thought the exercise was super hard because the instructions were super hard to read.
If you want people to perceive tasks as easy, print instructions in an easy-to-read font.
Everything around us is influencing us and fonts are no exception. Writers, the content is not the only thing that matters.
Below I added a few examples on how to use these findings. As usual, don’t take me super seriously. After all, I’m just a writer as well. (Teasing!)
If you want to look sophisticated, use difficult-to-read font.
If you want to look like you put in lots of effort, use difficult-to-read font.
If you want people to be happy and relaxed about following your instructions, use easy-to-read font.
If you want to look like you’re stating something super obvious, use easy-to-read font
And for the love of God. Whatever you do, don't even think about touching Comic Sans.
Have fun.
Source: The Illusion of Choice, Richard Shotton
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