Using Typography to Hack Your Brain
The psychology of deliberately making a font hard to read
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A central intention of design today is to reduce cognitive load, the amount of effort the brain needs to understand something, so that communication and comprehension are quick and easy. So it was a bit surprising when a typeface specifically designed to be hard to read recently made headlines in the design world. Why would anyone purposefully make a font difficult to read, you might ask, when developments in printing technology and type design have strived for centuries to make words more, not less readable?
The quest for legibility
Lots of research has focused on legibility. In the 1960s Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir tested road signs by placing them on a car that was then driven toward a test audience, who then noted at which point the different text styles and sizes could be read. The result was the creation of a new, highly readable British road and motorway signage system, which subsequently became a role model for modern road signage all over the world.
More recently, MIT and type foundry Monotype collaborated to improve the design and typography of interfaces we read with a “quick glance”—things like our smartphones, smartwatches, and car displays. They used much more sophisticated (and less nerve-wracking) technology than Calvert and Kinneir did, as they were able to monitor eye tracking to measure split-second response times.
Easy to read = easy to do?
As well as making signage clearer, it’s been shown that an easy-to-read typeface might convince your brain that a given task is easier to perform because information printed in a legible typeface ostensibly requires less mental effort to understand and process.
This idea could have a wide range of implications, such as encouraging people to exercise. For example, psychologists at the University of Michigan showed that a group of 20-year-old college students who read the written instructions for an exercise routine in an easy-to-read typeface were more motivated to exercise regularly than those who read it in a harder-to-read style. Both groups read exactly the same instructions; the only thing that changed was the font.
