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Subject:RE: What's wrong with Times New Roman? From:"Downing, David" <david -dot- downing -at- fiserv -dot- com> To:"John Posada" <jposada99 -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:53:52 -0500
Well yes, I remember now that I took a course in book publishing, and one of the exercises was to go though magazines and newspapers and come up with examples of both good and bad font choices. I remember one of my examples of bad font choices was an ad for the American Heart Association trying to raise money to fight heart disease. The ad used a very delicate font that I thought might represent weakness - as in a weak heart.
I also understand the Bookman is a good font for small point sizes.
While we're about it, we've discovered that Lucida Console is a good font for approximating the appearance to type on a terminal screen -- i.e., for an old-fashioned prompt-and-scroll interface. (Funny thing is, both me and another co-worker were mistakenly reading the name as "Lucinda Console" for awhile.)
David Downing
Senior Technical Writer
Credit Union Solutions
Fiserv
________________________________________
From: John Posada [mailto:jposada99 -at- gmail -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 9:43 AM
To: Downing, David
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: What's wrong with Times New Roman?
What's wrong with just regular Times, which is what we use for body test?
I think that when people say a font is "wrong", what they are saying is that for what it does, other fonts might do it better.
To me, a font should be as efficient as possible space-wise, while enhancing its legibility in all the forms it may be presented, and at the same time, not take attention away from the content because of the font's look .
This does not mean that the purpose should be to cram as much as possible. It also means that you can appear to be more liberal with white space without having less content.
Some fonts are more readable than others even when they are either smaller, tighter, or "shorter". This results in the more information on a page (or the same amount while more "airy" and at the same time, making the page easier to read.
--
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
NYMetro STC President
"The Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives."
---Winston Churchill
Looking for the next gig.
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