Feel Info: A feeble attempt to quantify aesthetics (original) (raw)

The debate over beauty, clarity, purpose, and what the most effective form a typeface should take has been ongoing in the design world, while proof in the scientific community regarding typeface design proves that the structure of a letterform has no material effect on readability or legibility. For this paper an empirical method is offered for quantifying a font’s usefulness and desirability over another in terms of aesthetics. I have attempted to offer methods to quantify some universal qualities of preference for fonts based on structural aesthetics through investigative, and empirical research. There are two arguments which are currently in vogue in the art community that should be abandoned. 1)The modernist ‘crystal goblet’ approach, simply defined is to choose a san serif font for every graphic design purpose, so that the unimpeded transfer of information is not clouded by a cultural or ornamental context. To many it is preferred method of contemporary typographic design both in terms of beauty and utility. 2) The post-modernist approach would be to find a more unique solution tailored for a particular audience be formulated based on criteria tailored toward the intended audience’s feelings or toward the subject matter that the work was attempting to convey. I am not a scientist. My study was not able to reach a cross section of humans that could be considered an accurate scientific sampling. My purpose was to shed more light on some traditionally held beliefs in a font’s ability to convey information. I collected an unscientific sampling of 72 people who responded to my survey on aesthetics. My statistical sampling was random. But the respondents were more likely to be college educated, than the rest of the population based on proportion. They were more also likely to be older than the general population, and more likely to be American than any other nationality. But there were people from a broad variety of occupations and educational backgrounds, never-the-less. I have included in the body of this paper, a sample of the types of questions asked after a brief explanation of font structure was assumed to be read by the uninitiated in typographic terms. It was assumed that participants would read the brief reasoning why this survey was being collected, but there are no guarantees as it was administered electronically. One of the most interesting results of the test to graphic designers such as myself found that calligraphic fonts were overwhelming preferred when the term beauty was associated with a font, and that san-serif fonts were overwhelmingly considered to be the opposite. Results that were tabulated opened up a broader discussion as to whether the Arts might be open to the idea of formulating a process which can quantify aesthetics. The very idea that an answer to a long debated philosophical question, such as this may seem anathema to those in the Art community. Possibilities that beauty may not necessarily be a subjective matter might be frightening to some relegating it to a formulaic process, aka craft, as opposed to art.