Is Times New Roman a serious font? Should we or should we not use it for our children’s birthday invite? Can one print a history book in Futura? Is it romantic to use Impact instead of Trajan in wedding invites? This brings back the discussion on ambiguity of design elements. Can a typeface which fuels the imagination of young children be declared untrustworthy so objectively? It worked perfectly well for young children. Well, to be fair, it wasn’t completely the fault of the typeface. However, it quickly became popular with, amongst others school children and because of its easy availability on computers, soon hospitals, supermarkets, offices, churches, newsagents and police stations started printing SERIOUS information posters, signs and newsletters in this comic book font. It would be interesting to compare amongst Baskerville, Caslon, Bodoni, Garamond and other pre-20th century faces.īefore I give a background of this type face, I am tempted to be biased and say, why am I not surprised that people did not trust this font at all? You see, originally the font was made for little comic book size speech bubble in programmes like Microsoft Word. the oldest typeface looked the most trustworthy. Looking at the other faces: Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet, what the outcome says to me is that tradition is seen to represent truth, i.e. The study was only among six typefaces, hardly enough variety to claim that Baskerville has a lock on projecting authority. We might also consider the role of tradition here. So, is it the honesty and dedication of its creator some how manifested in the typeface or is it the elegance and precision of typeface it-self, that makes it agreeable to people? Or is it simply a reflection of people’s faith in religion and authority (as people have read bible in Baskerville). The dramatic contrast in stroke modulation with vertically stressed ‘O’ and circular forms enhances its beauty. The long curvaceous tail of the letter ‘Q’ looks perfectly refined. The typeface is Ornamental yet sinuous and elegant. The Baskerville typeface is a result of that love for typeface and commitment to perfection. He was also known as a complete printer because he kept improving his paper, ink, machinery and typeface in pursuit of perfect quality. John Baskerville loved typography, and it’s believed that he lost his fortune in pursuit of it, sinking all the money he had into designing and printing complete editions of the works of Virgil and Milton, not to mention the Bible.

It is classified as a transitional typeface because it is positioned between the old style typefaces of William Caslon and the modern styles of Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot.

Assuming that Morris could have been right about Baskerville being the typeface of truth, I looked into it to understand what might have made it so.īaskerville is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England. When I was asked to analyse two fonts as a part of my classroom assignment, I took that as an opportunity to explore the two extremes created by Morris’s experiment. This led Morris to conclude that Baskerville is the typeface of truth. Morris’s test showed that the least trustworthy typeface was Comic Sans whereas Baskerville had both the highest rate of agreement and the lowest rate of disagreement.

Are there, he asks, certain fonts that encourages a reader to believe that the sentences in which they are typeset are true? Morris was actually testing something completely different: the effect of fonts on perception of truth. However what intrigued me was the reference to a type experiment conducted by Errol Morris for his New York Times Opinionator blog. Ostensibly, his objective was to determine if the reader was an optimist or a pessimist. This has been an ongoing debate in the design industry, but the truth is that in our field, to quote screenwriter William Goldman, in his assesment of contemporary hollywood “ Nobody Knows Anything.” In most cases these arguments are subjective and are based on the design philosophies and orientation of the designer. This discussion reminded me of an article by Michael Bierut, “ The typeface of truth.” He begins by analysing the ambiguity of design elements – do they posses intrinsic features which evoke certain feelings or encourage actions, when used in a specific context.

Baskerville typeface test