The Nook and iBook apps on my iPad offer a choice of five and six fonts, respectively, but on the off-chance that the designer of the print edition chooses one of these, the text will still be 'flowed' onto its digital pages in an ad hoc fashion and sized according to my personal preferences.Įven for a typography ignoramus such as myself (a friend recently asked about the typeface my own book was set in and I had to admit I've forgotten what it's called), this seems a sad state of affairs. As with Henry Ford's Model T (available in any color you want, as long as it's black), Kindle books are invariably set in PMN Caecilia. E-readers have already obliterated the careful choices designers make when deciding to set a novel in Minion or a history book in Caslon Old Face. For Lehrer, who admits to loving his Kindle but also to worrying that it makes 'the act of reading a little bit too easy,' this is an ominous sign.įor type buffs it's even worse. While we naturally think that we learn better from texts that are pleasant and easy to read, the opposite may be the case. The hypothesis is that the added difficulty in reading these texts forces more cognitive engagement, which leads to greater comprehension. The study, titled 'Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes,' found that people remembered more from worksheets and PowerPoint presentations when they were composed in a hot mess of hated fonts like Monotype Corsiva, Haettenshweiler and the dreaded Comic Sans Italic. A recent study out of Princeton, and brought to wider attention by Jonah Lehrer at, suggests that ugly, irregular fonts can boost the amount of information readers retain from a text, while easy-to-read type is more likely to just sort of slide out of their minds. But surely everyone can agree that a good typeface is easy to read, right? A surprising number of older authors name Courier as the font they prefer to write in because it resembles the characters of a typewriter and therefore kindly suggests that the current draft is still available for improvement. The story of how Helvetica became the preeminent typeface of our times has inspired a documentary film, while loathing of Comic Sans has prompted what can only be called a typographical jihad. People have their favorites, for reasons both practical and sentimental.

On the subject of fonts (or, typefaces, to use the more technically accurate term), feelings often run high.

What font goes with monotype corsiva