In a previous post, I said that there were 3 main ways in which poor typography impacted the reader: legibility, credibility and brand equity.
Legibility can be greatly diminished by poor typography. We’ve all seen headlines where the arm of a capital letter, for example a “T” and the letter immediately following it don’t nest tightly together. The result is that there is an unnatural, subtle visual break. Rather than the eye naturally and smoothly flowing from one word to the next, it wants to pause. Headlines set in this way can have an almost broken appearance. Consider the all capital setting of the word “WAS” To the eye, this can almost be read as “W AS”. Depending upon the word preceding it and the word spacing, the “W” could be seen as belonging to the previous word.
I realize that the mind is eminently capable of piecing this puzzle together, but when the time we have to impact our reader with a sales message can be measured in seconds, do we really want to waste any of that valuable time by forcing them to slow down to understand our what we’re saying?
Next time, I’ll address other examples of poor spacing to be avoided.
