Nice, a collection of postage stamps created by type designers.

Serif fonts, such as Times New Roman, or Georgia – which I use here by the way, mostly in post titles and headings though – tend to be harder for dyslexic people to read. Sans-serif fonts, such as Arial, or Helvetica – used here for most post text – are preferable, though fonts resembling handwriting are the easiest for dyslexic people to read.

Serif fonts, with their “ticks” and “tails” at the end of most strokes (as found in traditional print fonts such as Georgia or Times New Roman), tend to obscure the shapes of letters, so sans-serif fonts are generally preferred. Many dyslexic people also find it easier to read a font that looks similar to hand writing as they are familiar with this style, and some teachers prefer them. However these types of fonts can lead to confusion with some letter combinations, such as “oa” and “oo”; “rn” and “m”.

For movie buffs, guess the title of the film based on just letter from its poster… I’m too embarrassed to reveal how I fared.

A font set designed by Ken Perlin, a computer scientist, said to be the world’s smallest, yet still legible typeface… though Adam Borowski, who in 2004 created a minuscule yet also legible font set, for side messages in a MUD client, believes his set is smaller.

You are more likely to recall information that is difficult to read, say because the text is slightly obscured or is composed with a font that is not so easy to comprehend, because you are required to concentrate more in order to absorb the material you are reading, something that scientists refer to as disfluency.

“Disfluency is just a subjective feeling of difficulty associated with any mental task,” explained psychology Prof Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the co-authors of the study. “So if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent… We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things.”

If I’m reading the report correctly Comic Sans was one of the fonts that was harder to comprehend… another plank in the case for bringing the often reviled font in from the cold?

Not my first choice in a font, but Comic Sans, originally created by Vincent Connare, a “typographic engineer” with Microsoft, as a less “boring” alternative to Times New Roman, certainly has its applications.

But why, more than any other font, has Comic Sans inspired so much revulsion? Partly because its ubiquity has led to such misuse (or at least to uses far beyond its original intentions). And partly because it is so irritably simple, so apparently written by a small child. Helvetica is everywhere and simple too, but it usually has the air of modern Swiss sophistication about it, or at least corporate authority. Comic Sans just smirks at you, and begs to be printed in multiple colours.

From an excerpt from British author Simon Garfield’s new book, Just My Type, on the history of typefaces, the way they influence our perceptions, and even some of the unimaginable outcomes our use of them can bring about:

The correct use of type varies over time. These days, corporate edicts are common, and memos come down from on high like tablets of stone: thou shalt use only on both internal and external communications. But who is to say that lower-case Arial from 1982 is preferable to the way we communicated in TRAJAN CAPITALS on the pediments of public buildings in ancient Rome? And how did our eyes switch from accepting one over the other, to the point where a thoughtless choice of capitals-all-the-way became a cause of headaches and dismissals? Walker was sacked three months after her email was deemed to have caused “disharmony in the workplace”, which would have been laughable had it not caused her so much distress. Twenty months later, after remortgaging her house and borrowing money from her sister to fight her case, Walker appealed successfully for unfair dismissal, and was awarded $17,000 (£10,000).

I’ve been waiting for a chance to mention Helvetica and space exploration in the same sentence, so here we go… how many unkerned normal 100-point size “Helveticas” does it take to reach the Moon?

If you thought it was 2,826,206,643.42 then you were right.

Paul Shaw, letter designer, design historian, and teacher, who created the “top 100 typefaces of all time” list in 1998, has produced an addition, the top ten typefaces of the decade from 2000 to 2010.

As before, it is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons.

34 typographic sins (PDF)… watch your use of those “dumb quotes” (mine here should be correct).