The effects of Chinese typeface design, stroke weight, and contrast polarity on glance based legibility

Modern interfaces increasingly rely on screens filled with digital text to display information to users. Previous research has shown that even relatively subtle differences in the design of the on-screen typeface can influence to-device glance time in a measurable and meaningful way (Reimer et al., 2014). Here we outline a methodology for rapidly and flexibly investigating the legibility of typefaces on digital screens in glance-like contexts, and apply this method to a comparison of 5 Simplified Chinese typefaces. We find that the legibility of the typefaces, measured as the minimum presentation time needed to read character strings accurately and respond to a yes/no lexical decision task, is sensitive to differences in the typeface's design characteristics. The most legible typeface under study ("MT YingHei") could be read 33.1% faster than the least legible typeface in this glance-induced context. A second study examined two different weights of the MT YingHei type family (medium and bold), as well as two contrast polarity (color) conditions to investigate how these variations impact legibility thresholds. Results indicate that bold weight text is easier to read in this enforced glance-like context, and that positive polarity text (black on white) is easier to read compared to white on black text under the lighting conditions considered. These results are discussed in terms of contextual factors that may mediate glance-reading behavior, as well as how type design interacts with the practical limitations of a moderate density pixel grid. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 1: Change, Voices, Open

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 1 includes papers from Change, Voices and Open tracks of the conference