A few years back, I included an item in my monthly email newsletter about a study on typefaces for the web. It was a small item, nowhere near the top of the newsletter, and I took no position on the result of the study.  The study, if I remember it correctly, came out of a Texas university and concluded that serif fonts were best for body copy on the web mainly because it’s the font most readers are accustomed to seeing in print. Think about reading a page of sans serif in a magazine or book; it’s just wrong. The study involved test subjects reading web pages and concluding the serif fonts were easier to read.

Despite my matter-of-fact approach to reporting the study results, that little item produced more email than anything I’d written about since I started distributing an email newsletter back in around 1995. Typography arouses passion in communicators. At our hearts, most of us are craftspeople who started out writing and designing print publications. I still have a Pantone color swatch book in my desk drawer, and I can’t seem to get rid of my XActo knives, even though I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve needed to slice up a galley. I used to spend hours poring over Communication Arts magazine. And like so many others, I devoted a fair amount of time to learning typography. (I go back to the days when we had to count headlines: fjilt were half counts, M and W were one-and-a-half; remember that?)

Scientifically speaking, there is no resolution to the serif vs. sans serif debate for web content, although most designers lean toward sans serif. You can find studies to support your choice, so they don’t help much. Personally, I’ve always leaned toward serif, but only at 12 pt. and above. Beyond the serif vs. sans serif debate, typography has been the oprhaned stepchild of web design, with few choices and little control.

Happily, I found a terrific article on web typography at Sitepoint. Written by London-based Multimap.com web developer Andy Hume, “The Anatomy of Web Fonts” goes into considerable detail about online type, but Hume manages to keep it understandable and engaging. Take his approach to the serif/sans serif issue:

Serif fonts are very popular in print, and although there is a certain amount of debate regarding which family of typeface is most legible on the screen, I fall firmly in to the camp that believes that sans-serif faces are a more suitable option…The variable boldness and fine extra strokes of the serif fonts, particularly at smaller sizes of body text, often appear pixilated and untidy. This is still the case even with the most modern anti-aliasing techniques. With anti-aliasing enabled, the serif fonts look blurred (which is exactly what they are) around their curves and terminals. On the other hand, the straight, low contrast, open strokes of a sans-serif font, such as Verdana, will always leave a good impression on-screen.

The article includes plenty of graphics to illustrate Hume’s points. Verdana, for example, was designed specifically for the screen and has plenty of space between letters (kerning) and within characters (glyphs). The article covers technical issues like additive and subtractive color systems (and why they matter), screen resolution, the inability to control final output (compared to print), and a variety of other topics. It also offers advice on choosing and implementing fonts, including applying Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to your work. For all you hard-core communication tacticians out there, it’s a piece worth bookmarking. As for me, I’ve never been married to serif fonts, and I can feel myself coming around to the sans serif camp.