Comments on: Errol Morris' quiz about killer asteroids was a secret experiment to find out how fonts affect our thinking

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:41:00 +0000

What’s wrong with the bar graph? It had to be cut to show the statistical differences in the data, a legit practice.

By: Grahamers2002

Grahamers2002 — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 21:21:00 +0000

So is this post a meta fakeout? That is, it this story — which reveals that the real issue is NOT about asteroids but about fonts — REALLY another layer of deception and the REAL issue under review is the effect of horrible bar graphs on readers?

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:23:00 +0000

So this is why the CERN guys used Comic Sans.

It’s what good scientists do; encourage dissent.

By: Okapi

Okapi — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:23:00 +0000

This would be much more interesting if they were able to correlate some feature(s) (ex. Surface area) of the typefaces with agreement and disagreement.

If there was a correlation with surface area, one might make the prediction that agreement could be altered by changing the font size.

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:19:00 +0000

Microsoft Word lists these ‘typefaces’ under the “font” tab. In fact, on my screen right now, I see “recently used fonts” followed by “Times New Roman”, “Ariel”, etc. This is how the term is used now, sorry.

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:16:00 +0000

Isn’t that just a function of the fact the Microsoft Word calls these “recently used fonts” when you click on the “font” tab?

Almost everyone on the planet with a computer sees these called “fonts” every day.

By: Ronald Pottol

Ronald Pottol — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:58:00 +0000

The rule of thumb I had always heard (Adobe’s “Stop Stealing Sheep, and learn how type works”?) was serif for under 24 points, sans over, so use it for headlines, etc.

By: dm10003

dm10003 — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 17:28:00 +0000

People have come to use the wrong typographical term for “typeface” or “face”.

“Font” refers to a particular style within the typeface such as outline, bold italic, light condensed, etc.

The terms “font” and “typeface” are not technically synonymous.

By: Finnagain

Finnagain — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 17:23:00 +0000

So, is the term “font size” redundant redundant?

By: Jonathan Badger

Jonathan Badger — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Yes. This is particularly annoying because despite the efforts of the more computational savvy biologists to get their bench colleagues to use things like R, which actually plot things correctly, Excel is still the standard graphing tool used by most bench biologists.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:02:00 +0000

But you want your the signs you leave behind saying “He went thattaway” to be believed, right?

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:21:00 +0000

When I went back to school in 2008, we had to submit all our stuff in Times New Roman, IIRC.

By: creesto

creesto — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:47:00 +0000

So THAT”S why so many teens type in all caps when they’re excited!

By: spenze

spenze — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:31:00 +0000

I have to say, I’m shocked there aren’t greater differences between fonts than this.
As a designer, I was taught that your typeface is for design as your clothes are to you. A comic sans would be a sloppy T-shirt and shorts, while a helvetica would be a modern cut suit.

That said, I guess in north america most people don’t give a damn about how you dress either.

By: Pope Ratzo

Pope Ratzo — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:15:00 +0000

All serif fonts look approximately the same to me. When the UofC press published something of mine some years ago, I remember talking to the designer, thinking he was seeing something I couldn’t, wondering if I had the typographical analogue of color-blindness.

Given the care with which typographers do their work, I don’t doubt that there is a great difference. I know that certain editions of books please me more than others, engage my eye better, allow me to read longer. Maybe it’s the font or the reflective property of the paper or how much the weight of the book fatigues my hands. I don’t know.

By: Daneel

Daneel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Hey, I didn’t say XOR.

By: GoatLordMessiah

GoatLordMessiah — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:30:00 +0000

I’m not that fussed either way; it just seems odd, to me at least, that people get mad over such things.

By: Toxa

Toxa — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:20:00 +0000

Fox News style guide…

By: Dan Hibiki

Dan Hibiki — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:17:00 +0000

that’s why you should wash it regularly.

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:50:00 +0000

Would it be considered ‘mean’ to go IRB shopping to see if I can find somebody who will go full-metal-hardass over this unapproved human experimentation?

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:43:00 +0000

And of all the Tufte zombies complaining about the bar graph, not one pointed out the ugly, needless pie chart in the middle of the NYT article.

By: dnebdal

dnebdal — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:41:00 +0000

It’s possible they did the questions as images (or webfonts, but I don’t think you can rely on 100% support rate for those yet).

By: GlyphGryph

GlyphGryph — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:34:00 +0000

Would you accept font-type, perhaps? That seems to be significantly more common nomenclature than typeface.

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:33:00 +0000

Baskerville was signficant. Cutting axes, although should be noted, is a fine way to highlight said statistically significant differences. Showing the bars identically would be just as midleading. Normalizing the graphs would have been another way to highlight the differences, but that would be even more confusing for a lay reader, I would think.

By: Jason Rihel

Jason Rihel — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:28:00 +0000

Only Baskerville came out as significantly different from the others, not comic sans.

As for the y-axis Nazis, there is nothing wrong with cutting the axis to show the difference, which was significant. Highlighting their sameness with a full axis is even more misleading. Yes, he should have drawn our attention to the axis switch, but he also could have normalized the data to a single font (say, the font the intro to the quiz was in) and highlighted the differences that way.

Blindly following Tufte off a cliff….

By: hassenpfeffer

hassenpfeffer — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:50:00 +0000

I <3 Baskerville, but my true love is Garamond.

On a completely tangential note, an especially convincing font was part of Doofenshmirtz's episodic scheme to take over the Tri-State Area in the recent Phineas & Ferb episode "Ferb Latin."

By: Christina

Christina — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:41:00 +0000

I don’t see how being the 3rd from the bottom in terms of rates of disagreement makes Comic Sans have “one of the highest rates of disagreement.” It looks like one of the lower rates of disagreement, to me.

By: slowtiger

slowtiger — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 08:08:00 +0000

Big news. As any decent graphics designer will tell you, there’s indeed an emotional quality in any typeface. Doesn’t matter where it comes from – mostly it’s just “this is always used by banks, so it’s a perfect typeface for another bank” – but this is why chosing the right font for a corporate identity can be a very hard thing to do, up to the point where they need to design a completely new typeface.

By: beemoh

beemoh — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:45:00 +0000

Yet when I handed in my assignments in Wingdings, they marked it as a fail. Everything in moderation, I suppose.

By: atimoshenko

atimoshenko — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:58:00 +0000

It’s the default way Excel plots these values (min value is 15,000 for the top chart, for instance). If the person doing the graphs then does not think very hard abut how appropriate this representation is to the data actually being represented, you get this kind of silliness.

EDIT: Worse still, the default Excel plot includes the y-axis which makes the non-zero minimum clear. They decided to get rid of the axis and just display the values above the bars, which resulted in an even greater misrepresentation. Sigh.