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How Fonts Affect the User's Experience
Several years ago, researchers at MIT confirmed through a study that fonts can impact how we feel: A bad font can make us frown unconsciously, while a good font can make us feel happy.
Content is King
Bill Gates
How Fonts Impact our Emotions
Fonts affect our emotions in two ways.
Cognitive bias
Firstly, we associate certain connotations to specific fonts and font styles. This, like many other things in our world, is often influenced by our cognitive biases and the culture we grow up in. For instance, sans serif fonts are commonly used on official U.S. government forms. But, in England, sans serif fonts are more commonly used by tabloids.
Objective readability
On top of all that, some fonts are inherently easier to read than others. And the harder our eyes and brains have to work to interpret a piece of text, the worse we report feeling afterwards.
Serif fonts were originally used by the print press, as serifs are proven to help the eye move from letter to letter faster.
When computers were first used, computer screens had low resolutions. Serif fonts had to be created using vectors, which just didn’t look right with the low pixel-density available back in the days. So, early designers defaulted to using sans serif fonts, which were created as bitmaps.
Minimum Font Size
It’s no secret that mobile apps are often used on the go. Add to these limitations associated with the screen size, glare from the sun, various visual impairments among users, not always the best screen quality of smartphones and you will get the first ground rule governing the minimum size for body text.
Google in Material Design guidelines recommends setting the minimum size for Body text to be 16sp (equal to 16pt in iOs)
Headline Size
In recent years, it has become very popular to use large headings in digital typography. They look contrasted with the main text and become anchor elements on the page.
But you need to be very careful when using large headers in the mobile apps. Often the use of a large size for headings in mobile apps results in the fact that a headline is stretched to 3–4 lines while contains 1 or 2 words per line. Such headers look messy and are hard to read.
Recommendations
Choose a headline size both contrasting with the body text and fitting on average 2–3 lines.
Don't forget
Pablo Picasso
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
