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by cjoy
3183 days ago
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Typography is not just concerned with maximising readability. It is subject to aesthetics and taste, which are strongly linked to habit and consensus. Most prolific type designers have at least once toyed with the idea of a mathematically constructed, ideal letter form. The final design is either allowed to offend the human eye or mathematics. I do not know a case where this was not true. |
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And hence influenced by culture. Much of typography (the aesthetic appeal aspect) is very clearly culture-bound.
But even the one aspect which might seem to be universal/objective (different things but that's another story), ie. legibility, turns out IIRC to be highly variable. I don't have the references, but I'm pretty sure recent research has shown legibility to be generational. The advantages of serifs has dropped off as later generations have been more exposed to sans serif typefaces. And gothic typefaces were more legible to pre-WWII Germans, etc.
If that's right, the best one could do mathematically would be to model a snapshot of the current cultural state. Perhaps the model could have parameters that could be tweaked as culture changed.