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Monthly report for January 2018

Oh why did I ask myself “serif or sans serif?"…

Until recently I didn’t know much about the topic other than the aesthetics point of view. There are quite a few research papers about it, and one could spend an entire week switching from an opinion to the other. The topic is so debatable and debated that I couldn’t find a definitive answer to my question, but the overall feeling I got is that there might be some benefit in using sans serif over serif typeface in a web context, even though the magnitude may be difficult to perceive.

That being said, many experiments were done at a time when using anything other than Arial and Times New Roman was impossible, and when screens resolutions were much smaller than today. It’s not like all these results are obsolete, but I feel like conducting research using more modern fonts and narrowing the used devices to a specific kind could be useful. For example, I wonder which font performs the best using a 16 to 22 pixels font size scale and a 1200 pixels wide browser window.

People preferences are different whether they use an e-reader, a smartphone, or even a television. And too many research papers mention “the Web” as a universal support, while to me it’s only a way to transport information. Since a website can be viewed on a dozen of different devices and contexts, finding the universal typeface for “the Web” doesn’t make any sense anymore, and sounds like searching for a panacea.

Learning

I started a Udemy course to learn the basics of Unity –once again. I went up to section 22 this month. If I plan on completing it by the end of this year.