The relationship between beauty and comfort in fonts

Is beauty uncomfortable? Is comfort beautiful? We use fonts to explore the relationship between beauty and reading comfort. Participants viewed a paragraph of nonsensical Latin text and rated how much beauty they felt from the letters. They also rated comfort twice: after an ordinary reading task and after a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task. In the ordinary reading task, participants rated comfort after reading a short story. In the RSVP task, participants read 40 words of a different short story, each word presented for 500 ms (120 words per minute), and again rated comfort. The first task maintains ecological validity, and the second eliminates reading speed as a confound. We found that the two comfort ratings are strongly correlated (R2 = 0.88), and comfort predicts beauty (R2 = 0.96). Beauty and comfort together revealed three distinct font clusters, which were not distinct using either measure alone. These clusters correspond to standard typographic categories: text, script, and display. Indeed, font category predicted ratings of beauty and comfort. However, within text fonts, beauty and comfort ratings did not distinguish between serif and sans serif. We also found striking individual differences. Beauty and comfort were positively correlated for most participants, but strongly negatively correlated for others. A participant’s beauty-comfort correlation is predicted by their preference for minimalist style and by the difference in their ratings across font categories (R2 = 0.60). We show how form and function, two aspects of product design often considered separate, are closely interconnected for fonts.