Are you writing for print or screen?
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 4:15PM I don't want to get all Typography for Lawyers, but I have been thinking a bit about fonts recently.
I get emailed a lot of contracts from other law firms and about 99% of them are formatted using either Arial or Times New Roman (depending upon whether the firm prefers its fonts sans or avec serif.
The thought process behind choosing one of these fonts may differ from firm to firm (or may be non-existent). For me though they have one key thing in common - they were both designed to be used for printed documents rather than read on an iPad, laptop or monitor.
In the case of Times New Roman this is self-evident given that it made its first appearance in 1932. Arial was designed with computers in mind, but still with a focus on being used in printed output.
Why does it matter? To many lawyers the answer is probably that it doesn't. If your workflow mainly involves printing documents before you read them then a print-focused font is probably the best option.
If you mainly work on documents onscreen though it makes a difference... and the best illustration of this for me is using IA's Writer app on the iPad, which uses a:-
"monospaced font called Nitti Light
created and optimized for iPad"
The difference in readability between this and the standard Arial / TNR font documents is noticeable enough to make you wish that all the documents you have to read on the screen were typeset in something similar.
I'm not suggesting that law firms should adopt Nitti Light as their house-style font, but as more clients (and other lawyers) move towards a paperless office is it time to start thinking about how your documents will actually be used?
They are created on a screen and increasingly they are reviewed and amended in the same way. A printed copy will be signed at the end of the process, but hopefully most of the actual reading has been completed by that stage.
So how about moving towards fonts which are optimised for reading on-screen?
There are a lot of alternatives, but a good starting point is this post by Daniel Will-Harris which analyses the screen-specific alternatives of Georgia or Verdana (again, depending on your level of Seriphobia).
This probably all sounds a bit geeky, but it does make a difference to how easy the document is to read. Next time you are reviewing an Arial or TNR document on your computer try hitting CTRL-A and changing the text to Verdana or Georgia and see what you think.
I wonder what percentage of document review is currently done using an electronic device... and what percentage this needs to reach before law firms need to acknowledge that their documents are read mainly on-screen and design them accordingly?
Reader Comments (2)
In a guest post at The Appellate Record entitled Ask The Typography Guru: What To Do About E-Filing?, Matthew Butterick recommends using whtaever print-optimized font you prefer for documents that will be e-filed in pdf format. You can find the post at http://is.gd/Lo1gXi.
Great point! I'm going to check out those links and change my standard (calibri 11pt 1.15 lone spacing)..
How about cufon replacement on your site then, sir!