The Microsoft OpenType Muscle

Recently, Dr. Kevin Larson, PhD in cognitive psychology, employed by Microsoft, spoke at the AtypI 2005 conference in Helsinki on readability and its supposed improvement with OpenType features.

OpenType (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opentype) is the latest in font technology, a font format that supports any language and advanced typographic effects. Hoards of money are being invested into OpenType's development, which I do believe is a good thing - but Dr. Larson's quest to find a statistical and scientific support for this expenditure knocked it all back into the phrenology age for me.

Dr. Larson's group had been looking at the overall effect of decent typography (OpenType ligatures, decent margins, considerate page layouts and good justification), handing test subjects both the good and the bad and finding out what they preferred. Sadly enough, they preferred the crappy page. And experienced no improvement in reading speed. The end for graphic design and typography.

I can imagine the typography guys at Microsoft (or anywhere else for that matter) didn't like such frightening results one bit, and this is exactly what bugs me. From here on, Dr. Larson's tests and their results seemed to evaporate into franticality, with the obvious point of trying to contradict the unfortunate outcome of the previous test.

Research more often than not bubbles up unexpected and unpleasant results, and from thereon should readjust itself into finding out WHY, and what those results mean exactly. But here only one answer would have seemingly satisfied: OpenType is good, Microsoft is good, typography is good. The question of what graphic design and typography is doing wrong, how we can improve, is to my opinion much more interesting than the spoof proof I got saddled up with, a frown-o-matic theory that all was well, that our job had meaning after all.

Further tests of Dr. Larson, so he explained, included somewhat childish word games (Remote Associates Test) to get the test subjects into a good mood so they would score more productively later on. Ergo, nicely designed pages and stuff would presumably make people score more productively. A cold shiver runs down my spine if I have to conclude here that good design and good visual communication is meant solely for the purpose of bringing readers into an enjoyable good mood. Would this mean we would have to present an article on African starvation in polka-dotted text so people would enjoy reading it?

Dr. Larson concluded that people reading well-designed text scored better on cognitive tests afterwards, but I somewhat fail to see the relationship. No mention was made of the text's content, what was in it. Was it cognitively stimulating? Or were people presented with an End User License Agreement? And again, would we like people who read a nice text on starvation to do well on intelligence tests afterwards?

His next experiment included something resembling a frown-o-meter: electrodes attached to the frowning and smiling muscles of a subject's face. People that read well-designed OpenType text frowned less, but again I fail to see the relationship between the two parameters. I wonder what the results would be on cross-indexing shoe-size to OpenType technology? One can correlate anything...

So OpenType makes you frown less. Sounds scary. Would this imply that OpenType in general heightens our life standards, allowing for a happier life with less frowning? Since a satisifiable answer for the existence of typography and graphic design is now found, I wonder if the experiment is going to continue to try and prove these results right or wrong? The first experiment got the wrong results, the second experiment the right ones, so I'm really wondering what the third will be like.

Erik Spiekermann, famous letterdesigner, commented that, due to this revolutionary results, he would now have something to show his clients that what he was doing was right, scientifically, and moneywise. When I personally design something I would rather they just liked what I was doing with their communication, examine the impact on their economy later on, and then readjust.

I'm not questioning Dr. Larson's capabilities but I am rather astounded by the fact that a crowding audience was so easily wooed with the lecture and its logically fallacious results.

But I may be completely wrong of course, I'm not a psychologist nor a typographer.

Tom De Smedt, computer programmer and graphic designer, 2005