‘Why your email font is ruining your life’ – ‘Mashable’
Mashable team says, “Well, maybe not your life. But certainly your reputation with people of good taste.
Helvetica, the hip font of choice for brands and typeface nerds, is the default font setting for Apple Mail. Gmail defaults to Arial, a font one designer called Helvetica’s “ugly bastard son.” If the browser doesn’t support Arial, Gmail will use Helvetica instead.
While Helvetica is beloved by design nerds for its neutrality, its uniformity and lack of consistent spacing make it hard to read in large chunks of text. “The letters are too close together,” said Nadine Chahine, a type designer at Monotype. “That makes it too tight.”
Arial, like Helvetica, has what font designers call “ambiguous” letter shapes that make it difficult to parse lots of words in a row. “If you imagine b, d, p, and q, those are letter forms that all the children always mess up. They are mirror forms of one another,” font designer Bruno Maag said”.
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