Denis Pelli¹, Minjung Kim², Maria Pombo¹; ¹New York University, ²Independent research scientist (Work completed while at Meta Platforms Inc.)

Is comfort beautiful? Can beauty be uncomfortable? We tested 24 fonts to explore the relationship between the beauty and the comfort of reading. Participants viewed a paragraph of nonsensical Latin text and rated how much beauty they felt from the letters. They also rated reading comfort twice: after an ordinary reading task and after Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), one word after another in the same location. After averaging across participants for each font, we find that the two comfort ratings are strongly correlated (R² = 0.88), and that comfort predicts beauty (R² = 0.96). Beauty and comfort together reveal three distinct font clusters that correspond to the traditional font categories: Text, Display, and Script, though neither measure alone can make this distinction. Text fonts (serif and sans serif) are average in beauty but high in comfort; Display fonts are low in beauty and comfort; and Script fonts are high in beauty and average in comfort. However, within Text fonts, beauty and comfort ratings do not distinguish serif from sans serif. We also find striking individual differences. Beauty and comfort are positively correlated for most participants, but strongly negatively correlated for others (6%). To our surprise, a participant’s beauty-comfort correlation is predicted by their preference for minimalist style (p < 0.001) and by the difference in their ratings across font categories (R² = 0.60). In product design, form and function are often assumed to be independent, but our results reveal a near-perfect correlation between font beauty and reading comfort.

Acknowledgements: Supported by: Meta Inc. contract to D. Pelli.