A science of information design?

Research on information design needs careful handling. There’s an appetite for scientific proof that designers know what they’re doing, but there aren’t published studies to inform every decision a designer has to make.

For one thing, typographic variables interact with each other – for example, the larger the typeface, the fewer words on a line of equal length. So it would be an impossible task to cover every combination. This was observed nearly a century ago by an early reviewer of the field. BR Buckingham² criticized the univariate research model, in which experimenters try to vary a single factor while holding all others constant. He comments: 

This is a good experimental technique. It is an article of faith among investigators. Yet it won’t work in the way it has been applied to typography unless one is prepared to go to very unusual lengths with it.’ (p. 104) 

Happily for information designers, it seems that there is strong agreement between published research and the cumulative practice of printers and designers since the invention of printing. Gordon Legge (a psychologist) and Charles Bigelow (a typographer) compared type sizes in common use, and sizes recommended by research. As they put it:

We present evidence supporting the hypothesis that the distribution of print sizes in historical and contemporary publications falls within the psychophysically defined range of fluent print size, the range over which text can be read at maximum speed.³

No one should embark on scientific research on typography without reading Ole Lund’s PhD thesis on the sorry history of this endeavour.⁴ He quotes this remark by RB Joynson, a psychologist: 

it is altogether too easy to assume that, when the psychologist’s conclusions run counter to common sense, it is the psychologist’s conclusions which are correct and common sense which was wrong; and it is altogether too easy to assume that, when the psychologist’s conclusions agree with common sense, what was previously only guessed has now been reliably established.⁵

When reading scientific research on information design, my tips are:

• Look very carefully at the materials they tested. Sometimes they are truly terrible.
• Does the research have a clear hypothesis, and relate to a conceptual model from which you could generalise the results. Or is it just testing some random things the scientist has intuited are important?
• Did the scientist just measure things that are easy to measure (such as speed of reading), or did they also find out what readers find important and look at that?
• Remember that it is very easy for research results to become detached from the conditions and qualifications alongside which they are originally presented. So read the original paper, not just someone’s account of its conclusions.
• Remember that when a statistician says something is ‘highly significant’ they mean that the result is robust and could not be just random. They are not claiming it is significant in the sense of importance. So you have to decide if the results have practical significance in the context of your task. This is known as ecological validity.

Karel van der Waarde and Myra Thiessen have written a detailed set of nineteen questions to ask as you read research reports.⁶

1. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944) Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press.

2. Buckingham BR (1931) ‘New data on the typography of textbooks’ , Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 30, 93–125. He goes on to point out that to do a full study of even a modest range of typefaces, sizes, line lengths and line spacings would require more effort than anyone is prepared to put in (he outlines a simple study that he claims would have required 1,792,000 responses). 

3. Legge, G. E., & Bigelow, C. A. (2011). Does print size matter for reading? A review of findings from vision science and typography. Journal of Vision, 11(5):8, 1–22, https://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/5/8, doi:10.1167/11.5.8.

4. Lund, Ole. 1999. Knowledge construction in typography: The case of legibility research and the legibility of sans serif typefaces. PhD thesis, University of Reading.

5. Joynson, R.B. 1974. Psychology and common sense. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

6. van der Waarde, K., & Thiessen, M. (forthcoming 2025). Nineteen questions to evaluate typographic research: Chaff and wheat. Visible Language, 59(1).

‍