Category Archives: Legibility

Can seg∙men∙ting words aid reading?

Posted on December 4, 2025 by richardbrath

A new study finds that visual tweaks meant to make English easier to read actually slow readers down. Yet the challenge remains: can typography guide beginners through English’s messy spelling? This post explores why interventions fail, what might still work, and why thoughtful design—and persistence—are essential to innovation. Continue reading →

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Text and Visualization Workshop at ESAD Vallence

Posted on May 30, 2020 by richardbrath

I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at a workshop late last year at the ESAD design school in Valence France: The workshop was titled sous le texte la carte: La visualisation du texte en cartographie. Although … Continue reading →

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Text Visualization and Code Editors

Posted on January 31, 2018 by richardbrath

Long before I started investigating typographic attributes for data visualization, Aaron Marcus and Ron Baecker were doing the same thing for software code. Back in the mid 1980s there weren’t integrated development environments, no integrated debugging tools and so on. … Continue reading →

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Readability

Posted on February 26, 2017 by richardbrath

Readability and what it means for data visualization Type can be legible, but still unreadable. Consider this image: Beautiful Helvetica, mirrored and rotated 180 degrees. Two highly common words from the English language. Letters are perfectly legible and even turn … Continue reading →

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Font Legibility and Data Visualization

Posted on November 30, 2015 by richardbrath

Illegible type doesn’t communicate. It is a first order failure: when type can’t be deciphered the message cannot be delivered. Legibility, Type and Glyphs Traditionally, data visualization encodes with size or color or brightness. Legibility isn’t really a concern with these … Continue reading →

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