Examining Garamond

There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.

- Eric Gill

I once worked on a manual for a new product called Journalist. The Vice President of the company (it was a small start-up) told me he wanted me to use the typefaces Garamond and Gill Sans in the document. Okay, I thought, whatever you want. I had never worked with these fonts before, so who was I to argue?

Turns out, Garamond is a very nice, legible serif font. Why do I say it’s legible? Well, let’s look at a test of legibility as described by Kathleen Burke Yoshida in her article “Avoiding Typeface Terrors.” As Burke Yoshida puts it, if you can cover the top half or the bottom half of the letters and still read the word, then the font is legible. So let’s take a look at Garamond from that perspective.

I’d say that, with either the bottom or the top half of the letters covered, you can still pretty accurately read the word. In that sense, then, Garamond is a legible font. But what else can we say about Garamond?

Well, because it’s a serif font, it tends to be more readable in a printed body of text. Why? The serifs help guide your eye along the text. Also, the x-height in Garamond (the height of the letter body, not including ascenders or descenders) is large; the ascender of the letter d is shorter than the body height or x-height. That helps enhance the readability of the typeface as well. And because the strokes of the letters are relatively light, Garamond gives the impression of lighter (as opposed to darker, thicker) text on a page.

So why did the Vice President of the company tell me to use Garamond for the body text of his product’s documentation? Obviously, there was something about the personality of the Garamond typeface that matched the image he wanted to convey. (Yes, typefaces do have personalities.) He selected a serif typeface to increase readability, but why not Times New Roman or one of the other, more common serif typefaces? If you look at Garamond, it has a formal feel. The serifs add a sense of formality, but so does the variable stroke weight (how the letter’s thickness varies). Because the stroke weight is light overall (meaning that there is more white space within each letter), the printed page has a brighter appearance. You could say that Garamond is formal without being pretentious, it’s reserved but airy.