Paradigm, 2/2 (October, 2000)

The Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading isworking on a two year AHRB funded Project which is looking at typography in children’s reading books. The aim of the first part of the project is to describe typographic features in children’s readers from 1830 to 1950, including: typeface(s); word and line spacing; line length; ways of showing emphasis; and use of punctuation. Using a specially designed framework, the typography in books produced by a range of publishers will be described. We are using collections in the British Library, Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, the Parker Collection in Birmingham Reference Library, and the Jill Gray Collection, Hitchin.

The second part is a series of empirical studies to and evaluate the significance of certain typographic variables on the reading of a piece of text. A series of specimen pages showing serif and sans serif typefaces; different forms of a’s and g’s; and space between letters and words have been designed and will form the basis of the following tests:

To look at typeface and alternative letter shapes. Children, with a reading age of 6 years, will read texts set indifferent typefaces and incorporating alternative characters. Their reading will be taped and analysed for errors and the children will be asked to comment on whether they found one passage easier to read than another. The results of both the objective and subjective tests will be compared to see whether particular typefaces or alternative characters help or hinder reading, or are preferred by children.

To consider horizontal spacing. Pages will be designed using different horizontal spacing: ‘normal’ letter and word spacing used for adult setting; additional space between words and letters; and double word spaces at sentence ends. The texts will be used to see whether additional spacing helps or hinders reading, and whether it is noticed or preferred by children.

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