A decade ago, talk of fonts was all the rage in North Carolina appellate circles. Jurists were increasingly reading briefs on screens, not on paper. And what works on paper might not work so well on an iPad. (Here’s looking at you, footnotes.)
The central antagonist at the time was the Courier family of fonts—non-proportionally spaced and notoriously difficult to read. The vice villain was , which was not designed to be readable.
Thanks in large part to the persistence of then-Judge (now Justice) Dietz and typophile Drew Erteschik, the Supreme Court of North Carolina changed the appellate rules governing fonts, banning non-proportional fonts and requiring serifs.
You know, serifs—those little flourishes that dandify an otherwise plain-looking letter. As the proponents of change explained, “Serifs matter because they help our eyes separate lines of text, similar to how you might use a ruler to underline a row of text.” And reader retention is better with serifs, research shows.
The appellate bench and bar embraced Century fonts (among other proportional serif fonts) and moved on.
A new comment in the North Carolina Law Review asks us all to reconsider the ban on sans-serif fonts. Law student Andrew Parco argues that sans-serif fonts are more readable on screens, not less. And those fussy serifs are distracting for those with dyslexia and other disabilities, he explains. Why not open things back up to allow stately fonts like Cooper Hewitt, the typeface in which the comment is printed?
Mr. Parco has an audience in mind—the Appellate Rules Committee and the Supreme Court of North Carolina, both of which he thanks in advance for considering his proposal.
So: who’s up for another round of debate about fonts? I sure am. Have at it in the comments here.
–Matt Leerberg