Legibility typefaces

Sure it's the same old game: look, I made the x-height really high and so was able to give it big counters, so it's as legible at 8.5 point as Times is at 10. The only trouble is that because of those big lowercase letters it now takes up just as much horizontal space at 8.5 point as Times 10 point does.

Looking at Gerard Unger's 1993 legibility typeface Gulliver, which at 8.5 point “looks just as large as a type like Times (1932) in 10-point,” I am struck once again by the futility of making typefaces “more legible” by making the x-height proportionally larger.

Because sure, it is easier to identify letters if you make the x-height and counters larger. And sure, you can set it with tighter leading, and it won't crash, but with that big x-height, you want more leading...about the same proportion of vertical white space to x-height as Times... And you can even, as Unger did, reduce the size of serifs so tightly spaced letters don’t crash…but following that logic, you could set text set in sans serif with hairlines between the characters. And that won't work, because the correct space between letters is at least partly related to the size of the counter space.

Gulliver, like Ionic or Utopia, looks like a reasonably good typeface, though it might be nicer if the ascenders and descenders were a bit longer, and the only way to do that is reduce the x-height, thereby making the counters smaller.....

Oh well.

Here is a face that’s REALLY serious about big counters and legibility, Minuscule Deux, designed for setting at 2 point, by Thomas Huot-Marchand.