Masters Short Course Championship 2006

 
Jana Vouk & Katarina Košmrlj

 
Gregor Aleš

 
Gregor Aleš

 
Marko Kostelec

 
Katarina Košmrlj

This time I went for something I haven’t done since… can’t even remember. Must have been when I was 16 or thereabout – 200m breaststroke.

I hardly ever tried swimming breaststroke, mostly because I wasn’t very good at it, but every couple of years I made myself swim all three distances – 50, 100 and 200m. Just for fun, to see just how bad I really was.

Today I did it in 2:53.55 or a just below what I anticipated (a 2:55). A quote from Calvin & Hobbes immediately popped into my head – The secret to good self esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they are already met..

On the other hand, 200m free was worse that I thought. I wanted a 2:10 but eventually did it in 2:14. Things just didn’t feel right today.

Still… there’s always next year and the long course.

This  post on FontFeed reffers to the now very famous  list of Web 2.0 company logos exploring which typographies are currently popular in logo design.

Arial & Helvetica in various forms are always the safe bet .

 Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University is researching font usability and they have published several interesting surveys that deal with the new ClearType fonts from Microsoft and comparing them with older ones.

The one called  Perception of Fonts: Perceived Personality Traits and Uses was focused on finding out how people perceive different fonts (formal, attractive, practical, creative etc.) and how they would use them (websites, online texts, business documents, advertising etc.)

I think some of the results are a bit weird and only show that most people have (very) poor taste.

For example:
Monotype Corsiva, Kristen ITC & Comic Sans (come on!!) scored highest on Web Graphics use and Times New Roman, Verdana & Cambria won computer programming category rather that the only true answer – monospaced fonts such as Courier New or Consolas.

Times New Roman is still the universal king of the hill but the new OpenType squad is catching up fast. Especially Cambria but that’s really no surprise since it was specifically designed to be a substitute for TNR and described by its designer as a “robust, all-purpose workhorse text face.”

The second survey deals with  Legibility of Two New ClearType Fonts – Cambria and Constantia in direct comparison with Times New Roman.

Not suprisingly both scored higher marks in the character recognition test:
Cambria – 92.87%
Constantia – 87.80%
Times NR – 87.55%

I’ll also point out one other research:  A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which Size and Type is Best?

Yaaay… I finaly got the scientific proof I wanted – any font set at 10pt or less is a bad idea for body text. Now stop torturing my eyes.
Yes, I know it’s a bit ironic for me to say that since this blog suffers from the same problem. But that’s out of my hands unfortunately.