One thing is clear to typographers: "Comic Sans is a sans serif typeface - designed to be informal, casual and used for that kind of material - like a comic," Chaparro said. Perhaps, over time we have come to link these visual cues to formal writing. But, "from the typewriter days, there is a history of serif fonts being used for business documents," she said.
Asked why we read these subtle cues the way we do, Chaparro said that's hard to know for sure. San serif fonts, on the other hand, don't have these elegant extenders, and tend to come across as more casual.
COMIC NEUE SANS PROFESSIONAL
Consequently, "more professional documents tend to use serif fonts," Chaparro said.
For instance, serif fonts have tiny extenders on the ends of letters, which lends them a more refined and elegant quality to the average eye. These qualities are cued by multiple subtle traits of the design. This suggests that humans are good at determining when a typeface suits a given context. Later studies showed that when people were asked to rate the suitability of these typefaces for formal documents like résumés, they typically chose typefaces rated as clearly “legible” and more "beautiful,", over those that were more "excitable," and “loud”, Chaparro told Live Science. (She's now a professor of human factors and behavioral neurobiology at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.) "Results showed that people's perceptions of typefaces boil down to three main factors: their 'ruggedness and masculinity', 'perceived beauty' and 'excitement,'" said Barbara Chaparro, who led the research when she was the head of a usability research lab at Wichita State University at the time. In a series of studies (opens in new tab) published in the early 2000s, academics at Wichita State University in Kansas revealed that people perceive typefaces as having distinct personalities, and that they're able to drill these down to precise traits. A single typeface carries multiple nuanced cues - and we're surprisingly good at picking up on them.
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