New Baskerville. Probably the best serif typeface ever designed. Not showy but full of confidence, Baskerville is known as a transitional serif typeface and was originally designed in 1757 by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham. A transitional typeface is positioned between the old-style typefaces of William Caslon, and the modern styles of Bodoni and Didot. The fonts they tested included: Helvetica; Trebuchet; Georgia; Computer Modern; Comic Sans; Baskerville; Baskerville Won Hands Down. They found that, quite surprisingly, the use of font did play a role in whether readers believed the statements. And by far, people were more likely to believe statements written in Baskerville.
In an ideal world, your email recipients would be moved more by the substance of your message than its aesthetic value.
But according to a recent article in Bloomberg, designers think certain fonts make a better impression in professional communications.
Here are two fonts they recommend using:
- Georgia: Each letter written in this font has an additional stroke at the end. So it's generally easier to read the individual characters.
- Verdana: The shape of the letters in this font is more open than in fonts like Arial. There's additional space between letters, and the spacing is more even.
Here are two fonts they suggest not using:
- Helvetica: The letters are too close together, a type designer told Bloomberg. That makes it hard to read.
- Arial: Font designers say it has 'ambiguous' letter shapes (as in, the letters 'b' and 'd' are the same shape in reverse) that make it hard to read multiple words in a row.
![Use Use](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125587198/630335423.jpg)
Arial and Helvetica are default fonts in many popular email clients, including Gmail and Apple Mail, but most font designers change the settings.
Meanwhile, one designer that spoke to Bloomberg advocates that organizations change their default font settings in order to make it easier for employees to read email.