Creative Cut: The Power of Type

He defines legibility, which is a function of type design, as the capacity to recognize a character on its own. For instance, the sans serif font Helvetica is very legible; you won’t confuse its lowercase with anything else in that typeface. “However, it’s monotonous; there’s no difference between the thicks and thins. Your eye gets bored. So it doesn’t have good readability,” Highsmith notes.