March 21, 2002
Avoid italics
On the CHI-WEB list the other day, someone asked for arguments against using italics on web applications. A colleague was claiming that italics have been proved more legible than normal text.
I weighed in with the following:
Because text in italics is not easy to read on screen, it is better to avoid having long sections of italicized text. Therefore, as quotations can be quite long, don’t put them in italics.
The Web Content Style Guide, Gerry McGovern, Rob Norton and Catherine O’Dowd, Financial Times / Prentice Hall 2002, p.185
This is a rather large generalisation, but, with a few caveats, I agree. At typical body text sizes on the internet, i.e. 10px-12px size text (serif and sans-serif), this is true. At those sizes text is aliased, and there is not sufficient resolution to properly render the slight italic angle, making for characters that are more visually noisy than their non-italic equivalents.
The larger the font size, the less truth in this statement.
I’m not familiar with the assertion your friend refers to. If someone has claimed that italics are more readable than normal text, this almost certainly referred to print, not screen typography. But I find it extremely dubious as a blanket rule.
Other CHI-WEBbers confirmed this unequivocally, citing a wealth of sources.
The irony? This site uses italics for block quotations. It’ll probably stay that way for a while until I get round to updating my stylesheets again, but I’ll be removing the italics.
It’s a pity. In print, italics can be a beautiful part of expressive typographic language. In my head I was designing for print, and old dogma made me blind to what was in front of me on the screen.
When ultra-high resolution displays arrive, I’ll be happy to welcome italics back in from the cold.
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