Choosing a font

As a form designer, you will not always be the one choosing the font for your form. Sometimes there is a corporate font standard or a corporate marketing department that will select the font for you. In these cases, the ideas in this section will help you understand the pros and cons of your font.

If you do have some choice in the matter, consider these ideas because they are highly relevant to online and paper-based forms. Share these ideas with a trained graphic designer and they can help you select the right font for the job. As with typography in general, the subject of font selection is a complex one and there are many factors to consider. My goals with this section are modest by necessity but I have found all of these tips to be practical for PDF forms.

If you have to pick a font quickly and you don't have time to read and think about these ideas, use the LiveCycle Designer default font: Adobe Myriad. Adobe must have planned it this way because Myriad meets all of the requirements that I look for in a good font for form design.

Choose a font with good contrast

As I mentioned, sans-serif typefaces generally offer better contrast between the bold and regular variations of their letterforms. This is particularly important in form design because this additional contrast helps provide clarity for your users whether they are viewing your form online or on paper. Both of these modes present challenges that a serif font with good contrast can help solve.

Good contrast helps online

According to research by Kevin Mullet & Darrell Sano in their book, Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques, it is important to provide strong contrast between font weights in a computer interface. They recommend using font weights that differ by two steps in range instead of using adjacent weights:

Typographic contrasts based on weight should generally span more than one "step" on the scale to ensure adequate legibility. The contrast between bold and medium or between black and bold, for example, is generally unclear and should be avoided. Better results are obtained using the bold-light and black-medium, or even black-light contrasts.

If you refer to Figure 4, the following two combinations of Myriad Pro meet the contrast requirement specified by Mullet and Sano:

• Myriad Pro Light – Myriad Pro Semibold
• Myriad Pro Semibold – Myriad Pro Black

Although I think this opinion is useful for form designers to consider, I don't think we necessarily need to follow the letter of the law. First of all, Mullet and Sano were focusing on computer interface design where the contrast between different graphical user interface (GUI) states needs to be very pronounced. Also, I happen to think that some sans-serif fonts like Myriad offer good contrast between each step.

Figure 4. Contrast examples in sans-serif fonts

However, I do think that Mullet and Sano's viewpoint confirms that we need to think seriously about using fonts with good contrast for our online documents. We can make it easier for the people using our forms to understand our intended form hierarchy if we use fonts with good contrast.

One example of a sans-serif font that offers good contrast is Adobe Myriad. This typeface was designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly in the early 1990s. Myriad is a particularly beautiful and useful sans-serif typeface that offers good contrast between the regular and bold versions. I prefer to use the Adobe Myriad Pro family because it offers five different font styles.

As you can see in Figure 4, there is good contrast between the Roman and Bold versions of Myriad. The Myriad Pro face offers a few additional levels of contrast. If you want to follow Mullet and Sano's advice, you can use either a Myriad Pro Light – Myriad Pro Semibold combination or a Myriad Pro Semibold – Myriad Pro Black combination.

The other typeface illustrated in Figure 4 is Adobe Avenir. Notice how Avenir offers one additional level of contrast compared to Myriad Pro. You may like this but I am sticking with my Myriad Pro. I like it better for form design because it offers a better overall contrast range and better contrast between each step. I have found the five weights of Myriad Pro to be suitable for most assignments.

Good contrast helps with paper forms

Using sans-serif fonts with good contrast also helps you create effective paper forms. Consider the life cycle of one of your forms. It may be printed on a low-resolution printer. It may be printed when somebody's ink cartridge is running low. It may even be faxed. In all of these cases, having clean, sans-serif fonts with good contrast will help your form maintain its graphic integrity.

Choose a font with large x-height

As form designers, we are often asked to put a lot of text into small spaces on our forms. To accommodate these requests, we usually decrease the point size of our text. Unfortunately, when we decrease the point size of our text below 8 points, our users have a more difficult time reading the text. This is particularly true of older readers. If you absolutely must use small point sizes and you want to increase the readability of your text, choose a font with a large x-height.

A font's x-height is the height of the lowercase letter x. As you can see in Figure 5, a font's x-height can vary from one typeface to the next. A font with a larger x-height appears larger and more readable at smaller point sizes than a font with a smaller x-height. Please note that both fonts illustrated here have the same point size and take up the same vertical space. It is only the larger x-height that gives Adobe Myriad a larger look and feel.

Figure 5. Fonts with a larger x-height are ideal if you need to use a small type size

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