Tech Thursday: More on Fonts
Who knew asking about preferred fonts would be such a hot topic?
This week’s Tech Thursday is coming to you on Friday due to family illness. Thank you for your patience!
So last week’s post on fonts hit a collective nerve! In an extremely unscientific poll of comments across social media, it appears that there are a few favorite serif and sans serif fonts. For serifs, Garamond, Cambria, and Palatino were oft-mentioned. Hardly anyone admitted a love for Times New Roman. And in sans serif, trusty Arial, Helvetiva, and Verdana had many admirers.
It was also brought to my attention that I did not mention kerning - the space between letters - which is so important for how we perceive text. If you want to play with kerning for yourself, here’s a fun little game.
I also didn’t talk about accessibility concerns, mostly because I was approaching the topic from the perspective of how we each like to view our work while drafting - that is, while solo working rather than designing for the eventual audience. Several readers reminded me that sans serif fonts, as a general rule, are more accessible.
Accessibility is about much more than just font style, and while I am far from an expert, I shared resources about accessibility before here and shared instructions for checking LMS pages here. If you want to get a quick check of a webpage, navigate on over to SiteImprove where their free checker will score you on a number of different domains. You can see how last week’s Tech Thursday post fared below.
Finally, one reader shared an interesting site, FontPair, created by a couple of former students, for those who want to dig into what makes different fonts pair well together.
Past Tech Thursdays
Student engagement: Free Chat / Climer cards / Digital exit tickets / Interactive quizzing / Online question management for classes & presentations / Wheel of Names (random name generator) / Providing audio feedback
Accessibility: Accessibility Infographics / Two programs to reduce eyestrain
Zoom: Name Breakout Rooms / Screen share in Zoom / How to Zoom in in Zoom
Research: Managing references / Find free versions of articles / Text Capture Apps
Using images: Extract text from images / Remove distracting backgrounds from photos / Using screenshots
Google: “Publish” from Google Drive / Google Classroom updates / “Make a copy” function in Google Drive / Working in shared Google docs / Collaborating in Google Slides / Turn Google Forms into a formatted document
Canvas: Canvas chat / Custom dashboard labels / Canvas “What-if” grades / Deliver assignment instructions as a Quiz
Productivity: Set times for tasks / Finding OERs / Study Skills Videos / Keeping Notes on Students / Keyboard shortcuts / Text Expanders / Mailbird email program / Voice-to-text options / Custom URLs & QR codes / DropBox Paper for collaboration
Design: Choosing Fonts
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