Comment by harshreality
8 hours ago
Past studies suggested slight differences:
- serif was claimed to lead to better horizontal tracking... so better for long prose readability
- sans serif was claimed to lead to better spot-recognition of characters... so better for spot-character/word recognition and legibility
Those effects were never very strong, and varied depending on the exact fonts in use (and for digital, font rendering characteristics).
There's also probably an effect based on what you're used to. If most of the books you read are serif (which they would be for older people, since almost all printed books were serif), and your exposure to sans serif was largely via the internet, and you don't like most of what's written on the internet, that might sway you toward serif. Conversely, if you mostly read modern internet text, you might have the opposite bias.
I can confirm the later effect; prior to the internet, my primary exposure to sans serif fonts were government documents and forms, and advertisements, neither of which inculcated an association with any virtues.
Perhaps you should compare government documents and forms from different governments. UK government forms are extraordinarily beautiful, and welcoming, and are easy to fill out. US government forms, on the other hand, seem almost calculated to be unfriendly, and are incredibly difficult to fill out even when you use supporting instructions. It almost seems like they have been deliberately designed so that they cannot be filled out without the assistance of a lawyer. Canadian forms seem pretty neutral, and practical, but are nowhere near as pleasant to fill out as UK forms are.