So I don't know much about typefaces, and this is probably a silly question, but once you read this: Legibility itself is still poorly defined, even today, and is not well distinguished from readability. It turns out a surprising number of otherwise convincing "legibility studies" have been based on reading speed or reading comprehension, which have no bearing on glyph recognition per se.
Isn't the question of legibility somewhat moot? As long as reading speed and comprehension have little or nothing to do with it, what does 'legibility' even mean? From outside the discussion it seems like when this got proven no one had the guts to say, "Whatever, we were wrong, all fonts were created equally!"
I was going to say yes, but then I realized it depends. At the heart of it, on a base level, symbolic language is just that, - symbolic. Meaning is conveyed via symbols, and the purpose of the written word is to convey this meaning. As long as meaning is conveyed, the written word is doing its job so to speak. There have been plenty of studies where letters were completely removed from words where the meaning of the phrase containing them didn't suffer. But in reality, letters and words convey more than literal meaning. Any designer can tell you that the form of the characters themselves convey a range of emotions and stances. Serious, playful, businesslike, nostalgic, etc. Maybe legibility falls more into the design and emotive camp for letters than the literal conveying of meaning camp?Isn't the question of legibility somewhat moot?
That makes sense. As long as we're viewing this as an aesthetic and not a quantitative difference then I can understand what we're talking about.