Of course the quintessential French typefaces nowadays are Garamond, Didot, and to a lesser extent Futura and Avenir. The Romain du Roy failed to catch on due to its overly austere geometric construction.
Could be. At the same time, it's for the latin alphabet which has had a baseline for legibility at least since the Romans started carving it into marble. Even most hand-written textura follows clearer design rules than Civilité.
I drive past businesses that I cannot read the font on their signs and wonder if that cuts out on their traffic. It does for me... I cant read the damn sign... therefore I will never be able to determine if I should go there and spend money.
Anyway good comment and being able to read a font should be right up there in the list of things a font should do. :)
I think the same thing when I see graffiti. People risk being arrested, or even their lives, spray-painting their names in odd places. But if they're so artistic about it that nobody knows what it says, what's the point?
I'm aware of legibility research, although you do have a point. It's just that I could read 95% of this at first sight without any particular training, so I figured its legibility scores would be quite high. But yeah, n = 1 and all that.
