Inaugural Lecture: Professor Sofie Beier

To mark Sofie Beier’s appointment as professor, the Royal Danish Academy invites you to her inaugural lecture, ‘Which typeface, for whom and when?’

A novel places different demands on a typeface than a road sign does. In a book, the type must support the reader through hundreds of pages. On the motorway, a place name must be recognisable from a long distance while the car is moving.

But even in the same situation, we bring different abilities to the task of reading. And those abilities change over the course of our lives. As children, we learn to recognise letters and words. As adults, we read quickly and effortlessly. With age, many of us find that our eyesight gets worse. A brief glance at a screen in a car may give one driver enough time to read, while another needs longer time, especially if the letters are small and the contrast is weak. The typeface that works for us today is not necessarily the one that will support us best in twenty years.

In this lecture, I bring together findings from our research into the features of typefaces that support reading in different situations and throughout life.

The answers rarely lie in the big gestures. They lie in the details.

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The lecture will be held in English, followed by refreshments.

About Sofie Beier

Sofie Beier is a graphic designer and professor at the Royal Danish Academy, where she leads the Centre for Visibility Design. Her work focuses on improving typeface legibility and making text more accessible. Grounded in psychophysics, her research explores how typographic choices affect how well and how quickly we read, and how we perceive text visually. In addition to authoring the Type Tricks series and Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility, she has published numerous academic papers on typeface legibility and readability.