Personality traits of Sinhala fonts on road informative sign boards: on readers’ preferences test

Abstract

Sri Lanka is a multi-lingual country and Sinhala, Tamil and English languages are used for communication purposes such as advertising, packaging and wayfinding etc. Among those communication tools, road signs help to keep road safety and efficiency. Road signs communicate important information about road safety, through type and symbols. Therefore message on road signs should be impressed to road user within very short time period. Hence high legible typefaces are used for road signs as well as type personality helps to recognise words easily. Therefore, this research focuses on the font personality of Sinhala typefaces in road informative signboards. Existing Sinhala typeface in road informative signboards is DL-Araliya and it was designed for print-based materials. Throughout the literature review based on type personality based on Latin script, personality traits were loaned from Latin road signboards: fast readable, unique, individual, short, heavy, fashionable, classic and solid. The stimuli were completed with adjective pairs of each personality trait. Also, a name of an unknown city in Sri Lanka included being a mark on a Likert scale. Six sample typefaces with similar anatomical features were selected for Tinker user preference test. The sample group consisted of individuals familiar with Sinhala typefaces on road informative signboards in Sri Lanka. The group was asked to mark their preference on the stimuli and the results were analysed with a mean value of each personality trait. In conclusion, the research proved that each Sinhala font had its own personality. FM-Ganganee was identified as the most appropriate font that has the required personality for road informative signboards.