Reading a shirt at forty metres

Legibility on cotton is not the same problem as legibility on paper. The surface moves, the print sits slightly above the weave, and the reader is usually in motion too.

Eleven settings of one sentence: three weights, two cases, two line breaks, and a few sizes either side of what looked right on screen. Then we walked backwards across a car park and marked the distance where each one gave up.

Serif held longest at sentence case. All-caps read faster up close and failed sooner far away. The break mattered more than the size — a sentence broken in the wrong place stops being a sentence at about twenty metres.