Guest: Sofie Beier

Sofie and I have a student-professor history. She was my supervisor for my final master’s thesis at the Royal Danish Academy during the COVID-19 crisis, and even though it was a difficult time globally, she was supportive and very patient with her students. When it came to the issue of Accessibility and Aesthetics, she was the first person that came to mind.

Sofie Beier is a design researcher and professor working at the intersection of visual communication, psychology, and reading research. Her work focuses on legibility and accessibility, how typography, layout, contrast, spacing, and visual structure affect reading performance and comfort across different readers and contexts.

She studies reading in children, older adults, low-vision readers, and in demanding or degraded reading situations, where design decisions matter most. She leads interdisciplinary research projects combining experimental methods, such as reaction time, eye tracking, and comprehension measures, with design research and visual analysis. The goal of her work is to move beyond assumptions and aesthetics toward evidence-based visual design.

Sofie’s willingness and resilience in carving out a research centre at the Royal Danish Academy, bringing forward design research within both the Danish and the international design research field, is something I really admire and value. It felt only natural to share her work and insights within this issue, as it sits between human behaviour and visual communication, as well as intentional and ethical design, and to hear her thoughts on the matter, both subjective and objective.

We’ll start with aesthetics and the perception of it. How would you define what feels pleasing or beautiful in design?

That’s a big question. I think it depends, because I kind of have two hats. I am an academic researcher, and I’m also an educated designer.

If I talk as an academic, then I cannot really answer that question. I don’t know the literature on aesthetics in that way. There’s a huge field of study within aesthetics, and that’s not a part of my research. You could say that I’ve basically decided to move away from the issue of aesthetics.

If you ask me as a graphic designer, or a type designer, then I would describe aesthetics as a feeling of harmony you get from all the pieces falling into place. I think everyone who works in design knows when that happens. So it’s sort of a magic experience when you just say: okay, there it is!

All these different processes I’ve been through… they matter. Sometimes you can only see it when you’ve gone to sleep and come back the next day to your work, and then you can see whether you landed it or not. Sometimes it’s something you can go blind to, if you’ve been working on it for a long time. You need to step away and then come back, and then you see: yes, that’s it, there it is.

Today I’m more academic than graphic designer. I’m talking about what I remember from the days when I was practicing.

How do you see accessibility fitting into, or even challenging, our traditional ideas of what good aesthetics are?

It really depends on what kind of accessibility we are talking about.

If we're talking about cultural accessibility, then aesthetics is a huge part of it, because we are brought up with different kinds of aesthetics, and you can definitely feel excluded by another culture’s aesthetics. I have experienced that myself when I travel, that I can see clearly that it means something beautiful for someone else, but it doesn’t tap into my upbringing, and therefore I can feel a bit excluded, like the design is not speaking to me but to someone else instead.

When we’re talking about accessibility in relation to the topics that I normally work with, like younger and older readers, and low vision readers, in those contexts aesthetics within reading might be less important, because it’s very much about the performance, your ability to see what’s in front of you. And it’s also a lot about function, that the typeface needs to work for you to read it. So it is in those situations, the typeface plays a role mainly in making the message readable. 

In other situations, when you’re talking about using type in a visual identity or in headlines, then you could say aesthetics play a role, not necessarily in relation to these specific reader groups that we are working with, but in relation to conveying a message from the sender. That could be the company, the organisation, the author. We know the typeface style, the way it is designed, has some built-in semantic associations, or that we assign different feelings and moods to it, and in those situations it is definitely also the choice of aesthetics that plays a role.

How do you see the relationship between accessibility and aesthetics in design practice today? You mentioned cultural aesthetics, but also accessibility being more at the forefront, is that right?

I’m very much interested in accessibility as something essential, but it’s also important for me to say that it’s not everything when you work with graphic design and visual communication. Accessibility plays a role in some situations, and in other situations maybe not so much. I think it depends very much on the purpose of the design.

I like to focus on accessibility in the areas of design where function is important. In areas of design where aesthetics matter more… there I might focus less. There might be different issues when it comes to culture, and in my research field I haven’t worked with different cultures, but I’m always very aware that the work that we do comes from the culture I’m part of. It doesn’t necessarily translate to other cultures, but I feel more secure working within my own cultural boundaries, because those are the ones I understand. 

Now I’d like to talk a bit about legibility, readability, and typeface design. What drew you to this field?

Originally I started because my interest was very much practical. I was a freelance graphic designer with my own clients, and as anyone knows, when you do that, sometimes you have spare time. So on those days when I didn't have any work, I started designing typefaces. I wasn’t trained, I just started doing it. And I was like, okay, I definitely need a book about this. I went to the library, I went online, and I couldn’t find the book, and then I was like, okay, someone needs to write that book. 

I realised that if I was to write that book, I needed to know more about it, which made me want to do a PhD. So it very much started out with a lack of available knowledge, and then I was also sort of interested in the combination with the aspect of human behaviour. The functionality of design was a great drive for me to take that step. 

At the time, it wasn’t possible, with my design background, to do a PhD in Denmark, so I had to go somewhere else to do it. I went to London, to the Royal College of Art, and did my PhD there. 

I had a really good time in London. It was like a big break for me in my life to just do that. So I moved there also with the belief that I would stay. But then I met, after three years or so, when I was in the last part of my PhD, I met Steen Ejlers, my later colleague, who was an associate professor at what was then called The School of Architecture, now called the Royal Danish Academy.

I met Steen in, I can't remember which country, but in a different country. That was the first time I met him. I knew of him, of course, because he had been writing about type design history. He invited me to come to The School of Architecture for a week to teach type design. When I went there, the sun was shining and the weather was so amazing, and I was like, wow, why am I in London with these shitty buses and all the pollution and all the commuting. And so I decided to move back. 

How have you seen legibility change over time, since you’ve been working with it for a while?

I’ve been in it for 20 years now, researching legibility, and over those 20 years there’s definitely been a positive development. When I started out, there was very little literature. When I did my PhD, I really struggled to find literature that could help me in my arguments, because traditionally the way of testing legibility has very much been about comparing two different typefaces. And you can find a lot of early experiments that are also poorly done, so there was very little knowledge out there at that point. The majority of what we knew was something that designers sort of learned through experience.

That has changed now. We know much more about what actually works and what doesn’t. Together with others, I’ve been part of introducing this other way of testing legibility, where we isolate the different parts of the letters, so we can say something about that specific element rather than the whole typeface as such. And this knowledge about the letter features can then be transferred to other typefaces as well when we test this way. I think within these 20 years, this has become a more established way of testing legibility.

Do you see it evolving, and if so, how?

I can see that going forward, something new is happening in regards to legibility testing, where we are, you could say, going back to the whole typeface, but in a different way. And because we have variable font formats, meaning that a typeface is not frozen in a specific shape but can vary, that leads to new ways of testing that variation, compared to how we have worked for the last 20 years, testing specific instances.

We need to understand this new design space that a typeface now occupies, that you can have so many axes that you in theory, can have all the world's typefaces within one font file.

So the first question is, how do we test that? How do we ensure that all these different instances are legible? And then the second question is, just because they’re legible for one person, are they also legible for another person?

That’s a whole new area when we talk about legibility, talking more about personalisation of typefaces and back to the accessibility part. Especially for people with low vision, they have very different needs. One low vision person is not at all like another low vision person. They’re way more different. Their needs are way more different than, say, 20-year-old, normal vision people.

Accessibility then becomes less about designing for everyone at once, and more about designing variations that target the individual. When we’re talking about digital platforms, there’s the opportunity to vary the material to the reader, to the specific reader. So you and I are not looking at the same things. It adjusts to our needs. 

It also means that we need to have a different way of thinking about graphic design, about layout, about communication, because it’s not something where you say, it’s frozen or static. It’s a dynamic design that is changing.

How do you control that and still keep the aesthetics that you’re interested in? That’s also an interesting question.

You know, when you have an accessible website, you have these tools where you can choose colours, and switch between dark and light modes, etc. If we take colours as an example, there’s this standard accessibility requirement to have a high contrast between text and background. That’s the simple approach to say, okay, now this is accessible. But in reality, it’s not that simple, because there are many people with low vision for whom high contrast actually hurts their eyes. It can also be painful if there’s too much light from the background, for example if it’s a white page with black text. So there you would need to somehow reduce the visual colour contrast. There are also studies that indicate that people with dyslexia benefit from having certain colours in the background instead of white.

So again, the accessibility guidelines, they are made in the only possible way they can be made. If you are to have a checklist, then you have to do it like that. But the world is not that simple, so going forward in regards to screen accessibility, I very much believe in this adjustment to the individual. The next question would then be, how do we do that.

That is something that we’re also working on here, with AI models and eye tracking, to understand how. Basically, we have people read the screen, we look at the way their eyes are moving, and we can also measure pupil dilation. Typically, if your pupils dilate, then you struggle more. We can measure your position. If you move forward, that could be a sign of you also struggling. If you fall back in your chair, maybe you’re tired. So actually, there are a lot of aspects of human behaviour that we are able to measure from the camera in the computer to better understand individual needs. 

How has your view of aesthetics changed as your research on legibility has evolved?

I don’t know if it has changed. Back to the two hats. If I talk as a researcher, then I think my focus on aesthetics is two things. I’m interested in the aesthetics of the typeface in relation to the semantic associations that typefaces have. That’s one area, and something we have also worked on.

What I’m also interested in is what the aesthetic of a typeface does to the reader’s ability to read, or to the ability to read, when it is really badly designed. And there’s this whole area within design for dyslexia, where there are some really badly designed typefaces. It’s like a space where anyone can say, okay, I’m not a type designer, but I can for sure design a typeface for people with dyslexia just because I live with dyslexia myself. There’s an odd culture around that.

And I think that interests me in regards to aesthetics, that there are these very amateurish typefaces out there that make claims. And what does that do to those who read them? Because if you have dyslexia, you want that to work for you, you really, really do. But how does it affect you when clearly the people who made it don’t understand the systems of letters, and don’t understand how positive and negative spaces should correlate, how typefaces are built on modular elements that need to be repeated between letters for it to have the right rhythm to be readable, all those fundamental, craft-related aspects of being a type designer. When that is taken away, and you therefore get bad aesthetics and bad function, what does that mean?

I don’t have the answer, but it’s something that I’m curious about.

Do you see other typeface designers or agencies working with accessibility, or following the kind of research that you’re doing?

The research we are doing is still very basic, I think. On the technological side, that part is not basic, but the research I’ve done in the past, where we isolate the different variables of the typefaces, is. We can say, for instance, that open counters are better than closed counters, that high stroke contrast impairs reading, and that very light or very bold weights are difficult in small sizes. So we have a set of simple findings, you can say, that in many cases confirm what designers have already known. 

So if you only follow those, then the majority of typefaces out there are actually accessible. It’s not like the world is full of inaccessible typefaces. I think the ironic part of it is that when someone tries, someone who doesn’t really understand accessibility, to make an accessible typeface, there’s a greater risk of it failing than a typeface made by a professional.

In your opinion, how can “accessible” products that focus only on function, and ignore aesthetics, end up excluding the very people they’re meant to support?

This you’re describing here is something that’s going to get way more attention in the near future. I know that here at the Royal Danish Academy, there are a lot of student projects focused on this issue, that the medical industry has simply forgotten to make nicely designed assistive technologies, and the students are very engaged with that.

In that way, I’m very positive about the future, because we’re going to have generations coming out now where that is a main focus, and hopefully the industry will also pick that up and change, because it’s so important.

You mentioned that the younger generation is looking at bringing aesthetics into accessible objects, but there is still a stigma out there. If you look at architecture or other design fields, a client might come and say, we need this to be accessible, and then it becomes something different from the “regular” product for able-bodied people.

There’s a tendency, and this is just my point of view, and something I’ve observed, that when we say something needs to be accessible, the design task is often perceived as boring. Like, do we have to use bad typefaces, or very neutral ones, is it just going to be dull?

So you end up with a lot of designers actually making things more boring because they assume that accessible design has to be that way.

Do you feel that this is changing?

I think that’s a good question. What you’re describing is definitely still happening. So I’m hoping that it will change, but you could also say that it depends on the situation. 

If you’re asked to make something accessible, then you need to figure out what it’s for. It could be visual, but it could also be for people who find it difficult to hold on to something. And in those situations, if you say, okay, we need to make something that is easier to hold, then you can sort of tap into the whole idea of universal design, because then it might also be good for people who do not struggle with that.

But not all design solutions can be approached like that. It’s not like, now we meet the accessibility guidelines, that means it’s better for everyone. Perhaps that’s where the real issue lies, making something that someone actually wants to use.