I went Googling for science on this subject and promptly found a review of the usability literature: http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html h

I went Googling for science on this subject and promptly found a review of the usability literature: http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html and a second study: http://www.unc.edu/~jkullama/inls181/final/serif.html http://www.unc.edu/~jkullama/inls181/final/serif.html And a poll of user preferences: http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm The apparent conclusion: Serifs hsve a small-to-nonexistent effect on the readability of digital text, one way or the other. However, other qualities like x-height and letter spacing do make a difference. In a Times New Roman vs Arial battle, Arial tends to come out on top. But that may well be because it has a larger x-height. When you poll users on their preferences they love sans-serif fonts. But a big part of the problem is that so few serif fonts come installed in all browsers. Times New Roman seems to be a poor screen font, and Georgia is better but isn't installed everywhere. In short, the fact that we prefer sans serif fonts for the web may be an artifact of our crappy selection of web fonts. It will be very interesting to see if and when serifs stage a comeback in the era of 300dpi displays and, more importantly, a much larger choice of fonts.