Legibility describes how easily you can tell individual letters and characters apart. Can you distinguish a lowercase "l" from a capital "I"? Does a "6" clearly look different from an "8" at a glance? This is a characteristic of the typeface itself and its setting, evaluated at the smallest scale: the single character, not the whole sentence or paragraph.
Legibility
Making sure individual letters and characters can always be told apart
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Designers Academy
6 August 2026 · 3 min read
TypographyPrinciples
In brief
Legibility refers to how easily individual letters and characters can be distinguished from one another, which is crucial in design to prevent errors in codes, numbers, and dense data.
