I ran into an interesting error today when I was signing up for a Coroflot portfolio. I had recently read the FastCompany post about how typography choice made a huge difference in readability for Al Gore’s new book, and so the thought was fresh in my mind when I got to the bottom of my Coroflot registration page.

There, they had one of those images of letters that I’m supposed to be able to read, while a computer cannot. Unlike many of the images these days, this one was actually fairly readable – it was just some normal letters, really, on top of a grid pattern to fool a computer. But there was one problem.

The font they used was sans serif, and the letters were similar to those shown below:

Naturally, I typed in the letters I saw, assuming they were all lower case, as 6 out of 7 definitely were. And, unfortunately, I received in return an error message that my letters did not match, and I would have to try again – and fill out some portions of the registration form again, as well. If context isn’t enough to give a clue between the difference between a capital I (“i”) and a lowercase l (“L”), then they should use a different font!