Do you swear by the simple design features of Helvetica, or do you prefer to expose your friends and colleagues to the whimsy of Comic Sans? Some people have strong opinions about particular typefaces, and researchers are starting to figure out how different fonts relate to feelings.
One of these researchers is Katherine Haenschen, a Virginia Tech researcher who noticed that political candidates were using different typefaces on signs in a rural area than on their signs in the city.
She decided to study whether typefaces can affect political decisions, and together with her colleague Daniel Tamul she just published the results of her study in the journal Communication Studies. They found that people associate certain fonts more with left-leaning politicians and others with conservative ones, and that they tended to prefer the typeface linked to their own ideology. For example, one of the typefaces included in the research study closely resembled the Gotham type that was heavily used in the 2008 Obama campaign.
If people are so receptive to fonts, this could affect who they choose to vote for, and that could explain why Haenschen had seen the same political candidate use different typefaces to try to reach a broader audience.
By the way, even though the words “typeface” and “font” are often used interchangeably, there is a subtle difference between the two. “Times New Roman, 12 point, italic” is a font that uses the Times New Roman typeface. Colloquially the word “font” is often used for both meanings, as in “Palatino is my favorite font”.
That typefaces elicit certain emotional responses is useful to know for people designing campaign posters, but it extends beyond politics.
Last year, a group of researchers in The Netherlands studied how fonts affect feelings when it comes to reading poetry. They discovered that people enjoyed non-complex poetry better if it was displayed in a simple and readable font. The researchers also initially thought that perhaps a difficult-to-read font might make people appreciate complex poetry more, because they would be forced to slow down when reading it, but that did not seem to be the case. It seems that people just generally preferred readable fonts, even for poems that you need to think about a bit more.
Knowing how people respond to different fonts can help designers choose the right typeface for their messages, so research such as the studies mentioned above are useful for anyone working in marketing, design, or publishing.
And, who knows, it could even help someone win an election.
