A Brief Report on Some Individuals' Responses to Various Typefaces

As featured in ABCTales magazine issue 9:
http://www.etribes.com/document/folder/49388

Abstract:

Pioneering research conducted by Dooley et al (2001) has demonstrated the link between commonly used typefaces and associated emotional responses. The forthcoming paper by Odenspraat seeks to outline the specific effects upon subject users. This report is intended to serve as a primer to the study expected to be published in the September issue of Words & Pictures: the Journal of Typeface Studies (North American edition).

The study is primarily concerned with the effects observed on individuals when exposed to various font types in conjunction with color, size and formatting options (bold, italic, underlined and so forth). The extent to which content and appearance determines or at the very least influences the user’s emotional status is only just being uncovered. However, preliminary studies have identified trends that may be assumed, for the most part, to be broadly uniform across the board. This study uses the Bogenschneider taxonomic identification system to separate high level typefaces into their according genus where typeface is the genus and font type/style is the family.

The Study:

A random non-stratified sample of a cross-section of the populace of Urbana, IL. consisting of 150 members of the public was observed over a 7-day period. Each participant in every group was given a selection of texts to read composed of a pre-selected set of typefaces. Their emotional responses both during and after reading were then observed and recorded.

Conclusions:

There is a significant correlation between typeface and emotional response. We include the main findings below.

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Serif Typefaces:

Serif fonts on the whole tend to project an air of academia which would go some way toward explaining why the vast majority of underachieving high school students find it so difficult to engage with the ‘drier’ subjects. The converse of this is that high achieving students who actively seek out educational challenges benefit greatly from texts printed in this form. The study showed a strong bias for chess club members to identify with the latter. The predominance of the upright stroke in Serif fonts has also been linked to good body posture, although there have been no conclusive correlations announced at the time of writing.

The three officially recognized subcategories of the Serif family are Old Style, Transitional and Modern. There is little difference between Old Style and Transitional; both appear to induce a feeling of lethargy and ennui in a majority of readers, even those operating at a higher level of engagement. Proponents of the Bouma School (see the classic text, Visual Recognition of Isolated Lower-Case Letters, Bouma, H. 1971 predictably not published in Old Style or Transitional Serif type) believe that this can be attributed to the identification of meaning through strings of letters, not individual characters which encourages abstract thought and daydreaming in subjects.

Some Bouma School adherents have advanced the argument that the predominance of Old School and Transitional fonts lies at the heart of a dumbing-down conspiracy by liberal plotters, hoping to subconsciously produce a generation of artists and dreamers although this line of reasoning has been dismissed as “paranoid gibberish” by no less an authority than Dr F.N. Hardibrook of the Nebraska Institute for International Typography Studies. A group of teenagers in the Ryedale area of Topeka, KS. were found obsessively focusing on publications utilizing Old Style type with the intent of generating a feeling akin to taking LSD or magic mushrooms. A moral panic was averted when most of the individuals involved said that they gained more of a buzz from staring at a Magic Eye picture for two hours.

Modern Serif typefaces are predominantly used for web-based texts as they are easier to view on-screen. They have a similar effect to Old and Transitional styles in terms of distraction and reduction in concentration levels but rather than inducing dreamlike thought processes the most commonly observed effect on subject users was a spike in the incidence of migraines. Over the counter medications commonly used to counter such maladies were generally ineffective; subjects found it far more beneficial to ingest prescription strength painkillers or to simply stop reading everything online and pick up an actual book instead.

Sans Serif Typefaces:

Although less than 200 years old the influence of Sans Serif fonts on the world has been nothing short of astonishing. Indeed it has been claimed that had the Pledge of Allegiance been printed and published in Helvetica there would never have been any confusion over the phrase ‘one nation under God’ which many historians now believe to be an advanced form of sex equality legislation, the original drafted line now known to be ‘one nation, ungendered’. Such a misprint is understood to be primarily responsible for the frankly ridiculous amount of overconfident evangelism dominant across the country today.

Sans Serif type is often used in signs and headlines as it tends to have the opposite effect of Serif fonts in that such notices grab the attention. The downside of such type is that the effect is only temporary. Early attempts to publish local government notices purely in Arial and Lucida Grande in order to increase citizen participation let to mini riots as eager readers clamored round telegraph posts to find out what the big news was only to become enraged to discover that they had been tricked into reading about Local Government Ordinance 134a: A Consultation Into The Effects That Storm Drain Overflow Has On Traffic Speeds. This particular incident resulted in five civil servants identified as being responsible for the initiative having their contracts terminated and prompted the mayor of Baxter, a veteran of the Vietnam conflict to describe the scenes of chaos as “worse than the time the Krispy Crème truck crashed into the Playboy tour bus back in ‘97”.

Recently released formerly classified government papers have also revealed that Sans Serif fonts were almost responsible for a conflict between the U.K. and the U.S. when the former unveiled their plans for the British Standards Classification of Typefaces (BS 2961: 1967) including the Grotesque, the Neo-Grotesque, the Geometric and the Humanist fonts. Hostilities were narrowly avoided when the British Prime Minister of the time, Harold Wilson, agreed to withdraw from planned use the utterly abhorrent Pearly Queen typeface which was said to reduce grown men and women to weeping fits. Currently all British typefaces entering U.S. territories are subject to a minimum quarantine period of six months whilst smugglers are given an automatic sentence of translating by hand the Declaration of Independence from Wingdings to Sonata although Amnesty International is currently moving forward with a claim that this breaches national and international human rights legislation constituting as it does a cruel and/or unusual punishment.

Sans Serif fonts, Arial in particular are also thought to be responsible for higher levels of sexual activity in subject users. There has never been a satisfactory reason why this is so, most respondents claimed not to see anything inherently ‘erotic’ about its basic, uniform design, but did report high levels of lust and heightened emotional sexual charges after reading text in this type. Arial type has since been prohibited in the commercial production of mainstream sacred texts (Bible, Torah, Qur’an) in all states apart from Utah where a copy of an Arial Narrow printed Old Testament can change hands for up to 5000 USD. The retail price of an Arial printed Book of Mormon remains unaffected.

Script Typefaces:

Script typefaces are generally avoided in commercial print as they induce feelings of repressed rage and anger. They are most commonly found on florid invitations to high society gatherings or within greetings cards from the low budget end of the Hallmark range. As such they as despised by a majority of readers; a bill is currently in session to debate the possible outlawing of materials that use this typeface, or at the very least, to have them displayed on higher shelves where no-one, not even a shop lackey with a step-ladder, can reach them.

Blackletter Typefaces:

Traditionally popular amongst Goths and European Christian religious groups, Blackletter typefaces imbue the reader with a sense of determination and a confidence that what they are reading is not only factually accurate, but also morally right and indisputably true. For this reason it is the choice of typeface for right-wing newspapers and seventeen year old poets. It is also highly effective when publishing a very young celebrity’s memoirs (i.e. under thirty years old) as it tends to take up more space than any other typeface thus padding out a 500 page memoir that in real terms barely runs to 75 pages (see also Dooley & McIntyre’s 2005 paper on double spacing).

Blackletter typefaces have also been historically linked to high incidences of finger injuries before the age of word processors; whilst utilizing a Blackletter font on a traditional typewriter the author would have to hammer down hard on each key to get the desired heavy ink effect resulting in him jamming his fingers in between the spaces between keys causing extensive nerve damage.

Germanic Blackletter typeface in particular is also associated with high levels of frustration and xenophobia among non-native speakers as the spiky Gothic text combined with the perceived clumsiness of the German language itself essentially means that subject users often give up reading halfway through the piece concluding that the German people are an awkward bunch who just want to make things difficult for others. Similar responses were reported with the French Textualis test group although it is believed that such an outcome was inevitable regardless of typeface.

Unicode Typefaces:

No-one knows what the fuck Unicode is all about. If anyone has any ideas, please do let us know. All subjects in the study reported high levels of depression when presented with this type.

Monospace Typefaces:

Monospace texts are dominated by the use of Courier. Much like the Gothic Blackletters, Courier typefaces often engender frustration in users although this is predominantly because of Microsoft Word’s unerring ability to select it as the default setting for documents when what you really want is something like Times New Roman and no matter how many times you change the damn thing it keeps reverting back.

The Future:

Since the emotional capacity of various typefaces has been recognized manufacturers and typesetters have been motivated to develop new designs that would attract a new, more profitable market. Predictably, chief amongst their goals has been the attempt to design a typeface that would inspire love. Early commentators believed that such a type already existed in the form of Comic Sans MS although further investigation revealed that test groups found this particular style to be “childish, annoyingly cutesy and not fooling anyone”. In an opposite vein there has also been a rush to design a type that would instill a deep seated sensation of hatred toward the subjects within the text. Such designs are expressly not permitted for use by anyone other than high ranking military units. This is expected to lead to a potential conflict - a literary arms race - between nations across the world as each seeks to develop the most effective ‘hate-type‘. The UN is currently seeking to negotiate a resolution from all members and non-members to refrain from utilizing any developed technologies in a desperate attempt to establish some kind of order although quite frankly the first country to come up with an effective typeface in this vein need only print and distribute millions of copies of a memo with the words The United Nations Fucked Your Mother to render such a resolution utterly redundant. World War III surely beckons.

(The full text of the study will be published next month in the forthcoming edition of Words & Pictures, original report attached below).