Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Font of Unwisdom

If I told you that someone had written an academic paper about whether or not people perceive typefaces as "conservative" or "liberal," and I explained to you I used those terms ideologically, rather than to describe a style, you would probably say something along the lines of "you're kidding."

I wish you were right.
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4 comments:

  1. Brian J.January 30, 2020 at 10:01 AM

    As a technical writer, I sat through a meeting that lasted hours arguing Garamond versus Times New Roman. So I know it.

    I only scanned it, but I would assume we would find serif to be conservative and sans serif to be good.

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  2. FriarJanuary 30, 2020 at 10:31 AM

    That was the perception, it seems. According to a CNN piece on the study, people also viewed fonts they liked as conservative if they were conservative or saw them as liberal if they were liberal.

    And when they saw a font that resembled the one Bernie Sanders used in 2016, they held it as more liberal than one that looked like one Barack Obama used in 2008. The CNN piece is here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/28/us/fonts-perceived-liberal-conservative-trnd/index.html

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  3. fillyjonkJanuary 31, 2020 at 8:06 AM

    1. Cripes, politics has to get into EVERYTHING. If you had asked me, before I saw that article, "Do fonts seem political?" my reaction would have been "What?"

    2. so THIS is why that thing was going around Twitter about "what is your favorite font," they were looking for people to point out as (according to them) wrong-thinkers based on font choice. (It's stuff like that that makes me want to look at modern civilization, go "I'm out," and go off and live in a cabin in the woods and never talk to another person again.)

    I'd say "you might as well claim fonts have gender," but I suspect THAT'S already been done.

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  4. FriarFebruary 1, 2020 at 6:54 PM

    I had no idea about the Twitter thing -- maybe they are connected as you say.

    I found myself almost wishing that people disliked a font because it was conservative or liberal in style and they just found the word describing the opposing view to their own unpleasant in any context. But no, the people in the surveys seem to have actually meant them as liberal or conservative ideologically.

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