As the co-editor of Type Matters, along with Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, I argue that font designs are semiotic communication. Typefaces accrue meaning through their historical uses and new typefaces receive meaning from their ancestors. Typefaces exist within family trees, classifications that frequently represent the times and purposes of the “first members” of the tree branches. Sarah Hyndman’s Type Tasting books, seminars, and website reflect a similar conviction that typefaces convey meaning, which can be framed using methods from the field of semiotics.
If we consider font taxonomies, they start with general features: serif, sans-serif, script, and glyph are four possible top-level groupings. Within those, there are finer and finer distinctions, which typographers and historians debate. There are display types (meant for “display ads”) in these groups and text types (for reading).
In print, political ads are a form of display advertising, a phrase that newspapers and magazines used to describe embedded ads, those that coexist with editorial content. In digital media, display ads are the banners and skyscrapers that we cannot seem to avoid online.
The classical Roman-influenced typefaces feature serifs, those fine adornments that originated with chisels carving stone. There was a technical reason for what we now see as “extra” strokes. Some of those lines were used to help stone carvers refine the start and stop of lines and curves.
Both hand lettering and printing technology do not require serifs. In fact, sans serif (“without flourish”) typefaces are easier to read on screens, and at larger sizes. However, research still suggests the uniformity of sans serif type can slow some readers. We read based on letter variations and word shapes.
I offer this background because there’s a human truth: we view old, traditional things as “conservative” and new, experimental things as “progressive.” There’s a good reason the major sans serif typefaces include Avant Garde and Futura. The sans are the new faces, the cutting-edge and daring faces.
We apply our frames of traditional vs. progressive to everything we must interpret. That includes politics.
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Updated 4:00 PM ET, Tue January 28, 2020
Serif fonts, or the ones with the little flourishes at the end of letters, are seen as more conservative, while sans serif fonts, the ones without the flourishes are seen as more liberal, according to a study published in the journal Communication Studies last month.
For example, study participants saw Times New Roman as more conservative than Gill Sans. Blackletter, which looks like it belongs on a newspaper masthead, was seen as the most conservative font, while Sunrise, a cartoonish-looking script, was seen as the most liberal.“If you think about serifs being used in more formal types of print or communications, maybe they’re viewed as more traditional and sans serifs are viewed as more modern,” Katherine Haenschen, an assistant professor of communications at Virginia Tech and the lead author of the study, told CNN. “There’s a small but significant difference in how people perceive these fonts.”
People also tended to view fonts that they liked as more aligned with their own ideology.
The more that Republicans liked a font, the more conservative they thought it was. The more Democrats liked a font, the more liberal they thought it was — a phenomenon known as “affective polarization.”
I have wanted to propose an entire book on the semiotics of type, expanding on existing research and past work in semiotics. We instinctively recognize typefaces alter meaning. Type a single word and change the typeface. Experiment and show the word in six faces to various people. The meaning will change based on the typeface used. Why? Because the meaning of a text is shaped by the typeface used for that text.
Designers have longed known this. We just need more academic explanation of how and why these meanings are absorbed by typefaces.