Fonts are fascinating
I’m crazy about fonts. My favorite part of any text editing software is the drop down menu for picking fonts. When I look at any text, I try to identify the font. Roboto is my favorite font.
I wanted to write an article describing how fascinated I am by typography, and how much I care for good typefaces when I do my design work. This fascination is not recent, in fact, I’ve liked experimenting with different fonts and text styles ever since I could operate a computer. I wanted to start with a story, to show you how I got started. It’ll be a trip down memory lane for most of you as well.
I was eight years old and already hooked to computers at that age. I remember sitting in front of the Windows XP boot screen, waiting for the wallpaper with the green hill and blue sky to appear on the monitor. After hearing the sweet login sound and hitting Refresh a couple of times for good measure, I would open the DOS Games’ folder and play Doom.
When I was not IDKFAing and killing Imps, I would be on Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint was my playground. My canvas and my toy set. The best part about PowerPoint was the WordArt feature. All day I would just click the WordArt button and make all sorts of text. Crazy rainbow-colored ones, 3D ones and text that looked like fire, grass, and metal. I perceived them in 3D because WordArt gave me an option to draw text with all sorts of texture and perspective effects.
I wasn’t studying Physics at that time obviously, but there are some simple laws of physics that your brain applies quite intuitively. I still remember thinking while playing around in 3D WordArt, that certain fonts looked “stable”, while with others I felt like they would tumble down in the wind, or rock unsteadily because they had weird bottoms.
I grew up, but my interest in PowerPoint did not diminish easily. I made quiz games in it. I made animations. Still, despite all the new improvements in the sleek Ribbon interface or the new 3D transitions, the font selection dropdown was the feature I interacted with the most. I noticed that I was picking fonts based on the text that I had written. If the text was serious, I had a set of fonts that made it feel serious. If I wanted to be crazy, there were fonts that suggested a more exciting nature. Typefaces started to become more fascinating to me.
Try this. Look at these images, and pick out the font that you feel goes nicely with the message.
You most likely chose the images on the left. Did the creepy ‘Trust me’ on the right make you feel like it has sinister motive?
How is it that the arrangement of shapes imparts an emotion or ‘feel’ to a message?
Well, I am not going to make a deep study into why exactly, but share some concepts that I strongly feel apply to how we see fonts, among other things.
Symmetry
One of them is symmetry. We humans are wired to perceive symmetry. We like things and faces that are symmetrical.
Also, there is a lot of physics we apply as part of our visual perception of nature. We can predict how an object may interact with forces, for example due to wind, gravity and touch, based on its shape, texture, transculency and other visual aspects. We intuitively apply concepts of mass, and gravity pulling on a structure downwards. The structure will most likely tilt in the direction of the side with more mass. With a structure that has bottom symmetry, it will not happen. The structure stands strong.
You can split this vertically in half from the center, and get two very similar pieces.
But with this:
It has a bias. It does not have symmetry.
Sharpness
Look at the edges and corners of this serif font (serifs are the line like strokes at the ends of a letter) They look sharp. The lines are straight, and the tips feel like they can puncture. Imagine making one with real life materials. They look like they’d be made using accurate machining equipment, by an expert chiseler. Any tiny imperfection, like a serif broken off or bent, and it will lose its quality. You cannot replicate the print of such a typeface using handwriting tools. It imparts that kind of serious, perfect, professional feel to the text. The text will feel more genuine, like a lot of work has been put into it.
Look at a handwriting font. The ends are often rounded, soft and safe. The curves look hand drawn by humans. It is alright that the curves look irregular because it has a very organic, personal feel to it. The strokes may also resemble the strokes that a real writing instrument like a pencil, pen or marker makes. If you read something written in handwriting font, it will feel like a letter that someone has written by hand. The text will have a more personal meaning, and bring out the emotional nature of the opinions and thoughts expressed within it.
Resemblance to real world effects
If you write something with wet paint, some of it will drip, and give it a melting effect. If you tear or shred something, it will have rough, inconsistent edges. Big and shiny objects bring excitement. Regular, geometric shapes do not occur frequently in nature, and most of the items that have a strong consistent geometry are produced with refined machinery, a luxury that science and progress has given us. Strong consistent geometry represents the future. It takes a great deal of work and skill to make elaborate, complex structures, and the calligrapher must be committed and experienced in his craft to maintain his consistent, elaborate strokes. Just like art styles, text styles are also influenced by their time period, and their history is as long, diverse and true like the evolution of languages and accents.
Fonts use shapes and fine detail that represent those qualities I listed above. Here, take a look:
Yes, typefaces are classified into many groups based on many factors, and all of this has been scientifically grouped and studied. This article isn’t about the technical anatomy of typefaces. It’s about how we connect to fonts, intuitively.
Designers know the importance of good typefaces. It’s a very useful study, as typefaces can influence people’s emotion, and therefore plays a very important role in Poster Design, Logo Design and branding. Typefaces are a reflection of culture and style, as real and distinct as fashion in clothing.
I like how astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson describes our desire to make things beautiful. In a Hot Ones interview, he says that humans have a desire to bring pleasure to the senses. There’s beautiful art and architecture to see with our eyes. There’s beautiful music for our ears’ pleasure. We enjoy eating refined, tasty, flavorful foods.
As part of visual expression, we do the same to our words.
Typography is an art. It imparts emotion to text. They are a persistent method of retaining personal expression, as they carry emotional information while their ASCII or Unicode sequences encode textual information. There is a reason why there are thousands of fonts out there. If we did not value the emotional side of visual design, all our text would be in Courier.
Also, in a very beautiful way, it’s a science too! Every time you browse through fonts in the drop down menu, your brain performs all these different processes, it applies those intuitive concepts and associations with real life experiences, to influence your selection of fonts!
Fonts are fascinating, aren’t they?
(Hope you enjoyed this short read. I’d love to hear from you. Let’s talk design!)
