Any graphic designer worth their salt can tell you the best Typeface for a new law practice in town is going to be drastically different than the typeface used for the local tattoo parlor. You probably know this to some degree already—an email to your boss in Comic Sans is likely to be read differently than if it is sent in Arial. Different typefaces, different feeling: On the left, the note is written in Comic Sans; on the right, it’s Arial. [Image: courtesy of the authors] The same can be said for political candidates and their campaign signs. Much ado was made in the graphic design community about candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 logo. The logo and its font, called Gotham, now has its own Wikipedia page and served as a wake-up call for scholars to begin studying the role typography plays in political communication. Does the typeface you choose matter? During the 2017 campaign season, one of us, Katherine Haenschen, a researcher and assistant professor at Virginia Tech who studies political communication, saw a campaign sign on Highway 460, which runs through a rural part of southwest Virginia. The sign—for candidate Chris Hurst, running for election to the House of Delegates in Virginia’s 12th district—was noticeably different from the candidate’s sign in downtown Blacksburg, a considerably more urban and liberal part of the same district. The rural sign used a serif typeface, the same class of typeface as Times New Roman or Garamond. Those fonts have letters that start and end with small flourishes, or serifs. Coauthor Katherine Haenschen took this photo of the Hurst sign from the road. [Photo: courtesy of the authors] The sign in Blacksburg used a sans serif font that graphic designers generally consider more modern—in part because they were developed relatively recently. Sans serifs (sans means without) do not have those little flourishes. Helvetica is probably the world’s best-known sans serif and even has its own documentary film. Candidate Chris Hurst’s more common campaign signs—which use a sans serif font—are held by supporters. [Photo: Chris Hurst for Virginia] The existence of two typefaces on two different signs for the same candidate raised the question: Does changing the typeface of a candidate’s name actually change something about how that candidate is perceived? Typefaces can communicate politics The two of us—Haenschen and Dan Tamul, also a researcher at Virginia Tech, who studies persuasion—designed a study to find out the answer. We recruited participants from across the United States through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program and didn’t limit participation to any age or political orientation. The participants are likely very similar to your average user and consumer of typefaces. While MTurk samples are not always representative, they have been shown to produce results that are highly similar to nationally representative samples. We showed study participants a name written in one of several typefaces. Some of those typefaces were serif fonts, others were sans serifs, and others still were more stylized display fonts like Blackletter, which looks like a newspaper masthead, and Sunrise. Typefaces, top to bottom: Birds; Century Gothic; Cloister; Gil Sans; Jubilat; Sunrise; TNR Regular. [Image: courtesy of the authors] Participants were then asked to rate how liberal or conservative they thought the typeface was,  » Read More

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