Yet, graphic designers have often treated typefaces as artistic expressions, and past research has shown that typefaces have personalities that can influence not only how we think about them but also how we perceive what is written.įor instance, another study found people will rate scientific abstracts as more interesting, appealing and of higher quality when written in a serif typeface compared to a sans serif typeface. You might be tempted to throw your hands up in the air and think that this is just one more example of how benign expressions are becoming politicized. Democrats generally rated typefaces as more liberal than Republicans did, with the exception of the three display fonts (Blackletter, Birds of Paradise and Sunrise). The perceptions of the typefaces were not uniform for all participants, however. The serif typefaces, Times New Roman and Jubilat, were rated as more conservative than the sans serif typefaces, Gill Sans and Century Gothic. Participants were then asked to rate how liberal or conservative they thought the typeface or the person whose name was printed.īlackletter was rated by participants as the most conservative typeface and Sunrise as the most liberal. Typefaces, top to bottom: Birds Century Gothic Cloister Gil Sans Jubilat Sunrise TNR Regular. 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. We showed study participants a name written in one of several typefaces. While MTurk samples are not always representative, they have been shown to produce results that are highly similar to nationally representative samples. The participants are likely very similar to your average user and consumer of typefaces. 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 two of us – Haenschen and Dan Tamul, also a researcher at Virginia Tech, who studies persuasion – designed a study to find out the answer.

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 Helvetica is probably the world’s best-known sans serif and even has its own documentary film. Sans serifs (sans means without) do not have those little flourishes. The sign in Blacksburg used a sans serif font that graphic designers generally consider more modern – in part because they were developed relatively recently. Candidate Chris Hurst’s more common campaign signs – that use a sans serif font – are held by supporters.

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