What font are you wearing?

Last week, I reflected on the notion of online ‘presence’, and how we create ourselves in words online. At the end of that week, I tuned in to Saturday Live (with the Reverend Richard Coles of the parish of the Communards) and heard this item about fonts.

Sat 26 Sep 2015
09:00
©BBC RADIO 4

The sensory experiments which graphic designer and font aficionado Sarah Hyndman conducted on the show, where she showed that fonts can be associated with different senses, were fascinating.

Sarah is fascinated by fonts and claims that the font you choose is as important as the clothes you wear. It’s an interesting proposition and one which pertains to some digital and printed communications (I judge users of Comic Sans harshly). However, within the media which we have been communicating in so far, we have little to no choice about the fonts which are used: they’re preset. As to which font I might choose to use, it would be Trebuchet or Segoe UI Semilight: I think those mark me out as dull…

You can find out more about this particular episode and about Sarah’s work more generally here.

 

2 Replies to “What font are you wearing?”

  1. Interesting … I’m conscious I tend to use the default font when I’m in an online environment. How about you?

    Velda

  2. Yes – I default to the default too (presuming that the recipient might not even be able to view my content in HTML) but take more care selecting a font for print.

    It’s interesting to think about how children try to express themselves with different fonts. When I taught it was Year 8 (S3) girls in the main who were very experimental with font use and colour.

    Helen

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