Why Fonts Matter: a multisensory analysis of typography and its influence from graphic designer and academic Sarah Hyndman

Description

Discover the incredible power of fonts - how they influence your decisions, alter your perceptions, stir your emotions and change how you understand the world. Graphic designer Sarah Hyndman shares her infectious enthusiasm for fonts in this visually inspiring, beautifully designed, immersive and interactive study, including quizzes, tests and case-studies. 'A fascinating insight into how type can influence our feelings, our senses, and even our taste' -- Professor Charles Spence, University of Oxford 'Most books about fonts are written for designers - Sarah brings the power of fonts to everyone' -- Patrick Burgoyne, Editor of Creative Review 'This book is an inspiration' -- ***** Reader review 'Ground-breaking' -- ***** Reader review 'Beautiful and fun! A fantastic read' -- ***** Reader review 'Love this book! Couldn't put it down and read it from cover to cover' -- ***** Reader review 'A really interesting and insightful book' -- ***** Reader review ********************************************************************************************************* We all constantly interact with type in almost every aspect of our lives. But how do fonts affect what we read and influence the choices we make? This book opens up the science and the art behind how fonts influence you . It explains why certain fonts or styles evoke particular experiences and associations. Fonts have different personalities that can create trust, mistrust, give you confidence, make things seem easier to do or make a product taste better . They're hidden in plain sight, they trigger memories, associations and multisensory experiences in your imagination. * Fonts can alter the meanings of words right before your very eyes. * See what personalities fonts have, and what they reveal about YOUR personality. * Explore how you respond to fonts emotionally and can make fonts work for your message. * Be amazed that a font has the power to alter the taste of your food. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in typography and graphic design professionally but also a fascinating insight for anyone interested in giving words impact or anyone wanting to know more about how type can be used to influence us. Review: Fascinating and innovative approach to type - Sarah Hyndman’s book is amazing! I have recently been preparing two sessions of lectures and workshops on hand-made typography based on poetry for school and university students, so I thought it was high time I got hold of a copy of this book. I was more than eager to find out more about Sarah’s extensive research by experiment on how type can set the mood, reveal one’s personality and appeal to our senses. I was especially intrigued by Sarah’s innovative approach of looking at the type ‘sideways’, which is similarly how people respond emotionally to works of art through sensory perceptions without knowing the context. Who would have thought that type can cry, laugh, shout, smell, and can be sad or happy, or even aggressive or calm? I love in particular the section on the edible type, as that is exactly the kind of idea my two workshops will emphasise: the importance of bringing life skills from all areas into the design process. I often hear kids asking, 'why do I need to learn this or that, it's of no use, it's so boring, whatever!' With such an excellent book on hand that shows everything from the punk and grunge to the neat and tidy, they may perhaps believe me when I say that design is important! Review: Makes other font books obsolete - Unassumingly titled, this book is the first scientific survey of how people react to different typefaces. It is based on extensive testing by TypeTaster via its website, and harnesses the power of crowdsourcing and the web to get a real measure of what type says to different people. It makes every previous, opinion-based, book on what fonts mean more or less obsolete. These days, almost everyone knows that Helvetica is neutral, Comic Sans degrades what you write, and Futura looks futuristic. However, if you search the web, or buy a lot of books, all it comes down to for the most part is opinion. There are a few journal articles about the impacts of different typefaces, but these are mainly by psychologists not typographers, and they don't really go beyond the system fonts. U&lc: Influencing Design and Typography will give you a lot of opinions by expert typographers, but they are still opinions, and they very much reflect the year in which the articles were written. Likewise, The Geometry of Type: The Anatomy of 100 Essential Typefaces will tell you a lot about the features of each font, and make some recommendations, but the recommendations are, again, just opinions. I came across Sarah Hyndman's site by accident. I had been looking for a few years for someone to do extensive testing on the web of different typefaces. I was on the point of commissioning a psychologist to set it up. Hyndman has already done it. You can go to her site and take part in the quizzes, and then see what everyone else has said—or you can buy this book, and get all of her research (to date) in one pleasantly digestible volume. (Quite literally—there are font cooking recipes at the end, for what fonts 'taste like'). In some ways this book is just the beginning. About 120 typefaces are discussed in the book, in varying levels of detail. There are clearly thousands more that could be looked at. Hyndman's tests and quizzes are wide-ranging, but there are many more questions which could be answered. With her survey based approach, though, it is now possible to dramatically expand our understanding of what typefaces do to different people in different cultures, far beyond her original questions. I look forward to a Volume II, III and so on as the work progresses. Sarah Hyndman has taken typography an enormous step towards becoming a science.