Emotions in Typographic Design: An empirical examination

Abstract

There are virtually no rules to empirically interpret the meaning inherent in typeface designs—people intuitively decipher typefaces (Van Leeuwen, 2005). Forty-two participants examined six alphabets and responded using an online questionnaire to discover: 1) whether viewing typefaces produces emotional responses, 2) whether people have the same emotion responses to typefaces and 3) whether certain emotions are predominantly associated with the formative design features of typefaces—classification, terminal shape, character width and weight. Psychological research about the role of emotion in visual processing was combined with an interactive animated questionnaire methodology (Desmet, 2002), and the resulting data were analyzed in a matched t-Test design (? =.05, 95%). This human-centered empirical approach proved a promising methodology for design research that successfully eliminated problems evidenced in previous object-centered typography studies. Because people reported similar emotion response to the design features, this study suggests that design's underlying features represent a common visual language.