With the assistance of a computer programmer, Morris was able to show each viewer these statements in one of six randomly generated fonts - Georgia, Comic Sans, Baskerville, Computer Modern, Trebuchet, or Helvetica. ![]() Morris did this in a clever way, writing an initial column ostensibly testing whether readers were optimists or pessimists based on how they responded to statements called out separately from the main text. A recent two-part series by Errol Morris in the New York Times sought to explore fonts and their effect on credulity - their ability to generate “truthiness” themselves. Within a couple of years, I’d gained enough knowledge so that when I needed a job in a pinch, I was able to parley a full-time job setting type for academic textbooks.Ĭracking the code on type has helped me see a different part of the psychology of communication, and one that’s often overlooked - the aesthetic aspect and its almost undetectable power. Being an autodidact, I immersed myself in fonts for many months, buying books, reading magazines, using tools, visiting designers, and so forth. I’d dabbled a bit in it, as my college newspaper migrated from phototypesetting to computer typesetting, but it was only in these early career days with an available mentor that I learned about serifs, kerning, counters, leading, ascenders, and descenders, as well as the palpable but subtle differences between superficially similar typefaces (Univers vs. ![]() ![]() I was lucky about 25 years ago - I got a job working with someone who was fascinated with typography and who knew it well. Lower case ‘a’ from Adobe Caslon Pro, superposed onto some guides.
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