Every typeface has a personality that influences our interpretation of the words we read by evoking our emotions and setting the scene.
Typography plays a big role in our every day lives. Your font choice for any project can make a huge difference in terms of how it will affect the user or consumer and that's exactly what graphic designer and educator Sarah Hyndman specialises in. Recently giving a talk at TEDxBedford, she shares with us a story of type and invites us to consider our emotional response to the printed word.
"I have always enjoyed words and letterforms from seeing them on sweet packaging as a child, and my Grandad had been a commercial artist who used to talk to me about design when I was little," Hyndman explains.
"My passion was really kick-started when I taught Experimental Typography at LCC, which explored how expressive type and letterforms could be. This is where I learned that there was much more to typography than history and 'rules'."
Typography choices have a big emotional affect on the consumer
In her talk, Hyndman explains that conscious awareness of the emotional life of fonts can be entertaining and ultimately give us more control over the decisions we make. She recently completed the first edition of 'Type Taster: How Fonts Influence You', which is a book that corresponds beautifully to the themes in her talk, combining font research, memory triggers and more.
The book also comes in a range of five limited edition covers including Baskerville, Clarendon, Didot, Gill Sans, Helvetica – you'll find the corresponding personality analysis of your cover choice inside the book.
"I've been chatting to non designers since setting up Type Tasting two years ago, and this has been really helpful because they ask really fundamental questions which are challenging to answer and force me to get away from using industry jargon," she continues.
The Type Taster is a must-have for any typography enthusiast
"It's important to me to make typography fun; after all it's what our voices look like, it's visual storytelling, it doesn't have to be taken too seriously." Released on February 14th, The Type Taster is available to pre-order now. Discover how the emotional life of fonts can be entertaining and ultimately give you more control over the decisions you make.
Sammy Maine was a founding member of the Creative Bloq team way back in the early 2010s, working as a Commissioning Editor. Her interests cover graphic design in music and film, illustration and animation. Since departing, Sammy has written for The Guardian, VICE, The Independent & Metro, and currently co-edits the quarterly music journal Gold Flake Paint.
