Baskerville typeface test8/26/2023 ![]() Now, if you're like me, you already know what the least trustworthy typeface is, right? It's got to be Comic Sans: goofy, unloved, mocked Comic Sans. ![]() Instead, it was meant to find out if setting the passage in one typeface or another would lead people to believe it more. So the test had nothing to do, really, with optimist or pessimism. Each person taking the quiz would read the passage in one of six randomly assigned fonts: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, or Trebuchet. Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?" To find out, he had a colleague, Benjamin Merman, create a program that changed the font of the indented David Deutch passage each time the article was first opened. "Or to be precise," as he points out in his followup post today ( part 1, part 2), "the effect on credulity. Morris was actually testing something completely different: the effect of fonts on truth. Morris then asked the reader to agree or disagree with the truth of that claim, and to indicate the degree of confidence the reader had in his or her conclusion. The result, supposedly, was to determine how many of us are optimists (finding Deutch's statement to be true) versus how many are pessimists (finding the statement to be false). You read a short introduction about the likehood of an asteroid hitting the earth, and then an indented passage from a book by David Deutch, The Beginning of Infinity, in which he claims "we live in an era of unprecedented safety" and will likely be able to defend ourselves against such an impact. Ostensibly, the object of the quiz was to determine if the reader was an optimist or a pessimist. Several weeks ago, Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, posted a simple quiz in his New York Times Opinionator blog. But there is such a thing, says Errol Morris. ![]() So imagine a client demands that text be set in "the most credible typeface." I would probably hide a smile and say there's no such thing. And typefaces? Hmm! Typefaces can be.anything you want them to be, right? There are many reasons to pick any one typefaces, all of them more or less arbitrary. For the truth is that in our field, to quote screenwriter William Goldman, " Nobody knows anything." Black can be ominous or elegant. Like other experienced designers, I appear to navigate this miasma of hearsay with confidence. Or is it black? Or red? Or China? To tell you the truth, I've always appreciated this ambiguity. I've been asked if it's true that white means death in Japan. I've been told in meetings that triangles - to take one example - are the "most energetic" (or the "most aggressive"?) shape. What do they mean? How do they work? Why does one work better than another? What criteria should we use to choose? This ambiguity can be maddening, especially to clients, who in desparation will invoke anecdotes and folk wisdom to help control an otherwise rudderless process. But I also know that the ingredients used by graphic designers - colors, shapes, typefaces - are fundamentally mysterious. Sometimes the fate of nations depend on it, sometimes it's the missing link between a soft drink brand and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, sometimes it just makes you happy. I know in my heart that graphic design is important. While we are on the subject of transparency of methods, and sharing of data and code: has anyone replicated this? Getting the data and scrutinizing it strikes me as a great term paper for a PhD student.John Baskerville, The Book of Common Prayer, 1762. Fast Company covered the experiment last week. That is Errol Morris in the New York Times, in 2013. A typeface that nudges (to use the vernacular of experimental psychology) us to uncritical belief? Did Baskerville, despite his opposition to the irrationalities of religion, create a typeface that has a religious pull? (“Mommy, Mommy, the typeface made me do it.”)įor every thousand respondents to the Times quiz, nearly five more people agreed with Deutsch’s statement when written in Baskerville’s typeface than they did when they read it in Helvetica. An effect - subtle, almost indiscernible, but irrefutably there. Could it swing an election? Induce us to buy a new dinette set? Change some of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs? Indeed, we may be at the mercy of typefaces in ways that we are only dimly beginning to recognize. ![]() Truth is not typeface dependent, but a typeface can subtly influence us to believe that a sentence is true. We have entered a new, unexpected landscape.
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