The emotive weight of fonts is something that’s been on my mind for years. In my previous life as a publishing intern, I worked on a book about Bodoni which opened my mind to deep historicity of font design, and that insight continued through everything from page design for my college magazine to designing my wedding invitations. One fascination I’ve always had with “handwriting” fonts. I experimented making a few when I was younger; I wasn’t using the depth of context and historical bases that Spiekermann describes. I was simply trying to transfer a sense of personality and authenticity to my computer projects, pre-touch screen. On the far side of the spectrum, I now work with a very strictly limited set of fonts for each of my various projects: one for the literary magazine I intern at, one for MIT and another set specifically for MIT SHASS communications. Identity through fonts becomes inflexible at a certain point. I think we are seeing this repeatedly in our ad projects: certain fonts work with certain brand identities and associations, simply through repetition. The non-serif Netflix font I’ve been working with is immediately familiar to me in combination with a dark gray background. Familiarity gives these brand-specific fonts a kind of authority, like the 1937 Empire font created for Vogue is subtly but clearly associated with the magazine type. It’s an immersive, affective tool for influencing a reader’s experience—as long as the font retains its basic functionality re: readability. The JOY example, for instance, was less than evocative for me simply because the letters weren’t as self-evident as they could have been at first glance.