Week 5.2 Commentary - KCG

I found it interesting how certain emotions lent themselves more easily to having a physical manifestation via typeface. For instance, I really agreed with the fonts Spiekermann choose to be “joy.” All of those fonts seemed very open and reminded me of blue skies which remind me of joy. I loved his comment about how the “Y” also resembled a person with both of their arms outstretched in joy. However, one thought that occurred to me is that I usually associate all uppercase types with anger and emphasis, so why did Spiekermann choose fonts that only have an uppercase type? The three fonts don’t look angry to me in this instance because they lack the characteristics he later associates with anger (dark and heavy typeface), in fact, they are the opposite and are very light and thin-lined and thus overrule the anger usually associated with all-caps.

Despite Spiekermann’s careful analysis and examples of fonts that tie to various human emotions, in my personal life, there isn’t that wide of a variety of fonts being used. Most things that contain content and information have very basic, informational fonts - the only time there are unique fonts is in branding or in more casual settings. In fact, when fonts similar to the examples he chose are used in daily life, they often look tacky to me. For instance, in the example below, the font is very similar to Spiekermann’s “joy” fonts, and while they do convey a sense of airiness and nature, it looks so bad to me. In imagery, in many of the readings we’ve done so far group simplicity with accentuation of certain features, in the land of fonts, I think subtlety is more effective as a design choice.