Hello again! And welcome to my humble site. Please make yourself comfortable. Today, I’d like to go a bit in depth about how one can use fonts to send viewers subliminal messages. It’s always used in advertisements. Font choice is very deliberate, usually (unless one is submitting a paper in academia, then it is purely for the ease of reading, and outside of the author’s control).
There are multiple aspects of fonts which make them all unique and ultimately customizable. There are font families (the most common being serif, sans-serif, and cursive), kerning, and effects (like italicization, bolding, strikethroughs, and underlining). All of these different aspects can be used to communicate different abstract ideas.
If I wish to subliminally communicate a sense of anxiety in a viewer using one word, I would use a typeface similar to ‘Chiller’, or in this case, Google font’s ‘Creepster’ or ‘Nosifer’ from Microsoft Office in large, tightly kerned letters. Creepster has messy lines, giving that finger-painted-in-blood horror-movie effect, while large, bold lettering feels intimidating, and tightly kerned letters evoke the idea of confined spaces. A few added effects with ‘Nosifer’ are how sharp the serif is on the tops of the letters, and the drips from the bottom. This could evoke the idea of a knife dripping blood. Kerning the characters close together also causes the word to be either read quickly or makes the word itself more difficult to read, although having very large kerning could also communicate anxiety through anticipation, not unlike a thriller movie.
For a viewer to feel more at ease, I would want to have slightly broader spaced kerning and the font to look clean. Part of the reason why ‘Creepster’ communicates anxiety, is partially because it appears messy. The font does not necessarily need to be quick to read, but it should be easy to understand, avoiding frustration from the reader. A few examples could be ‘Architects Daughter’, ‘Life Savers’, ‘Arial’, or even ‘Times New Roman’ whether it be to familiarity (as with Times New Roman), or otherwise. Since it was mentioned in the last paragraph that large fonts can be intimidating, we would want a comforting font to be of an average size: not too hard to read, but not so large it is commanding.
If I were to create an advertisement for desserts, I would want the viewer to feel subliminally at ease, in the mood to treat themselves. Decadence is the ideal. A font that would take the viewer longer to read, not unlike cursive, with subtly broader kerning than the average. Something that communicates being a part of an elite group could be a font based in cursive, like ‘Monsieur La Doulaise,’(which is specifically 17pt in size, but hard to read), or ‘Tangerine, (this is specifically 23pt in size)’. Another option for this, could be more specifically for Valentine’s Day. This font is ‘Emilys Candy’, where the hearts and overall cheesiness of it reminds me of the day where we buy pink stuffed animals and heart shaped boxes of chocolate in a single capitalistic day of flamboyant displays of love (this is specifically 15pt in size). That’s enough of my tangent on Valentine’s day though. The point is, it would fit the mood for an advertisement for such things.
After having the opportunity to take Writing and the Creative Process with Professor Paquin at Plymouth State University, I could talk about this for much longer, but I am quite certain I have gone on long enough. If you found this enjoyable, or I have provoked any thoughts, feel free to add a comment below!
As always, see you next time!
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