Adventures in Typography

Fonts are pretty neat. I've had a few conversations about fonts over the last few days, which seemed a bit high when compared to my average number of font conversations per week (zero), but the more I learn about them, the more I'm interested by them.

The cool thing about fonts is that they can really significantly affect your perception of a message without you even realizing it. The obvious typographic tricks like bold and italics can add emphasis, but the REALLY sinister typographic tricks can manipulate your interpretation of a message in much subtler ways.

Take FedEx, for example. Their logo is pretty well known, and easily recognizable, but it also contains a subliminal message. The font used in the logo is spaced and stretched exactly enough so that the negative space between the "E" and the "x" forms an arrow. If you haven't looked at the FedEx logo and seen an arrow before, prepare to have your mind blown.



The idea is that the arrow implies forward motion and speed. It's debatable how much of an effect the arrow actually has on their business, but I definitely do get a very business-oriented, efficient vibe from their logo.

Another company that's used typography pretty prominently to reshape public perception is the old British Petroleum, now known as BP. Here's their old logo:



Gah, the big capital letters and shield-ish crest basically scream "old, rich white guy smoking a cigar and burning rainforests". BP figured this out too, and came up with this new logo to replace it:



Aah, much better. The lowercase, sans serif bp says "We're so hip and environmentally friendly, we don't waste time or unnecessary ink on capitalization of letters", and the green thing says "Here at BP, we mine sunflowers, and our main industrial byproducts are sunshine and happiness". Keeping in mind that it's exactly the same company, look at those two logos and tell me the second one doesn't make you feel just a little bit better about BP as a company. Such is the power of typography (and graphic design, I guess).

As a final note, I came across a huge article about a guy who spent several years of his life trying to design a new, superior font called "Clearview" for American highway signs, to replace their old, not-so-great "Highway Gothic" font. It's pretty shocking just how much thought can be put into letter shapes.