What the Font !

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On July 4, 2012, Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, Coordinator of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, announced that their team had discovered the Higgs Boson. Dr. Gianotti shared the results from the Large Hadron Collider with a group of expectant scientists through a presentation describing what many termed as possibly the most important scientific discovery of the century. The only problem was that Dr. Gianotti used the much criticized Comic Sans font on her presentation slides to announce this momentous discovery and this became a subject of considerable criticism and debate among the scientific community. Most people felt that Gianotti ought to have used a more serious and professional font to communicate such an important discovery. 

Silly as it may sound, this incident underscores that fonts matter a lot in the professional world and document creators must always be aware of this fact. In a widely quoted essay – The Secret Life of Fonts – designer Phil Renaud, who was then a university student, analyzed his assignment grades and drew a correlation between his grades and the fonts used by him. Renaud, after observing that he got the best grades whenever he used the Georgia Font in his essays, loosely concluded that fonts, if anything, seemed to have a subconscious impact on the reader. Renaud noted the possible superiority of some fonts over others in the following words: 

"What I’m not opposed to saying, however, is that the style used in an essay certainly seems to influence grading tendencies, even if that is at an unconscious level. I think that it’s possible that a person sees a Serif font and thinks “proper, academic”, and sees a Sans font and thinks 'focus is on the style, not the substance; must lack integrity'. Maybe."

A paper by Princeton professors Yauman, Oppenhiemer and Vaughan also highlights how changing the fonts of educational material can impact learning outcomes ( it interestingly argues that educational material content presented in harder to read fonts is remembered longer by students !)  

In the recent times, the term Font Psychology has gained considerable traction. Canva defines font psychology as the study of how different fonts impact thoughts, feelings, and behaviors .   Read this fantastic article by Canva and another highly engaging article  by Aashish Pahwa to understand font psychology and why fonts are so fundamental to convey marketing messages for companies. Digital synopsis presents a great pictorial guide summarizing the font psychology concept.

So an interesting question emanates from the above discussion – is there something like a best font for serious professional writing? Well if an interesting New York times experiment by film maker & author Errol Morris is anything to go by, the answer is – yes there is! Morris floated an innocuous quiz in this experiment asking random respondents to agree or disagree with a statement of the famous Oxford physicist David Deutsch, about the possibility of asteroids hitting the earth. Unknown to the readers was the fact that every time someone visited the page, the quoted paragraph appeared randomly in one of the six carefully chosen fonts. After scientifically analyzing quiz responses from 45,000 respondents, Morris concluded that most number of respondents strongly agreed with Dr. Deutsch’s statement that asteroids will hit earth whenever it was presented in the Baskerville font. Baskerville was the clear winner, the King of Fonts! Typography nerds can read the history and evolution of this famed font in  this article by Jon Robinson. Having said that,  it is important to realize that fonts are ever evolving and there are many great new font choices that can be used for serious academic and professional writing. 

Now that we know that fonts are quite important, one is tempted to ask – from where can I get interesting new fonts that are not on my computer? Well there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that most fonts, as you might have guessed, need to be purchased. The good news is that there are also resources online from where you can download interesting fonts for your documents and presentations, for free. Notable among these are: 

• Open Font Library: http://openfontlibrary.org/ 
• Google Fonts : https://www.google.com/fonts#

(This Google Fonts site also has some great free icons for almost any situation that you can use in docs,websites and presentations. Click on icons tab on top !) 

• Font Squirrel : http://www.fontsquirrel.com (Some Free) 
• DaFont: http://www.dafont.com (Some Free) 
  

 

Just download any font from these sites, unzip the downloaded file, right click and choose install. The font should become available in all LibreOffice and MS Office applications. So go ahead and get some great fonts and wow your audience and readers with classy documents, brochures and presentations. And if the prospect of higher grades is compellingly alluring and your heart is thus set on trying out Baskerville for that next graded essay (Not Baskerville Old Face), use LibreOffice 7.2 which comes pre-installed with a near identical cousin called Libre Baskerville. MS Word die-hards can download and install Libre Baskerville for free from here. (Don't just get fixated on Baskerville. There are many other very good fonts to explore!)

Dr. Mark Womack from the University of Houston, in his outstanding writing handbook offers some useful advise (Updated May, 2021) on the choice of fonts for academic writing which are pre-installed in MS Word and Apple Macs (alternatives to Baskerville!).Some great advise on practical typography that you can use are also available here. 

And if you are still not convinced about the power of the humble font, you MUST see this !

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