ONE recent study from the Northeastern professor Katherine Haenschen, which investigates the intersection of digital media and politics, explores the role of typefaces in political branding.
Haenschen found that fonts are chosen to convey information about candidates and differentiate them from their opponents, thus making fonts a form of political communication.
The researchers interviewed graphic designers to analyze the logos of more than 900 candidates from the 2018 US midterm elections, where Democrats swept 41 seats in the House of Representatives to win the majority and Republicans retained control of the Senate.
Visuals are often overlooked and under-studied in the field of political communication, but have increased as online content shifts from text-based blogs to more image-oriented platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, according to the study.
The analysis adds to the growing area of research by offering an empirical look at font choice in political candidate logos and wordmarks — which is a type of text-only graphics.
Your research found that fonts themselves were not inherently political, but they did convey information about the candidate. What kind of information?
We found that many things predict what font people will use. One is party: Republicans are more likely to use serif from Sans serif fonts in relation to the Democrats. And they were more likely to use script or handwriting.
Incumbents were more likely to use serif, so that tells us that there's a modern design that shows up in logos that someone who was elected to Congress in 2008 or 2010 has a logo that's probably from that era that looks a little different from the design now leaning more towards sans serif fonts.
Male candidates were less likely to use script or handwriting than female candidates, and more likely to use slab serif, so we see differences by party, years in office, tenure, and candidate gender.
[Note: Throughout this interview, Haenschen refers to serif, sans-serif, and slab-serif fonts. Common parlance in typography, serifs are the small lines attached to larger portions of a letter, such as the small downward strokes at the top, and the horizontal line on the bottom of a capital “T” in the font on this page. Sans-serif fonts, such as Arial, do not include the extra lines. And in slab-serif fonts, the serifs, or additional lines, are generally thicker and more pronounced.]
It seems like a lot of thought goes into choosing fonts.
We spoke to eight graphic designers and they talked a lot about their process, how they tried to find a font that conveyed the candidate, their qualities and their characteristics.
So if a person is stable and reliable, you want a font that conveys stability and reliability. It wasn't so much that the font was necessarily liberal or conservative, but a font that looked very traditional might work better for a more conservative candidate. But they pointed out that the challenge is that you have to use the candidate's name, so you have to find a font that works with that name.
The designers talked about using all uppercase or all lowercase. Or, just last name, or first name, or different combinations of letters.
It's made for signs and buttons and stickers and mailings and websites, so it has to work in different formats and it has to be really readable. You have to see it when you drive by a sign on the highway. And it has to work on a postcard and it has to work on a website, so there's a big limitation in terms of how the logo itself works.
What made you interested in delving into fonts?
It's fine to say “Oh, this Republican has this font and this Democrat has this font.” But if it doesn't change how people feel about the candidates or how they feel about them at the ballot box, then maybe it won't have a broader impact.
This is what we are looking at now. Trying to understand when the design has an impact and if you give people other information, does that kind of swamp the effect of the graphic design?
Congressional midterms are next year. What do you think goes on behind the scenes of some of the designers you interviewed?
On the one hand we talked Ben Ostwer, who runs a large creative agency. He made the Kamala Harris logo. But then we talked to people who work with local candidates, people running for school board, running for judge and so on.
For people who are going to run these well-funded, competitive congressional campaigns, I think there's a growing awareness that you need to create some kind of visual branding to make that part of your social media rollout. When you make that two-minute YouTube video, you also need to have your logo, branding, website, Facebook page. Everything should look good when you start.
The 2022 midterms are going to be really interesting. Those wild swings back and forth we've seen in recent interims may not be true. It's a big open question whether midterms are as bad traditionally for the incumbent's party as we've seen in the past. With everything else going on with COVID-19 and the economic recovery, it's a big question mark.
Is there a correlation between making a logo look professional and increasing your chances of winning?
There is probably some kind of relationship, yes. Having good graphic design means you spent money on it, which means you had money to spend early on because all that design work is done before they launch their campaign and website and send out their fundraising appeals. You want the logo on everything so get the logo done before you start.
That means you had enough money to start your campaign to engage some kind of professional services, and I think we're seeing both a rise in professionalism in terms of the increasing number of consultants in politics, and that kind of goes hand-in-hand with concentration. more money.
So I would say that if you were to see a head-to-head comparison of a highly unprofessional logo and a professionally designed logo, I would think that the candidate with the more professional logo probably has more funding, probably has more campaign infrastructure, and is probably better suited to win .
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