Can fonts affect our feelings?
Key Takeaways
- Fonts influence emotions by shaping how readers perceive tone, trust, and brand personality.
- Research shows rounded typefaces evoke warmth, while sharp forms can signal authority or precision.
- Choosing the right typography helps you guide audience feelings and strengthen communication impact.
Brands rely on type to convey trust, sincerity, and reliability. Designers and brand experts have known for years that type affects how people feel, even if they can’t explain exactly why.
Consumers can instinctively sense when a typeface isn’t hitting the mark, and it has a subconscious emotional impact that’s hard to quantify. Would you follow directions from a motorway sign set in Comic Sans? Or take out home insurance from a company using Papyrus? And if so, why not?
At Monotype, we wanted to understand how fonts drive experiences, associations and feelings, and assess the effectiveness of different typefaces in different situations.
In partnership with applied neuroscience company Neurons, we began conducting research to find out if and how different typefaces really do affect our emotional state. We wanted to understand how fonts drive experiences, associations, and feelings, and assess the effectiveness of different typefaces in different situations.
Neurons leveraged decades of experience in data collection and consumer neuroscience to measure people’s subconscious and conscious reaction to type.