Sunday, December 03, 2023

2023/173: Font Psychology: Why Fonts Matter and How They Influence Consumer Behavior — Richard G Lewis

This stylish and elegant typeface is very much suitable for official purposes. [loc. 457]

This book would have been better as a blog post. It's a short overview of font usage on marketing and publicity material, with a focus on web design, and though I'd have found it a useful reference twenty or thirty years ago, it's not saying anything new or interesting.

It would also have benefitted from an editor, or at least a proofreader. 'San serif', 'sans-serif' and 'sans serif' are used interchangeably; Montserrat is spelt three different ways; not all the fonts are illustrated with examples; the author first recommends Arial (yawn) for business purposes but then includes it in a list of fonts (including Comic Sans and Papyrus) that have been 'overused'. The footnotes aren't linked in the main text, and the descriptions of fonts are so repetitive as to be meaningless ('very much suitable for official purposes'... 'one of the most favourite typefaces of all time' ...) Might be a good starting point for a student project but not much use to an industry professional.

Fulfils the ‘Art / Design’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

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