Don’t hate me because I’m Comic Sans

There’s no reason that you should notice the typeface of this newspaper. Type for newspapers - and books, business letters, and so on - is designed to be transparent, displaying the words and paragraphs clearly and without distracting from their meaning. Beatrice Warde, publicity manager for the British Monotype Corp. in the 1920s and 1930s, titled a talk she gave to British typographers “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible.”

What is invisible, however, is not always unfelt. And in these days of personal computing, typefaces are of interest not just to professional printers, but to every poor Microsoft Word user trying to make his résumé “unique.” (A word to the wise: don’t.) If type were really just a dumb pipe for language, why would we have a choice of more than 100,000 different typefaces?

In fact, type does affect how we feel about the words we read. Where our spoken language relies on tone of voice and gesture to convey emotion, written words pick up emotional baggage via type. After all, if we didn’t instinctively understand that type conveys more than just words, we wouldn’t feel that all caps equals SHOUTING, and we’d think nothing of using comic-book biff bang pow! fonts on wedding invitations.

Simon Garfield’s new book about fonts, “Just My Type,” is packed with lively anecdotes and histories of type, typesetting, and typographers, but above all, it returns again and again to type’s somewhat mysterious connotative properties. Helvetica, a typeface so famous it was recently the subject of a documentary film, brings feelings of “impartiality, neutrality, and freshness … manages to convey honesty and invite trust,” and “even in corporate use … maintains a friendly homeliness.” Modern typefaces, such as Bodoni, “say CLASS,” which is why they’re used in fashion magazines. “There are some types that read as if everything written in them is honest, or at least fair,” writes Garfield; Gotham, the typeface used in President Obama’s campaign materials, has, since his election, “inherited loaded associations with victory and honest success.”