"The visual image continues its assault on written and spoken words. If it were not bad enough for words that a picture is a worth a thousand of them, well this article shows that the power of words itself is even modulated by how they are pictured."

What!?! assault? -give me a break! Sorry Neil, images will always communicate more quickly than words, but they idea is for the font and the message to work together.

Any person involved in the printing industry could tell you that typeface has ALWAYS been a design consideration (as long as printing presses have been around) and that different fonts have different strengths and weakenesses- Sans Serif is easy to read for short statements and titles, while serifs make the words flow better in paragraph-form on the page.

I've taken design classes where we actually spent considerable time studying different fonts, if you'd believe it.

My favorite, the understated classic: Garamond, though I also enjoy Goudy.

No, Heidi, being kind of a 60/40% words/images kinda of guy myself as far as my own work goes, and those percentages may change, I do appreciate the image. I was playing a bit in the first paragraph with the relative power of each, power which is different mind you, images may communicate more quickly but not perhaps more accurately if left on their own, and hence the caption. Words can at times be more precise and, perhaps, evoke even more emotion, though we may be, as a society, be partially giving up the tools for them to work for us in that way.

“…though we may be, as a society, be partially giving up the tools for them to work for us in that way.”

True, but what do you mean by “partially giving up the tools”? I would say this is true in the sense that words are narrowing and widening in meaning, because of our tendency to pull from our familiar core nest of words instead of taking the time to learn the more “accurate” words. According to my dad, vocabulary expansion used to be a huge focus in higher education. I don’t doubt it! While taking a linguistics course in college, I learned about some fascinating shifts in language over the last 50years-one of which was the significant decline of the average college grad’s vocabulary. I wish I could remember the flashy statistic to set in the most this-is-SO-very-factually-bleak font. But alas.
P.S. I'm quite fond of the the Papyrus font.

Heidi V, to be more precise, I probably should have said that we are not engaging in the training, both formal and infomal, to develop and benefit from and to enjoy a large vocabulary.

I am torn about using big words. On one hand, I don't want to be a snob. On the other hand, sometimes there is a word that may be "big" or "fancy" which gets at the meaning precisely. Of course, as in everything else, my own vocabulary is small compared to others.

I think developing a large vocabulary is a good goal though, because it seems to me that the more words you learn, the more connections are being formed in your head, and it would seem the more wrinkled that grey matter would become. I think this is best done both formally in school and informally through reading. I think even the potential of learning a word incorrectly, because one has incorrectly guessed at its meaning from its context, is not such a bad thing. One has still done some work to triangulate a meaning, if you will.

So even though vocabulary malfunctions have been very embarrassing when they have happened to me, I still learn from them. And when children have them, I think we should be careful to affirm them for the effort even if we may not be able to contain the laughter at times. Even a spectacular mistake is a sign of those little minds working.

Cool post! I love fonts! I love trying different fonts. I think a few "font masters" are Olivia Pettit and Carrie Jones- at least those that appeal to me.
I like the simplicity of Century Gothic. Curlz MT is fun. Maiandra GD and Goudy Old Style have a nice old look. I liked Papyrus but now I feel it is over used.

Need more fonts? http://www.fonts.com/

I like Papyrus so much that it is the official font of the banners for the Dassler Effect, though I am shooting for a little more banner stability these days. I am going to have to do a post showing all the prior banners which I can find.

I LOVE Times New Roman. Isn't it the best? Ha, really, I know nothing of fonts except TNR and Arial. Glad you all are connoisseirs--had to look up how to spell that word. Tricky business, l'Francais.

Still spelled it wrong darn it. Connoisseurs!

Laura, I was, and I suppose still am, a big Times New Roman font fan, prefering it for its formality and smallness. I suppose, though, that some of the other fonts are easier on the eyes. Still, when I do a paper, that's the font I use in 12 pt. It may be because that is one of the MLA style standards.

Times New Roman is actually designed to be a print font more than a screen font - it's not the easiest font to read on screen. I prefer Tahoma or to a lesser extent Verdana, point size 10, which are essentially the web standards, at least in a professional setting.

Funny thing about Arial, is that it was designed as a rip-off of Helvetica in order to avoid having to pay royalties to Adobe. You can thank Apple and Microsoft for shafting Adobe and their pay-per-font PostScript charges, for jointing developing TrueType back in the Windows 3.1 days.

I personally find Times New Roman to be annoying. Maybe it's because it is the MLA style standard. Whenever I use it, I feel like I'm back in school. I guess I am an Arial/Helvetica user due to it's clarity in communication. I am always trying to make sheet music, overhead projections, and other stuff like that as simple and familiar as possible so that it does not get in the way. I guess I share that point with the Swiss/Scandinavian design ethic. Ikea all the way, baby!

I do dig special fonts in other applications like wedding invitations, book covers, movies, CD art, T-shirts, etc.