How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars

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From BackChannel:

Typography is undergoing a public renaissance. Typography usually strives to be invisible, but recently it’s become a mark of sophistication for readers to notice it and have an opinion.

Suddenly, people outside of the design profession seem to care about its many intricacies. Usually, this awareness focuses on execution.

. . . .

 But by focusing on the smaller gaffes, we’re missing the big picture. Typography is much bigger than a “gotcha” moment for the visually challenged. Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.

. . . .

Why We’re Afraid of Blackletter

You’ve seen blackletter typography before. It’s dense, old-fashioned, and elaborate. It almost always feels like an anachronism. It looks like this:

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But usually when you see it in popular culture, it looks more like this:

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You probably know blackletter as the script of choice for bad guys, prison tattoos, and black metal album art—and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Blackletter looks esoteric and illegible now, but it started off as a normal pattern that people across Europe used every day for hundreds of years. It stayed that way until pretty recently. It reigned as the dominant typeface in the English-speaking world for several generations, and remains popular in parts of the Spanish-speaking world today.

Why don’t we use blackletter anymore? The answer is literally “Hitler.” Nazi leadership used Fraktur, an archetypal variety of blackletter, as their official typeface. They positioned it as a symbol of German national identity and denounced papers that printed with anything else.

Link to the rest at BackChannel

PG reminds new visitors that he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he posts on The Passive Voice.

For example, the use of the Fractur typeface by any government office in Nazi Germany was abolished by decree in 1941. The reason given was that the typeface was Jewish.

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30 thoughts on “How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars”

  1. *shrug* I struggled to sight-read German hymn verses in Fraktur when I lived in Germany but never thought it was an especially evil font, just a challenge.

    What do I think when I send a message or select a font? 1) Is it legible? 2)Will it work with the rest of the cover? 3) Is it legible on screen?

    I did have to tell my students that anything turned in using four-count Comic Sans, Black Letter, or in a script font is an automatic F. If I can’t read it, I can’t grade it.

  2. I’m old enough to remember hot metal typesetting, Ludlow hand setting and the like and recently resorted to a very old way of “casting up” type so an interstate colleague and I could work the kinks out of a font when we were both seeing different things.A short story of mine is still around. Called “Get Out the Garamond” – itself an old font – it concerns a typesetter saving a particular font to announce the Second Coming, and what happens when it’s inadvertently used.Wallowing in nostalgia now.

  4. “You probably know blackletter as the script of choice for bad guys, prison tattoos, and black metal album art”

    That’s funny. It makes me think of important documents that mark major life milestones, such as birth certificates, diplomas, marriage certificates…

    I guess I must hang out with the wrong crowd.

    As it happens, the Latin-Blackletter argument was going on long before the Nazis.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute

    Perhaps Hersh should spend more time learning about the actual history of typography and less time looking for things to be offended by.

    “Check my anglophone privilege”, indeed.

    “the Arabic world only has about 100 clunky typefaces to support communication between half a billion people”

    So the fingers of these half a billion people are all broken? They can’t download a free copy of FontForge and create their own fonts, free of evil colonial influences?

    Jeeeez….

    • That’s funny. It makes me think of important documents that mark major life milestones, such as birth certificates, diplomas, marriage certificates…

      That’s what I thought, and I also associate it with the medieval era in general. What better font to represent “Ye Olde” Somewhere-Or-Other?

      So the fingers of these half a billion people are all broken?

      I wondered the same thing, but further down he says that someone actually is working on resolving that problem. Eh, a lot of OP just reinforces the idea that typographers are a strange lot.

      • >I wondered the same thing, but further down he says that someone actually is working on resolving that problem.

        One person, out of half a billion. My conclusion is that people who use Arabic script aren’t particularly bothered by the existing fonts, or someone would’ve made others long before now.

        • I am surprised that Islam does not wallow in type faces. It’s been decades since I sat through Islamic Civ, but I seem to remember that calligraphy was among the highest art forms in classical Islam because all representative art was forbidden by their strict interpretation of “Thou shalt make no graven image…”

          • That’s precisely the thing, I suspect. Calligraphy was and still is among the highest art forms – but calligraphy is something you do for yourself; you emphatically do not get a machine to do it for you.

            (The same was true in Japan, which is why the email technology developed in the 1970s did not take off commercially until the mid-1990s. Kanji lend themselves very poorly to text-based displays, 8-bit character sets, and Western keyboards, so email was a non-starter for the Japanese at that time. Instead they invented the fax machine, which allowed them (in effect) to email calligraphy to one another via the telephone system. Because Western business people could use a fax machine whilst remaining blissfully computer-illiterate, that development was able to prevent the adoption of sensible technologies for over a decade.)

            There is also the difficulty that Arabic calligraphy is (by Western standards) insanely context-dependent. An Arabic font may contain dozens of glyphs representing the same letter, to take into account all the different ligatures and swashes and doodahs that the letter takes on depending on the characters surrounding it. OpenType was pretty much the first technology that could handle that.

  5. Long ago and far away I bought a book, later I opened my purchase to discover an audio disk within. I set the disk down and began to read. First chapter completed I stared at the disk.

    The chapter had foreign words, strange names, and places I couldn’t pronounce. I found a player and pushed play. In my ears was an educated man with a slight English accent whose pronunciation was clear and divine.

    I found a new font, one I could hear and the book became more than a book.

        • And did you know the Open Sans is the official font of UK’s Labour and Liberal Democrat parties? I always thought OS was more of an Apple thing but it’s apparently more a Google thing. I like it (and use it).

            • No you don’t need to change it – at least not for these silly reasons. 😉

              Now if it’s hard for people to read (or looks like a crew of five-year-olds did it while the caregiver was out of the room) then you might have to think about it – unless of course that page is ‘for’ kids. 😉

                • And I mean who cares what else some other group likes to use.

                  OMG! De prez drank out of a blue labelled water bottle! Let’s all make sure our water bottles have a different colored label!

                  Same silliness.

                • At some point you have to live your life and blow a big wet raspberry at the professional handwribgers and shakedown artists.

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