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© 2008 shift

Issue 1 | 2008

“The Magical Power of Words”:

Font and Ideology in Western Newspapers

By Dave Gaertner

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How does font affect our reading of a text? Is it an aspect of reading with which we should concern ourselves? Can we “read” a font in the same way we might “read” a work of art? These questions have become all the more relevant in a world where font is seen by readers and publishers alike as playing an active role in how a text will be received. Although it is difficult to pinpoint when the importance of our relationship to font became so pronounced, the evidence of this relationship can be found in films such as Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica (2007), which documents the history of one of the world’s most popular fonts. Evidence can also be found in text itself. In an article entitled “Girls just Wanna Have Font?” Wayne Robins reports on Courtney Love’s reaction to a story written on her in The New York Observer. According to Robins, “Love complained about "getting, like, vicious font," or enduring "bad font."[2] If we follow from the authorities on the subject, Love is responding to the “feeling” that the type face in question conveys.[3] The authors of How to Select Type Faces argue that this “feeling” (seemingly implicit to the type face itself) can either compliment or distract from what a word or sentence is trying to put across. For them, “the most beautiful car in America might better be advertised in the ravishing Egmont than in the parsimonious, penny-polishing Scotch.” [4] In other words, type face communicates an idea-- in this case “ravishing” or “penny-polishing”-- that exists independently from the content it is representing. Thus, printed text can be said to carry two distinct meanings, in both content and form. For Love, it is the meaning found in the latter that takes primary importance.

Robins ends his article on an ironic note, reflecting on how font has become yet another way for celebrities to mediate their image:

The whole media-savviness [of celebrities] is pretty extraordinary. Choice of typography, I think, is the next logical step... Celebrities, instead of asking for a particular photographer for a magazine layout, will want to know who the page designer is. And perhaps we can look forward to power agents laying down the law to editors: "Tom Cruise does not do Helvetica."[5]

Despite its absurdity, or perhaps because of it, Robins’ article illustrates the increasing validity of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement: “the medium is the message.”[6] This precept invites us to think about how the vehicle by which content is transferred (in this case the font) takes an active part in the production of meaning. For Love, and a fictional Tom Cruise, the medium is the message insofar as font is negatively implicated in conveying an image (which, for all intents and purposes, can be seen as the “content” of the celebrity). Robins sees this fact as becoming even more prominent in the future. In other words, font affects our reading of a text in the message it conveys as medium.

While Robins’ example is obviously an inflated illustration of the "medium is the message” precept, this type of attitude towards font has obvious implications for those institutions that rely on print to communicate. Newspaper publishers, for instance, seem to be trying to capitalize on the message fonts can convey as medium. In the last three years, three of the Western world’s major dailies have undergone major redesigns, which include a complete overhaul of their type faces. In 2005 The Guardian switched from “the tired old gentleman's mixture of Miller, Helvetica and Garamond” to Guardian Egyptian[7] (fig. 1). In 2006 The New York Times hired former Face magazine artistic director and font designer extraordinaire Neville Brody to design a bespoke font[8] for the “Nation’s paper of record” (fig. 2). And in 2007 the Globe and Mail enlisted Nick Shinn, who also designed the Mordecai Richler memorial font (for the specific use of the Giller Prize) to create Globe and Mail Text (fig. 3).

However, none of the articles I consulted about the font changes in these newspapers addressed the intriguing idea that “the medium is the message” --an issue that Love seems to find quite obvious and that Grant Widmer, in the epigraph beginning this paper, refers to as “the magical power of words.” Rather, these articles focused on a font’s utility, or how type face makes the content of the paper more accessible. In other words, content, as opposed to form (or message as opposed to medium) remains the dominant focus for writers and publishers even when the medium (font) is the subject in question. This paper will try to explain what I see as an important gap in the literature on newspaper fonts, asking why a discussion of the medium has been left out of the conversation on font in the field of newspaper publishing. Following this, I will be providing a brief reading of newspaper fonts to illustrate how fonts communicate certain ways of valuing, thinking and perceiving that are ideally reflective of their newspaper’s political positioning in order to illustrate the role type face plays in the reception of text.

As I have already mentioned, in the majority of the articles I read on the redesign of newspaper fonts, type face is said to be designed for purely for utilitarian reasons. Many of the reasons for a font re-design are based in sales and the continuing need for print media to remain a competitive source of information in the age of television and online news. According to the newspaper art director Micha Wiedmann, a change in font can give a newspaper “real presence on the newsstand”.[9] However qualitative this statement might seem, it has very quantitative evidence to back it up. Len Kubas, president of Toronto consultancy Kubas Consultants, adds that “a redesign of th[e] magnitude [of the Globe and Mail’s] can typically produce anywhere from a 1% to 3% boost in circulation.”[10] Such evidence is undoubtedly why papers are willing to pay about $27,000 or more for a bespoke front page flag font.[11]

However, an increase in sales is not the primary reason for a newspaper employing a new type face. Perhaps in order to cover up a rather facile appeal to gimmick, the majority of newspaper publishers justify their redesigns by focusing on utility, or how a change to such things as font facilitates the reading process.[12] According to Ron Reason, the designer responsible for the Orlando Sentinel’s redesign, “what you want is consistency and clarity… Before you add something, ask yourself, how does it help the reader? And does it make the paper smarter?"[13] Bryan Erikson, an art director at the Detroit Free Press, expresses the same type of utilitarian sentiment about the redesign of his newspaper: "it always brings you a new level of excitement and a more pleasurable reading experience when you have a new look," Erickson says. "We cleaned it up and made it easier to use."[14] In Canada, Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, goes so far as to attribute the entire success of his recently redesigned paper on the utility of its new font:

The secret that made the [Globe and Mail] redesign possible lies in new typefaces custom-made for us: Globe and Mail Text, News and Sans. They are, at one and the same time, more efficient and more readable.”[15]

In other words, despite the fact that papers like the Globe and Mail  have enlisted artists and designers known for their creative talents, it would seem that font itself is of interest only because of its usefulness, rather than because of the artistic merit (message) it might convey in and of itself.

The need for a newspaper to focus on utility, I would argue, stems from a need to maintain the message, as opposed to the medium, as the primary focus for a reader. As the Russian Formalists first illustrated, in shifting the focus from what is being presented to how it is being presented, the import of content is eclipsed and put in service to form. Pierre Bourdieu refers to this medium-oriented way of viewing an object as “the aesthetic mode of perception”[16] in which one “asserts the absolute primacy of form over function, of the mode of representation over the object represented.”[17] Part of what makes “the news” what it is depends on its ability to present itself as content oriented. The news as such is the content it represents, not the mode of representation. As an example of the news industry’s desire to represent content as being primary to form in its media, consider the following remark from Al Anstey, deputy director of news for Al Jazeera English: “A good reporter understands the story, recognises why it's important and explains it clearly, with authority. But the best reports are remembered for the story, not the reporter.”[18] Clearly, news broadcasters (even those whom some would insist are rife with political mediation) are predisposed to represent themselves (the form) as overshadowed by the story (content). In other words, while it remains undoubted that particular media have a particular ideological slant, the story itself is meant to confirm the validity of the media’s “objective” ideology; mediating a story’s reception through form would only undercut the broadcaster’s authority. Indeed, when the mode of representation, or the medium, does becomes the focus, such as in parody news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the much valued appearance of neutral objectivity is compromised and that source loses much of its weight as a “serious” medium.

This is not to suggest that we, as a society, believe that the news is, or even can be, an unmediated representation of the world, but simply to illustrate that mediation must be repressed by the newsmakers in order to maintain the appearance of neutral objectivity; the medium can never explicitly be acknowledged as participating in the conveyance of a meaning --which exists independent from the content it represents-- without serious consequences for the necessary appearance of news as an immediate representation of world events. Of course, newspapers market themselves towards specific ideologies (usually the left or the right), but this does not preclude the fact that most reporting is meant to be perceived as a primarily objective representation of an event.

The Jayson Blair scandal provides further example of the news industry’s struggle to maintain the appearance of objectivity for its media. In May 2003 Blair was fired for plagiarizing and fabricating stories for the New York Times. It is estimated that Blair wrote over six hundred articles for the Times before being dismissed. Obviously, the Blair scandal called into question the objectivity of the “Nation’s paper of record,” but rather than use the moment to discuss the slipperiness between journalism and fiction, the Times chose to engage “in both internal and external processes to repair both its own image and that of journalistic practices in general.”[19] According to Elizabeth Blanks Hindman it is by distancing themselves from Blair through these processes that the publishers and journalists at the Times “affirm[ed] the values of objectivity and its consequent professional norms,”[20] thus contributing, in a very public manner, to the re-establishment of objectivity as the primary concern in the field.

As the Blair scandal helps us to illustrate, despite the ideological tilts most newspapers adopt and the outwardly biased editorializing  in which their writers take part, objectivity remains an important aspect of what constitutes a serious newspaper. It is because of the need to maintain the appearance of objectivity, I would argue, that newspapers must represent their font redesigns in strictly utilitarian terms. Indeed, this representation becomes almost obfuscatory when members of the news media are asked to speak about how font contributes to a newspaper. For example, consider Greenspon’s remarks, given above, that the secret behind the Globe and Mail’s entire redesign was the change in font.

Further, consider these remarks from Neville Brody, the designer responsible for the New York Times new font, Times Modern, on the utilitarian aspects of his design. According to Brody, “the change in typeface [in the New York Times] signals a change in content, and ultimately articulates differing forms of content more immediately.”[21] Here, Brody seems compelled to defend his font as playing a definite and important role in the newspaper. Interestingly, however, namely because Brody is a renowned designer and artist, his remarks remain entirely centered around the content of the paper, at least insofar as his font grants easier access to it, rather than on the medium itself. While the font certainly participates in the conveyance of meaning for Brody, it does so in a manner that is interactive with content, rather in the independent manner which we have thus far been considering. What Brody seems to be is suggesting is that his font somehow (and this somehow is an issue we will need to address shortly) effaces the slipperiness between signifier and signified, thus making the news more immediate than mediated. According to Brody, Times Modern does not only allow us to read the news, it allows us to read it faster and better. As such, Brody depicts his font as being purely utilitarian, a medium created primarily to make the content of a newspaper more accessible, rather than an art form able to communicate meaning in its own design and structure. This type of argument effectively eclipses the notion that font communicates anything independent of content simply by making content the dominant focus.

Yet, how exactly can Brody’s font be said to make content more immediate? As much as he seems to be attempting to obfuscate the medium behind the message here, is it fair to say that the medium can be totally subsumed by the content it allows access to?  Can a type face help the reader to more effectively bridge the gap between signifier and signified? And, if not, would it be fair to “read” a newspaper font as, for example, “bad” or “vicious” in the same way Love reads the font in the Observer?

Indeed, the explicit, and often exaggerated emphasis on the utility of font, as exemplified by Brody, is blinding us to a much more interesting field of study: the ideological construction of type face. According to Slavoj Žižek

the point [of any critical analysis] is too avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form: the secret analysis is not the content hidden by the form… but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself.[22]

Of course, Zizek is not here speaking specifically of type face, but rather making a more general statement about analyses of real versus constructed realities. In sum, his argument cotends that one must move away from the “fetishistic fascination” with content in order to study a much more important question: how does form, and what it tacitly communicates, contribute to society’s perception of reality? 

Returning more specifically to our discussion of font and utilitarianism, Žižek posits that it is precisely at the moment of heightened utility --such as Greenspon and Brody demonstrate when referring to their type faces-- when ideology is at its strongest. He writes that,

In everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparent innocent reference to pure utility -- one should never forget that in the symbolic universe ‘utility’ functions as a reflective notion; that is, it always involves the assertion of utility as meaning.[23]

Famously, Žižek goes on to illustrate this point by reflecting on the hidden ideology of toilets. According to him,

the reference to lavatories enables us not only to discern the same triad [of the existential attitudes of the French, German and English]… but also to generate the underlying mechanism of this triad in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: ambiguous contemplative fascination [German]; the hasty attempt to get rid of the unpleasant excess as fast as possible [French]; the pragmatic approach to treat the excess as an ordinary object to be disposed of in an appropriate way [English].[24]

In other words, it is at the moment when an object is said to be purely utilitarian that it can best be opened up to speak about some of the underlying strategies that order our society. Thus, rather than interpret Brody’s comments as privileging content over form, we should address them from the perspective Zizek provides us with here. If Times Modern “ultimately articulates differing forms of content more immediately” it is due to the fact that the type face “functions as a reflective notion” of the political perspective of the newspaper in question. Or, in other words, font conveys an ideology through which the reader can filter and organize his/her understanding of a story.

Before I move on to explicate this argument it first necessary to provide an expanded definition of ideology, which I will borrow from the critic Terry Eagleton:

I do not mean by ‘ideology’ simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.[25]

In other words, ideology is not simply a way of thinking; it is an invisible way of regulating the world around us. In this sense, newspapers contribute to ideology all of the time. In the stories they choose to publish and in the manner in which they choose to re-present these stories they tacitly communicate a particular way of thinking, which best represents its readership (or, more precisely, the capital that keeps it in business). By publishing an “objective” story with an ideological tilt, a newspaper reproduces the social conditions necessary for its readers to continue to purchase papers. For example, the Creek academic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn writes that         

the largest daily newspaper [of South Dakota] refuses to call the killing of innocent women and children at Wounded Knee, all of them under a white flag of truce, a “massacre.” In South Dakota it is publicly called… an “event,” “an incident,” or an “affair.”[26]

By maintaining and reproducing the idea that what occurred at Wounded Knee in 1890 was an “event” rather than a “massacre,” Cook-Lynn argues, the newspaper is able to protect its Euro-American readership from the potentially disrupting fact that “new societies and new nations are born from the spilling of the blood of other nations”,[27] a fact, she contends, that “must be denied if a nation is to see itself as ethical.”[28] As we can see in this example, ideology underscores at least some of this newspaper’s “objective” articles, insofar as very specific language is used as a filter to describe and classify a historical event. Without openly disavowing that Wounded Knee was a “massacre” (by saying so in so many words), the South Dakota daily tacitly conveys a very contrary perspective in the form it chooses to re-present the story, thus reproducing a very particular way of perceiving the Western world and colonization. In my argument, font participates in ordering the world in much the same way: by reflecting a particular ideology in its design and structure, type face becomes a tacit filter through which the content of a newspaper can be ordered. In the following paragraphs I will attempt to provide a rather brief reading of newspaper font, through the analytical tools provided by two of its designers in order to illustrate the very pertinent role font can play in ordering the reception of newspaper text.  

First, in the article “Fonts of Clarity”, published in Editor & Publisher in 2000, Mark Fitzgerald touches briefly on some of the ideological implications of newspaper redesigns. In an interview with Lucre Lacava, the designer in charge in re-creating the Vancouver Province, Ottawa Citizen and The National Post, Fitzgerald tells us that, 

North American designers can slip into a philosophical turn of speech that can leave non-artists confused. Almost as an aside, Lacava, for instance, describes how centered headlines wouldn't work at The Post and Courier because "Charleston is a flush-left city."[29]

Notwithstanding Lacava’s use of the word “flush,” the language used here is reminiscent of Žižek’s reflections on the ideology of toilets. Indeed, Fitzgerald is locating ideology in an object generally treated (as I have already shown) as being almost purely utilitarian. Further, the language used in this excerpt is representative of an ideology that exists “between-the-lines.” Lacava must mention the “philosophy” implicit to newspapers “almost as an aside” not only because directly addressing the leftist ideology of a newspaper would strip it of its neutral objectivity, but also because it is only as an aside that the font is able to conveys its “power.”

This assertion needs to be unpacked a little further in order to consider its full import. As we have already considered, shifting the focus away from a newspaper’s message towards its medium threatens the objectivity of that paper inasmuch as attention to form obfuscates the objectivity of the news to which, as Hindman illustrates in her article, major newspapers like the New York Times still cling. Fitzgerald provides an excellent example of how this could occur in the quotation above: if the ideological content of a type face is made explicit it would suggest that a newspaper is attempting to mediate its journalistic content, directing its readers towards a certain way of thinking before even engaging with an “objective” story. Yet, if this ideology remains “between-the-lines” it is always already generating a particular way to identify with the “objective” journalistic content, thus selling more newspapers and facilitating its own existence.

This is not simply a matter of a type face conveying a “feeling,” but rather of font being imbued with a particular way of thinking, valuing and believing (in this case leftism). As Lacava is suggesting, as long as the ideology of a type face aligns with the political positioning of its readers, a font mediates content in such a way that a newspaper is able to respond to the political concerns of its readership (and thus the capital that allows it to exist) while simultaneously maintaining the “objectivity” that remains a vital aspect of the news proper. Here, Lacava provides us with one simple analytical tool through which we might “read” font: a type face which leans to the left can indeed be indicative of a leftist ideology. While this is a somewhat basic example, it does provide the ground from which we can move on to more complex analyses.

The idea that font communicates ideology is further exemplified by Nick Shinn, the designer who created the new fonts for the Globe and Mail. The following excerpt is from Typofile, a website that caters to self-professed font geeks. Here Shinn is commenting in a forum entitled “Guardian Redesign” (2005) two years before he designed the Globe and Mail fonts:

I’m disappointed by the all-serif look. I felt the same way when the Toronto Star, also a leftish paper run by a foundation, rather than a media conglomerate, was recently redesigned with all serifs. Somehow, it signals a pandering to “taste”, a movement away from a hard-line stance, whether or not that is the editorial drift.
My initial impression (which may nonetheless be revised once I see it on newsprint) is that the newly refined look will be at odds with the necessarily blunt messages that this newspaper, so frequently critical of the establishment, must carry.[30]

Shinn must also speak from the shadows, however in a manner slightly different to the oblique references Lacava makes: as opposed to the newspaper, which caters to diverse groups of people and still commands intellectual authority over other Medias, the website remains a marginalized forum, particularly a website that caters to so specific a group as Typofile. Despite that fact (or indeed because of it), we can read Shinn reflecting on the ideology he sees in the font of another designer. Rather than taking a “hard-line stance”, he asserts that Guardian Egyptian caters to “taste” by projecting a softer image that is at odds with the difficult content a paper must represent.

If we read further into Shinn’s analysis we might assume that this appeal to “taste” is a way to mediate the severity of the news, to make it more palatable for the reading public. Further, and perhaps more importantly, Shinn seems to see Guardian Egyptian as running counter to one of the Guardian’s basic ideologies: the critique of the establishment. Font thus acts as a control measure against those who might want to take action against reported events and softens the stories that speak out against the actions of the governing body. Shinn bases this reading in the “all-serif look” of Guardian Egyptian, which can also be located in Times New Roman and Georgia, as opposed to the more “modern, progressive, cosmopolitan attitudes” of Helvetica or Arial (in which this paper is written).[31] Indeed, in its connections to the Roman alphabet, the serif look seems to convey the air of tradition while appealing to the upper and ruling classes, who were able to spend the time creating type faces that moved beyond the realm of simply communicating into the realm of aesthetics.[32] This reading of font allows us direct insight into how type face can be said to communicate meaning independent of the content it represents by reflecting on its historical iterations.             

As I hope I have demonstrated, if we look closer, Brody’s emphasis on utility reveals something much more interesting than content. By highlighting utility to such a degree, the designer is able to invest his font with ideology, or ways of valuing, perceiving and believing that contribute to the reproduction of social power. Made explicit by the publishers, this ideology would impinge on the objectivity of the news, but veiled “between-the-lines” it is another way to attract an audience and sell newspapers. In principle, font works in the same manner as a headline would, albeit more tacitly. A headline predisposes a reader to engage with an “objective” article in a certain way. It provides the initial tone through which the ensuing events are meant to be read. If we follow from Nick Shinn, this is precisely what font accomplishes via ideology.

In sum, perhaps without surprise, font is an important aspect of how we interpret newspaper text. However, this relationship is not simply a utilitarian matter of allowing the reader to access more easily the words on the page. Rather, instilled with ideology, font initiates a particular reading of an “objective” article. Independent of content, it communicates a feeling, rooted in specific values and beliefs that informs the reception of the message. A “vicious” font would initiate a “vicious” reception of a story printed in its form. The key then, is not to invest in the utilitarian functions of font, which are so blatantly represented by newspaper editors and designers. Doing so only contributes to “the magical power of words,” a formulation driven by vague conceptions of the “feeling” conveyed by a font, which lack in any real critical reflection. The exaggerated focus on utility has stymied our ability to research the ideological functions of font and the intricacies of type face as form and left us to resort to such facile interpretations. As Terry Eagleton states, “criticism must dissociate art from mystery and concern itself with how… texts actually work.”[33] It is here, as medium, that further research on how newspaper text, one of the world’s major disseminators of information, begs to be done. Ideology and font might appear to be worlds apart, but a detailed study of the links between the two can provide new ways to understand how social reality is constructed, how we understand world events, and indeed, how a newspaper actually works.

Dave Gaertner is a PhD student in literature at Simon Fraser University. His dissertation is on discourses of reconciliation, but at the moment he is more interested in “dirty humour” and its reception after 9/11. When Dave is not writing or reading, he likes to watch the cooking network and reminisce about the days when he smoked. He currently lives in Vancouver with his epidemiologist partner, Kathy.

Bibliography