"Typeface and Document Persona in Magazines"

Nida M. Stewart

Nida M. Stewart is currently a senior at New Mexico Tech where she is pursuing a Bachelor's degree in both Technical Communication and Psychology. Nida's interests include editing, document design, user interfaces, and instructional writing. She currently works as an editor for Policies and Procedures for New Mexico Tech. 

Contents

Abstract and Introduction

Literature Review

Research Methodology

Synthesis of Results 

Discussion 

Conclusion

Works Cited

Appendix A: List of Magazines Used in Research

Appendix B: Comprehensive Heading Magazine Listing

Appendix C: Comprehensive Body Text and Blurb Magazine

Discussion

Although the results from my study provide valuable information that future studies can use as a basis, it is important to note that this study is rather limited in both its scope and its size.  My study focused on a rather broad interpretation of typeface and typographic persona.  Unlike previous studies where researchers were able to select the exact typefaces they wanted to study, it is generally harder to determine what typeface is being used in a publication.  This can be the case because some publications may use typefaces that might look similar to a common typeface or use proprietary typefaces.  I also limited myself to twelve different magazines with two issues from each.  Although I did cover various magazines from different demographics, twelve magazines are not nearly enough to draw conclusions about magazines as a whole medium, as there are hundreds of different magazines oriented towards various age and interest groups.  Even though my research was limited in these regards, there are some visible trends that I can see from the results I obtained.  Even though these trends may not hold true in all other magazines, it is interesting to see these trends in the observed magazines.  Observation of these trends can possibly shape further thinking about typography in general as well as influence further study of the use of typeface in media.

Various conclusions can be drawn from the results of the study.  The first thing I noticed is none of the magazines had any sort of Plain (monospaced) typefaces.  Monospaced typefaces take up larger amounts of space due to letter spacing, and the shape of the letters is generally larger than typefaces that are All-Purpose and Traditional.  It would be both a waste of space as well as unattractive to use these kinds of fonts in a magazine.  We are more likely to find monospaced typefaces on computer terminals and webpages than in magazines and other documents.

It is difficult to determine a definite trend with headings within all of the magazines.  Something that can be discerned is that headings, whether they are section headings or article headings, generally tend to be in Bold.  This is most likely resultant of wanting to set the title of articles and sections apart from the rest of the articles.

Using Script for headings is less common than either using All-Purpose or Traditional.  This conclusion is understandable because Script typefaces are more difficult to read than Bold, Traditional, or All-Purpose typefaces.  Using Script typefaces may be counterintuitive, as they may be distracting to the reader.

The News magazine category tended to have the most static typographic choices, possibly due to the assumption that people who read magazines such as Time and Newsweek are older, professional, and educated.  Most, if not all, of the other magazines I observed are more geared toward casual reading, which may explain the less structured typographic choices.

In contrast to comparing headings, there seems to be a definite trend with the utilization of Traditional typefaces in articles while employing All-Purpose fonts for short blurbs and articles.  All the magazines followed this trend save for the two magazines with erratic and unusual typography choices (Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping) as well as Game Informer (which primarily utilizes All-Purpose typefaces for the majority of their magazine).  In Emily Skarzenski‘s article on "Type and Layout: How Typography and Design Can Get Your Message Across - or Get in the Way," she mentions how serif typefaces increase comprehension five times as much as sans serif fonts (Skarzenski).  This statement would explain why longer articles in magazines are in Traditional typefaces than All-Purpose typefaces—more attention and concentration is necessary with longer documents.

From the information and results given, it seems inaccurate to believe that there is any sort of demographic trend in magazine headings.  There appears to be no trend overall, and further limiting the results by demographic seems to lessen the odds of a plausible trend (save for bold typeface being fairly common for headings).  We also have to take into account that this study only looked at two to four magazines out of hundreds that could fill a category.  It is entirely possible that the analysis of more magazines in each category could yield desired results, but it is something that is currently out of the scope of this project.

Other studies that could be conducted along the same vein of this study could be to look at the typographic choices employed on web sites and other digital media sources.  Further study on the typography of magazines could be conducted, as well.  Instead of touching on multiple demographics as was done in this study, one could simply obtain a large number of magazines from one demographic to see if trends appear.  A more in-depth analysis could be conducted on the exact fonts and typefaces of magazines, as well.  In this study, typefaces were generalized based on their defining characteristics.  Another possible study could compare magazines of different countries to see whether typographic trends carry over from culture to culture.

Even though the results yielded were not exactly what I expected, observation and analysis showed that no matter how varied magazines I obtained were from one another, a general principle tended to be followed.  This study gives us at least some evidence that typeface selection is something that is considered by large corporations such as magazine publishers.

The results of this study show that there is a general trend in the usage of typeface in magazine publications. This study addresses the gap in research by giving further evidence that people do note and utilize trends in typeface. Although previous research indicated that these trends were apparent, this particular study reenforces the information provided by the previous research in this category.