The best one is probably G W Ovink's "Legibility, atmosphere-value and forms of printing types" of 1938. The second section is about the "impressions" that fonts leave (although culture has certainly changed since then).

hhp

A Psychological Study of Typography
Sir Cyril Burt
With an introduction by Stanley Morison
Cambridge University Press
1959

These days, Sir Cyril is most famous for having been found to have faked some of his data in his twin studies (re: nature/nurture debate).

I must admit that I would take any of his other research with a grain of salt for that reason.

T

Make that a bag.
Burt's studies in many fields (in particular typography) were posthumously exposed as bogus. And this was generally known towards the end of his life, but the English exercised typical proper decorum, I guess!

hhp

Thanks a lot for the hints. Aren't there any newer research in this field. The need for these kind of information must be larger today ...

Nicolaj

>>The need for these kind of information must be larger today ...

I reckon so. I'm hanging out to read about things like this,
but don't quite know where to start. There must be something
that hasn't been exposed as being "bogus"!

You might look into back issues of Visible Language (formerly known as Journal of Typographic Research). Also, Michael Brady (or was it John Langdon?) once wrote an article in Critique magazine (#14, I think) about what associations various typographic attributes have, like narrow = feminine, etc.

hhp

Nobody mentioned this groundbreaking study?

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/news.asp?NID=1976

Link-rot seems to have set in but the BBC link is still active.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1348871.stm

Cheers, Si

Type & Layout: How typography and design can get your message across - or get in the way
By Colin Wheildon

This is a recent work, very practical for art directors who are interested in getting the text read, rather than just looking good.

Wheildon is an ad man, using direct marketing as his laboratory, just as the famous Claude Hopkins (1910s) and David Ogilvy (1950s) did before. What they would do is a split run, and vary one typographic feature between the two (say do one half in serif face, and the other sans) and see which got the better response.

However Nikolaj, you seem to be interested in the emotional effects of typography.
Usually, pyschologists and researchers such as Wheildon look at the mental mechanics of reading, in particular legibility and readability.

And there's a reason for that.
Any piece of typography has so many variables, that it would be impossible to isolate, in an experiment, the emotional effect of:
-typeface
-leading
-alignment
-measure
-size
-page layout
and of course there is the meaning of the text to consider.

This is the preserve of art and design, not science.

I feel your need. It seems that most writing about typefaces discusses:
- historical reference
- description of features/classification
- technology
- politics of design
- cultural theory
- readability/legibility
- circumstance of its design process

I've written a lot about typefaces, but it's very analytical (note my penchant for lists), and that seems to be the norm -- journalistic, commercial. So, which writers let the subject get under their skin?

Jon Coltz, for one, at daidala.com

Any other suggestions?

Miles Tinker did some studies of legibility and emotional impact of fonts like Walbaum and Franklin Gothic in the 70s, iirc... I did a paper and a lecture on the emotional impact of typefaces as a sign of their time in the 90s, but its in German and thus not of much help :-)

HD Schnellnack:

I do read/speak German so if the paper is availeble I would be most interested!

Nicolaj

The reason for my interests in this field is for corporate and exclusive font designs. Im trying to get more ways of working with this and this is one. Maybe there are litteratur on corporate font design or ... ?

Nicolaj

Nicolaj... no problem, my text is public domain anyway. But please keep in mind that it is about 8 or so years old and that it isn't aimed at designers/typographers but at newcomers, as written (at the time I was still studiying communication sciences) by a newbie :-D Which is why it is not very up-to-date and looks darned amateurish. (It was printed on DinA4 and cut to a slimmer size)

http://www.nodesign.com/board/emotion.pdf

Testing the link, I noticed that it works better if you set Acrobat to show you the pages as spreads.

What the text completely lacks is my stance on curent design trends, from oliver vaughan to stefan sagmeister and my thesis that we live in an overdesigned, emotionally supercharged world in which emotion-by-design has become an all-too-important salesfactor and that as designers we have to ask ourselves if it is okay to be just another cog in the turbocapitalism machine, basically producing more literally waste and keeping a dying over-consumption-system artificially alive. In the 90s we were all happy for better and more design, currently I'm not so sure anymore. Emotional design has become a manipulative tool in the wrong hands.

Errr, political ranting apart... I also have some english texts on emotional design, but they're rather focussed on product design and stuff like that. If you want, I can zip them and upload them on the server so you can download 'em.

HD Schellnack:

Thanks a lot! When it comes to emotional design as a manipulative tool it sure can be a problem if the company/product behind the design doesn't fulfill the promises made by the visuel style, shape and emotional effects. There are so many bad companies/products on the marked. Avoiding them is a idealistic lifetime work. Should designers lie or die ..?

Nicolaj

It's not so much the bad company hing that iffs me, but that design -- rather than complementing a good product -- has turned out to be a false promise in itself. We buy things because OF their emotional design, despite the fact that technically they may not even work as good as a less-overdesigned product (take the Starck lemon-sueezwer or the Starck 1 wash-basin, take Ray Gun...). Also, I think that design has become THE most important marketing factor for products in an oversaturated market. Thus we have the 103rd detergent that is EXACTLY as good or bad as the other 102, yet it has a different design and thus feigns to be different. The same goes for any kind of product and many companies, generally. By this, we actively prolong a system, that in the end is anti-ecological and in many ways also economical nonsense. This, imo, is NOT what design is about. (Although, of course nonsense is always cool... so... )

I think we need less emotion in our design, but rather a keen, maybe even intellectual, journalistic approach to what we do. Content first, seduction only as a means to promote positive content.

>>It's not so much the bad company hing that iffs me, but that design -- rather than complementing a good product -- has turned out to be a false promise in itself.

I get your point ...

Nicolaj

Si, that BBC article reads more like the stuff of horoscopes -- hard to take too seriously. (Then again, it's just the article and not the actual study.)

I can't help thinking of color psychology as it may relate to the subjective area of type selection. Those color studies are interesting and have merit, but I rarely defer to them as 'truth.' I would have to consider any psychology of typography study in the same way (especially if it's as trite as the suggestion to "use Courier for a resignation letter.")

For example, we've been culturally trained to believe red is the color of love (valentines day, roses). But color psychology suggests that blue is the color of love (private, caring) and that red is the color of power (can't argue with that). We've been culturally trained to recognize blue as corporate (stable, trustworthy). We tend to think of yellow as bright or warm (fresh or sunny) while color psychology suggests yellow represents control or conflict.

So, these readily contradict each other. Both of them may be right in their own way, in their own context. For me, the selection of color (and type for that matter) are all about the context and the audience.