Contact Kai Bernau and find out if you can buy a copy of his thesis book, Neutral. Also study how different styles of handwriting have been used for different social, religious, and business purposes.

Thanks Dunwich, Kai bernau was mentioned before when I was speaking of this so I will definatly have to have a look.
Thanks for your input, appreciated

How do typefaces acquire their symbolism?

Firstly, they are branded products, so they are publicized by their manufacturers.
Secondly, they are associated with distributors (traditionally that would be through typesetting companies).
Thirdly, they become associated with the products, services, and publications they are used in; art directors, graphic designers and typographers have a key role in determining how the latent abilities/qualities of typefaces are realized and materialized--once the ball starts rolling...
Fourthly, they are further publicized and discussed in the editorial matter of trade media.
Fifthly, some get in the history books.
Sixthly, a very few spill over into non-professional and prosumer awareness, acquiring signification by the way in which this occurs.

Nick covers a lot of it.

Later on, typefaces that were especially popular in a particular period or geographical location (or sometimes just from that period or geographical location) may become associated with it. The strength of this association depends on whether the typeface's popularity was particularly stronger in that time or place than in others, and also whether it was part of broader typographic or artistic trends.

Thus Avant Garde screams of the 1970s and disco and America, yet Optima is not thought of as particularly late 1950s or German.

Cheers,

T

… typefaces acquire their symbolism

Are you sure they do?

I take your bait:

Sure, type designers do of course exploit the symbolism of type shapes directly into their fonts, by alluding to previous typefaces.

However, the point I wanted to make in my first post was that so much of the symbolism is arbitrary to the actual letter shapes, the result of extraneous social, cultural and economic processes.

For instance, recently Gotham has become very symbolic not only of New York (from whence its style derives), but also of the USA, due, I conjecture, to its association with the 9/11 memorial and the Obama presidential campaign. This despite the fact that the style of sign lettering which it channels is not exclusively New York or American.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Very interesting points Mr Shinn, i really appreciate the help.

This is all great stuff. Their is so much to go into. I was reading up on Blackletter although it was used generically, and the history of it is varied, because Nazi Germany took it on, and promoted it as the official type-style for Germany. It now holds symbolism and meaning to that.
I know my knowledge is know where near yours but I think this is similar to what you are saying.

I found your first post extremely interesting, and is a great piece of help for my research.

>How do typefaces acquire their symbolism?

The platform ID should be 3 and the encoding ID should be 0.

Mr vibez is on the money in my opinion. The letterforms have no intrinsic meaning. Like with the semantic nature of words, letterforms are given meaning by context- and meanings change hugely in short timeframes.

And I think it's important to distinguish typefaces and type styles here. Because Of the way our brains interprete shapes, very few
people remember enough detail about a letterform to be able to distinguish typefaces (like you can!), but most people can identify the broad similarities of a type style.

The best example I can think of is blackletter. We associate blackletter most closely with the third reich. But it's calligraphic form was created by monks, and considered close to god. The first printed book, the Gutenberg bible, was made using blackletter. The association with the nazi's is unfair, because in 1941 the nazi high command decreed it "ungerman" (it had been used in Jewish-owned newspapers) and forbade it's use. But it was too late. Rappers and metal bands exploit the nazi association to convey a subversive idea, and in turn have blunted it's offensiveness by making it ubiquitous.

http://blogs.sitepoint.com/the-blackletter-typeface-a-long-and-colored-h...

Meaning is a collective hallucination that resides in shared human consciousness- so it's fuzzy and indistinct and subject to tiny and huge shifts. By using a typeface, you are contributing to it's history and meaning by giving it context.

Much of how a face acquires symbolism can be summed up in this quip:

Q: How do you emulate British post-war design?
A: Paint it British Racing Green and slap Gill Sans on it.

Nick Shinn's first response, third category, could be summarised more plainly as by usage.

The question made me think of what Ellen Lupton wrote about concerning the Neuland typeface (Rudolf Koch 1923) connoting African-Americans and by extension, all things African. Rob Giampetro has expanded on it here.

Some, but maybe not all, of the story about what Blackletter has come to signify can be found in Peter Bain & Paul Shaw's excellent book Blackletter: Type and National Identity, and also Christina Paoli's Mexican Blackletter.

Nick Shinn's first response, third category, could be summarised more plainly as by usage.

I was trying to make the distinction between two kinds of "usage", in graphic trade media and client media.
Fonts are branded tools, and the folk who pay for them are predominantly professionals.
Certainly, we professionals see the results of their use in the mass media, but we are consumers too, and are exposed to and develop impressions and opinions about types through advertising, media, and academic publications which target us.

The "Nazi signification of blackletter" is an issue because the trade media and academia have made it so, as much as if not more than any connotation it might have in the mass media. This thread is ample proof of that.