FontLex: A Typographical Lexicon based on Affective Associations

FontLex: A Typographical Lexicon based on Affective Associations Tugba Kulahcioglu, Gerard de Melo Rutgers University – New Brunswick Department of Computer Science, Piscataway, NJ, USA {tugba.kulahcioglu, gerard.demelo}@rutgers.edu Abstract The task of selecting suitable fonts for a given text is non-trivial, as tens of thousands of fonts are available, and the choice of font has been shown to affect the perception of the text as well as of the author or of the brand being advertized. Aiming to support the development of font recommendation tools, we create a typographical lexicon providing associations between words and fonts. We achieve this by means of affective evocations, making use of font–emotion and word–emotion relationships. For this purpose, we first determine font vectors for a set of ten emotion attributes, based on word similarities and antonymy information. We evaluate these associations through a user study via Mechanical Turk, which, for eight of the ten emotions, shows a strong user preference towards the fonts that are found to be congruent by our predicted data. Subsequently, this data is used to calculate font vectors for specific words, by relying on the emotion associations of a given word. This leads to a set of font associations for 6.4K words. We again evaluate the resulting dataset using Mechanical Turk, on 25 randomly sampled words. For the majority of these words, the responses indicate that fonts with strong associations are preferred, and for all except 2 words, fonts with weak associations are dispreferred. Finally, we further extend the dataset using synonyms of font attributes and emotion names. The resulting FontLex resource provides mappings between 6.7K words and 200 fonts. Keywords: typography, font, emotion 1. Introduction It is not uncommon for people to spend several minutes looking for the right font, but finally ending up using the default one (Fox, 2010). One would indeed be well-advised to spend some effort on typographic choices, as the choice of font has been shown to be able to affect the perception of the text as well as of the author (Juni and Gross, 2008; Shaikh, 2007b; Shaikh et al., 2007), or of associated prod- ucts and brands (Fligner, 2013). The task of selecting a suitable font is particularly burden- some for graphic designers, as their profession calls for such decisions to be made on a regular basis, and the mere use of a neutral font may negatively affect the perception of the related brand or product (Shaikh, 2007a; Shaikh, 2007b). Even more severe than opting for a neutral font is to end up picking an ill-suited font typeface. This is commonly de- scribed as the font being incongruent with the underlying meaning or theme (e.g., writing the word “happy” with a font perceived as unhappy). As previous studies have re- vealed, the use of incongruent fonts not only increases the response time of users (Lewis and Walker, 1989; Hazlett et al., 2013), but can also have a particularly detrimental ef- fect on the perception of the related product (Fligner, 2013; Childers and Jass, 2002; …

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