Typography

You may not realize this, but there is a science as to how our eyes absorb letters.

When we read, our eyes glide over the letters much easier if the font is a serif font. A standard serif font (think Times) is used for much of our prolonged reading--textbooks, newspapers, Web sites, etc. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is sans serif fonts (think Verdana) that catch our attention. Sans serif fonts are void of the little "feet" at the tops and bottoms of serif font lettering that makes the letters appear to bleed together. It is these "feet" and the shapes of the words that we recognize. Our eyes barely have to try; we are programmed to recognize word shapes.

Sans serif fonts are a different story. They come in a whole host of sizes and types. Their shapes can be much more difficult to recognize. Sans serif fonts are often used in headlines for this reason. Just like the color red, the job description of a sans serif font is to catch our attention, to trip us up and force us to read rather than to look.

Take a look at the following ad and notice how Wendy's utilizes this principle.

(photo courtesy of http://brandautopsy.typepad.com)

The blocky sans serif font forces our eyes to work. Wendy's has a very specific message they are trying to feed their potential customer in this advertisement (which will be analyzed in a later post), and in order to make sure that the message has the biggest chance of seeping into the brains of the biggest amount of people possible, Wendy's made the executive decision to choose a font that is different, a font whose letters don't make it easy for our eyes to glide past them on autopilot.

If you take notice of the past two advertisements for McDonald's and Steak 'n Shake, they, too, utilize a sans serif font as an attention grabber.