The ultimate font face-off: Serif vs sans serif in the psychological battle of font personalities

Times New Roman or Calibri? Does changing your font make a difference?

Dive into the ultimate showdown in the world of fonts: serif vs sans serif. This is a psychological battle of typeface personalities. I asked you to pit Times New Roman and Calibri against each other. Which came out on top?

Letters are squiggles on a page or a screen. You’re not meant to notice them. It’s their job to be unobtrusive as they spell out the words you read. Not to call attention to themselves and to be in the spotlight by appearing in an article like this.

Your brain does something clever. It creates a cloaking device that makes the squiggles seem imperceptible once they’re arranged into words and sentences. You can look straight at them, but you don’t really see them. As if by magic — instructions, ideas, stories, songs, flavours, smells and messages are transmitted directly into your head.

These squiggles come in many different styles. I’ll call these fonts, although they should really be called typefaces (1). You’re not consciously aware of the font styles when you read, but you’ll feel their emotional impact. If a publication or brand you’re familiar with changes its font you’ll feel that something’s different, but you probably won’t know what changed. Unless you’re a type expert, in which case you’ll notice the nuances in a similar way to a wine expert tasting wine.

I’m a graphic designer and I’ve been measuring your emotional response to fonts since 2013. I’ve co-published studies with a professor from Oxford University and published results in my books including ‘Why Fonts Matter’ (Penguin/Random House). I incorporate the research results into activities in my workshops and events to show that the results work in real life situations.

Why have fonts been in the news?

I was invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to talk about fonts. The US State Department had banned Times New Roman, a font with serifs, and instructed staff to use the sans serif font Calibri instead. The UK’s Home Office and Supreme Court had issued similar instructions a year earlier. This resulted in…