After taking the “Helvetica” quiz, I was assigned the courier font to describe my personality. When taking the quiz I answered most of the questions truthfully, but I also found a few of the answers to be too funny not to choose, so instead of going with the answer that may have best described me, I chose the one that made me laugh. Now, I don’t think this is too far off-base, because I consider my sense of humor to be my strongest characteristic, but the explanation of my font revealed a slightly different personality trait. This type of font described me as someone who “proudly goes against the grain”, and is “not afraid to let your opinions be known”, and that I “would rather be known as anything but “conventional”. Although these traits are not exactly what I was attempting to convey through the quiz, they are traits that I definitely believe describe me.
After seeing what the courier font looks like, I have to say I was slightly disappointed, and I don’t believe the quiz accurately described this type of font. The font to me seemed very simple, and it was very conventional. According to McCloud, we attach meaning to most visual stimuli based on what kind of text it is associated with, and how that text is presented. For example, there is a four panel comic strip in the book that shows a woman cooking in the kitchen. There are only two different words used in this strip, “chop” and “tik”, and both are used in different ways to help the reader understand the sound and movement occurring in the comic. The word “chop” is presented with bold, large lettering and with an exclamation point at the end, “CHOP!” This text is used in the panel where the woman is cutting a large carrot with a large knife, and the text, along with the visual, lets the reader know that there is a loud sound and a forceful motion occurring. The word “tik” is much smaller in size, its lettering is much thinner, “tiktiktiktik…”, and is associated with a picture of a quietly ticking oven timer.
The way my font was described to me after the quiz put a completely different visual in my head than what the font actually looked like, which goes to show that people apply different meanings to things based on how they are described, as opposed to something being described that has a similar visual representation accompanying it. Things that may seem out of the ordinary to some people may convey a different message to others, especially when there is not a visual representation of what is being described.
ABCDEF 123456 (This is an example of courier font)
PJ -- what happens when you answer the quiz truthfully...does it match you with a font that "works" for you? Nice post. I like the way you talk about how text can be its own visual representation in the second paragraph.
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