What’s behind the Trump administration’s war on typefaces? |
“There’s no typeface for irony,” various editors over the years have told me reproachfully, as their red pencils scored out my attempts at humour. No question of leaving words’ real meaning to the reader’s intelligence, no question of encouraging that empathetic, unspoken moment of mutual understanding when reader and writer commune on another level without the awful, unforgivable line “this is a joke”.
Typefaces are no joke, no insignificant mere decoration, but imbued with as much meaning as the words they shape. They, like all aspects of culture, can signify everything from emotion to nationality, to social or technological change, to zaniness, to politics. And they can become battlegrounds in their own right, not least around “serifs”, small lines or projections at the extremities of many characters that many feel make letters more elegant and easier to distinguish from one another.
Last week, US secretary of state Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces with