From Edwards Mendelson in the NYRB, a great piece on an obscure topic that affects us every day – “The Human Face of Type:”
In 1928 the German designer Jan Tschichold championed sans-serif faces in his influential modernist manifesto, Die neue Typographie. The modern man’s vision of the world, he wrote, “is collective-total, no longer individual-specialist.” We need a “typeface expressive of our own age,” and that typeface “must be free from all personal characteristics; it will be the work of a group.” Of all the available typefaces, sans-serif, he wrote, “is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.” In 1933 the Nazis arrested Tschichold for Communist sympathies, but he escaped and over the next few years renounced his modernist ideas: “To my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism.”
Uh, wow. I didn’t know that the type you use says so much about you. So what does that abominable MS Word default type Cambria say about Microsoft?
The Finch and Pea 