I used to think fonts were just fonts.
Then I spent three years watching design agencies agonize over typeface choices for rebrand projects, and I started noticing something strange: clients would describe Helvetica as “trustworthy” while calling Futura “ambitious,” even though both are just geometric sans-serifs with similar x-heights and stroke weights. Turns out, typography doesn’t just communicate words—it whispers personality traits directly into our brains, bypassing the rational parts entirely. Research from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University found that readers consistently assign human characteristics to fonts, rating serif faces as more “stable” and “mature” while sans-serifs get tagged as “modern” and “approachable.” The effect is so reliable that brand consultants now use it like a psychological cheat code, though nobody can quite agree on why it works in the first place.
Here’s the thing: your brain makes snap judgments about credibility based on letterforms alone. A 2012 study published in Cognition had participants read identical statements in different typefaces, then rate their agreement with the content—and people were more likely to beleive claims set in Baskerville than in Comic Sans or Helvetica, even when the information was exactly the same.
The Serif Paradox: Why Traditional Fonts Signal Expertise (Even When They Shouldn’t)
Walk into any law firm or financial institution, and you’ll drown in Times New Roman and Garamond.
There’s this received wisdom in branding that serifs—those little feet on letterforms—communicate authority, tradition, and reliability, which sounds reasonable until you remember that Times New Roman was literally designed in 1931 for newspaper efficiency, not gravitas. But perception doesn’t care about history. Kevin Larson, a principal researcher at Microsoft who studies reading psychology, found that people consistently rate serif fonts as more “professional” in contexts involving money, health, or legal advice, even when testing with audiences who couldn’t define what a serif actually is. The effect persists across cultures, though it’s weakening slightly with younger demographics who’ve grown up reading sans-serif interfaces on screens. I guess it makes sense—if you’ve spent your entire life seeing Instagram captions in Avenir, maybe Georgia doesn’t automatically scream “trustworthy institution” anymore.
Wait—maybe the real issue is contrast, not the serifs themselves.
Some researchers argue that it’s not about the decorative strokes but about the thick-thin variation in letterforms, which creates a sense of craft and intentionality. Fonts like Didot and Bodoni have extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes, and brands use them to signal luxury and exclusivity—think Vogue mastheads or high-end cosmetics packaging. But then you’ve got brands like Everlane using minimal-contrast grotesque sans-serifs to communicate the exact same luxury positioning, just with a “modern” filter applied. The rules contradict themselves constantly, which is either frustrating or liberating depending on whether you’re trying to follow them or break them.
How Geometric Sans-Serifs Became the Default Language of Tech Optimism and Corporate Bland
Honestly, I’m exhausted by geometric sans-serifs at this point.
Every startup, every app, every “innovative” company has converged on the same aesthetic: clean, round, friendly letterforms with open apertures and humanist proportions—basically variations on Circular, Gotham, or Proxima Nova. The style is supposed to communicate approachability and forward-thinking clarity, and it did work beautifully when Spotify and Airbnb first deployed it against a landscape of stuffy corporate serifs. But now it’s become visual wallpaper, so ubiquitous that it’s lost its semantic meaning entirely. Designer Tobias Frere-Jones, who created Gotham (the font Obama used for his 2008 campaign), has noted that fonts become victims of their own success—once a typeface gets associated with a particular value like “trustworthiness,” everyone piles on until the association dilutes into nothing. Recent data from brand perception studies shows diminishing returns: audiences under 30 now rate geometric sans-serif brands as “generic” rather than “innovative,” which has sent some agencies scrambling back toward serif revivals or weird hybrid experiments.
Anyway, the trust issue gets complicated when you factor in context and content mismatch.
When Typography Contradicts Your Message (And Why That Visceral Discomfort Actually Matters)
Here’s where things get weird: font choice can actually undermine your content if there’s a mismatch between the personality the typeface projects and the message you’re trying to send.
A study from the University of Michigan had participants read a set of instructions for a challenging physical exercise routine—once in a difficult-to-read decorative font and once in simple Arial. The group that read the ornate version estimated the exercise would take nearly twice as long to complete and rated it as more difficult, even though the instructions were identical. The researchers called this “cognitive fluency”—when something is harder to read, our brains unconsciously assume the task itself is harder too. This has real consequences for trust: if you’re a healthcare provider explaining a medical procedure in a whimsical script font, patients will unconsciously percieve the procedure as riskier or more complex. Financial advisors using playful rounded fonts see lower credibility ratings in client surveys, even when their actual advice is sound.
I’ve seen brands try to fight these associations and mostly fail. A funeral home in Portland tried rebranding with a cheerful sans-serif to seem “less depressing,” and the community backlash was immediate—people felt the typography was disrespectful to grief, even though nobody could articulate exactly why. Turns out our font associations run deeper than rational thought, probably tied to decades of accumulated visual culture and context. You can’t just decide Comic Sans means “serious” now, no matter how hard you try.
