: Cognitive Science-Related Font? Looking for fonts that have anything to do with cognitive science. E.g., a type that somehow evokes either brains, thoughts, science, biology, psychology, connectionist

@Debbie163

Being myself a graphic designer with some background (a BSc) in psych, my take is that typography has always associated with human cognition, with or without the awareness of the designer/typographer who designs the font or any piece that involves typography.

Cognition involves things such as recognition, i.e. how to recongise shapes, associate them and give them meanings, and so forth. For a long long time, typographers have talked about readability and legibility, which already involves some cognitive process.

Also each font has certain characteristics that may invoke certain associations, each person has his/her own perceptual map based on his/her own conditionings of past experiences. In this way, each font has its impact on the viewers' emotion, and subsequentially emotional and physical responses, but as every person is unique, it is not possible for font designers to design a font with the purpose to evoke a specific response. Although, generally, some fonts may be viewed by many as modern, bold, some traditiona, elegant, etc.

This is a very intereting topics tho' I do hope that the craft of typography can receive more studies in the field of cognitive science.

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@XinRu324

The font Computer Modern has been used in a lot of scientific publishing due to its association with TeX, and use for mathematical notation, etc. It was created by Professor Donald Knuth and is free and open source.



I have no idea what the OP really has in mind because he hasn't really given an example, but when I think of fonts used in scientific publishing I think computer modern.

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@Phylliss782

Cognitive science has a great deal to do with network theory, rhizomic connections, etc. I would consider something very structured for your main type (Univers perhaps).

In the headline you could use the type to play up the network aspect by creating nodes and connections between the characters. You could painstakingly do it by hand. I would spend some time at Scriptographer.org and see what automated solution might be available.

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@Shelton719

Emotion in design is very subjective and different colours, shapes and even typefaces will have different connotations and can evoke different sensations based on the culture of context in which they're viewed. For example, say you live in a country that uses Arial for almost all government forms, Arial will have a different meaning to you than in a country where this is not true.

Check out Will Harris's blog for a more in depth discussion, or this article on cruzine for some great examples of evocative typography.

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@Reiling762

If you need this for a poster / publication, I would probably go for something "neutral" and clean. I see cognitive sciences as a search for meaning and connection, so I wouldn't charge it with fonts that can easily relate to more concepts. Alternatively, if you want something with personality, that would be the keyword I'd use, a font that looks personal and "human".

A good starting point is www.myfonts.com/, you can do an advance search based on keywords and fields.

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