Off-topic post on typography and politics

Sticking with politics…

The following article was taken from the Guardian website posted by Michael Tomasky Thursday 12 November 2009. The article talks about the importance typography can have in relation to an election of government. Tomasky discusses the positive impact sans serif typefaces can have when sat next to serif fonts that can be perceived as old and dated.

Off-topic post on typography and politics

I was just reading this interesting post by John Holbo at Crooked Timber in which he describes a book review he wrote of a biography of a celebrated typographer whose name was new to me. Holbo quotes the man thus:

In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable.

In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel's infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.

Holbo then links to an older post he wrote about the poster for Obama's speech in the Tiergarten last year, showing a poster for the event. The post notes that a few right-wing bloggers tried to say at the time that it looked sort of fascist (a harbinger), but observes, correctly, that the type face used is in fact much more Bauhaus-ey and goes on to say that the Nazis banned Bauhaus typefaces like Futura as being a (unsurprisingly) "Jewish inventions." Nazis seem to have switched back and forth (bi-typographical, one might say), employing the strong sans serif in posters like this one but at other times relying on the well-known German-style script seen here.

The subject of typography and politics has long been an interesting one to me, and I've noted in recent elections in America that the Republicanshave gone relentlessly sans serif while Democrats tend toward the serif. See this Bush-Cheney sticker, for example, against this Kerry-Edwards. The same distinction repeated itself last year, although McCain-Palin's sans serif was far less aggressive than Bush-Cheney's, and the standard Obama-Biden serif sticker was a little less wimpy than Kerry's.

Is there typo-ideological consistency on your side of the pond?