[Music] [Sarah Hyndman] Have you ever said something only to get a slightly shocked reaction in response because your intended meaning was completely misconstrued but you weren't sure why, what you said made sense to you, but it meant something different to everyone else? My name's Sarah Hyndman. I'm a graphic designer, researcher, author, and founder of Type Tasting. And I've been running mass participation typography experiments for over a decade. Now let me show you my deck of cards. They're scratch and sniff cards and they smell of lavender.
Can you imagine what they smell like? Now let's see whether I can guess which card the smell of lavender will make you think of. My guess is that you're most likely to vote for B followed by D.
And if you voted for either of these, then the shapes of these letters tell me that the lab that lavender evokes a mood for you that's pleasant and a little bit old fashioned.
So I know this because I've been running mass participation experiments with my activity lab for over a decade. And these are designed to provoke, to evoke, and to empower.
But one day, I did this lavender experiment and three people picked option A. And this surprised the rest of us. It seemed like an unlikely answer until we found out why. So keep listening and I'll explain later.
So I've co-published papers with Professor Charles Spence from the University of Oxford. I've been exploring your typosensory perception since 2013 and I'm the author of the best-selling book, Why Fonts Matter.
I create experiences that use words to transform what audiences feel, think, taste, smell and do.
So what happens when we interact with words? Well, as humans, we make assumptions at first sight. And this happens because our sight is largely a screening sense. Our ancestors needed to know quickly whether something was safe or dangerous.
And the brain finds patterns in what we see and it mixes them up across all of our senses. And it uses these to make predictions.
And in today's world, we make predictions on the appearance of words usually without even noticing that we're doing it because words are ubiquitous and familiar and yet seemingly hidden right there in plain sight.
The appearance of words, the typography creates context. It sets the scene. It introduces a story before we even read the words. And we form a first impression about what we're about to read at first sight, just like we form a first impression of a person.
So, typography is the interface between us and so much of what we experience in today's world. We consume it almost constantly as we go about our everyday lives, but we only really notice it when it goes wrong. So, for example, Gap's infamous 2010 rebrand that only lasted for one week or the Tropicana rebrand that lasted for less than a year. Or more recently, what I would call late stage blandification when all logos just started to look the same.
So this is my friend, Miho. And she was very happy the day we discovered the foods of America aisle in a big department store in London. She grew up in Michigan, but she's lived in London for 20 years.
And when she saw all this packaging, she started to tell me stories and memories from her past about her family and birthdays and everyday life.
But of course, the packaging didn't prompt memories for me. These were Miho's memories and not mine because I grew up in the UK.
We all gather an ever-expanding collection of associations from the experiences we have. These create memories and they shape our interpretation of meaning.
Have you ever helped a child to learn to talk or to read? Well, you were watching them do something amazing. They were rewiring their brains. Our brains don't arrive in a box pre-installed with software.
We have to create neural connections and effectively wire our brains to do the most important things that we need. Like understanding the language of our family, recognizing their faces, and reading.
And we start to do this from a really young age, which means that the way each of our brains is wired is unique to every single one of us. No two brains are wired the same.
If sometimes it seems like someone else is perceiving the world differently to you, well, that's probably because they are.
Your brain is amazing. Its ability to create neural connections is called neuroplasticity and it carries on doing this throughout our lives.
When the brain first wired itself for reading, it repurposed existing circuits in order to recognize letters in different fonts. It adapted the circuitry for recognizing faces and the silhouettes of potential attacking predators to recognize different letter shapes.
The personal collection of memories and associations that we've each gathered, along with the different ways our brains are wired, means that human beings are such a wonderfully diverse species.
And there are three main reasons to embrace diversity, both for business sense and to be better human beings.
So first of all, to survive and thrive versus extinction. So, diversity is important for evolutionary survival. Different people with different skills and ways of understanding the world have ensured the species or their tribe has survived and thrived avoiding extinction.
Today, this applies to business survival too. We need a range of different people with different skills and ways of understanding the world to help a company or a department or a project to survive and thrive.
Secondly, creative thinking versus same old, same old. The more diverse our lived experiences, our backgrounds and our points of view, the more possibilities we can imagine. In the words of Forbes, investing in diverse teams creates a powerhouse of creativity. Having unique backgrounds contributes to a collective imagination that's rich, varied, and capable of thinking beyond traditional boundaries because ideation draws from a wider set of experiences.
Diversity shapes meaning. You tell a joke but nobody gets it.
Well, things have different meanings for different people. We all have different references and experiences, and meaning at the end of the day is created in the mind of the beholder.
As designers, we need to empathize with the diverse audiences that we're designing for to ensure that our work is inclusive and resonant. And when design overlooks diversity, when it stops being inclusive, it narrows the potential audience. It perpetuates stereotypes and it marginalizes groups of people.
Your audience, we, want to feel seen and heard.
After over a decade of running mass participation experiments, I've had insights into just how wonderfully different we all are. While there are clear patterns in my findings, there are also differences. I love the unexpected answers and the experiments that go wrong. These teach me so much more and they challenge my assumptions.
So I see fonts as personalities. Do you? Now this is one of the first questions I started asking when I began to run my experiments. And I created a font set just to find out do other people see fonts as personalities too. And if they do, then are their personality pairings the same as mine? So, the first results to come in were from the typeface Bauhaus. Only I thought something must have gone wrong. Why were people saying things like "silly" and "clown" and "donuts"? With my designer knowledge, I expected something so much more serious and intellectual, perhaps linked to the art movement of the same name.
But then I split the answers out so I could compare those from designers with those from non-designers. And the non-designers were much more likely to describe how the font made them feel. But the designers answered things like architecture and technical and art movements based on what they've learned and what they already knew. And so, it turns out that as designers, we're more likely to be deferential about styles we've learned about. We bestow them with properties and qualities that are linked to their backstories.
And it turns out Bauhaus isn't the only one. Helvetica is also split between history informed properties like intellectual and intelligent and stylish in contrast with comments like "meh" or "dull" or it feels like boring tax forms.
So let me show you what happens in my brain. Type foundry monotype or EEG headsets to Adobe MAX a couple of years ago, these measured our brainwave activity while we were looking at different typefaces. So here I am wearing the headset. And you would think that my brain knows which typefaces to take seriously, right? Yeah. But no. The ones that evoke the biggest response were usually the unusual ones that I wouldn't consider using. So here is my brain piquing at curiosity.
It reacted more to fonts that evoked feelings than the serious ones that I'd learned about.
And so why is it so useful to know how typography makes us feel? Well, Professor Gerald Zaltman from the Harvard Business Business School famously says that up to 95% of our decisions are made in the subconscious. And now our subconscious deals in feelings.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow that our subconscious is thousands of times faster and more powerful than our conscious brain.
And this means we can overcome the onslaught of stimuli in our environment which our slower conscious brains would be overwhelmed by.
So when we're in designer mode, we think about type a lot. We've learned the rules, we've learned the history, and our eyes are tuned in to noticing all of those details.
But when we're in consumer mode, we feel first. And this happens instinctively and automatically.
So, we're now in a time of feelings first design. Signals for this include the rising interest in neuro-esthetics, the name of Jessica Walsh's new type foundry, Type of Feeling, and the new FEEL ME exhibition at Trapholt Museum in Denmark, which looks amazing.
And of course, there's my research which I've been doing for quite a few years now.
So designing for function, yes, it's important. But as designers, it's important for us to remember that we're designing for the consumer's subconscious brain and the subconscious deals in feelings.
Now even diversity is diverse. Humans vary in so many wonderful and different ways and imagine how dull this planet would be if we were all the same.
When I set up Type Tasting back in 2013 and I started to do lots of mass participation experiments, I discovered that, in reality, I wasn't even exploring typography. Typography, it turned out, was just a medium for exploring human behavior and for taking a look at our inner world of experience.
I realized that I was really investigating bias and feelings and how differently we each perceive the world.
How many associations do you think are truly universal? Can you think of a logo that the majority of people across the world might recognize? Well, there's not really many of them. Maybe this is one that you could have been thinking of. And of course, you can recognize this even from a sliver of what's a fake logo and the color.
Which of these signs would you be most likely to believe? Well, just like your ancestors, you needed to know quickly if something is safe or dangerous because your sight is, after all, your screening sense, and you need to know whether you need to react quickly.
Most people choose B, the minimalist sans serif style. It's the convention for warning signs throughout the US and the UK and many other countries. You've learned this. It's a shortcut. It's a bias. Biases are shortcuts. Sometimes they're useful, but other times they become outdated and we need to check-in on them and update them or change them completely.
We also need to know whether these conventions are universal or when they differ from culture to culture. So, what do danger signs look like in other countries and in other languages? And if we're working on a project to be launched in a different country or for a different group of people, we need to collaborate with people from that audience to find out what we don't know.
Otherwise, we're in danger of coming up with cringy or even offensive work, like when the World Archery Foundation used a cliched chop suey font to celebrate the South Korean Women's Olympic archery team in 2021. That's so recent. They could have done this differently.
What kind of music would you expect to hear on this record? Can you hear it in your head? I paired this letter with heavy metal. But then it started to surprise me to discover how much the answers varied when I asked a big audience. And it turns out it depends on your tastes and where and when you grew up and what you've experienced. So this is just a selection of the answers. There are, of course, many more. And this typeface also has dark associations that really wouldn't be appropriate in some connotations, in some contexts.
When we're using expressive type styles to build layers of meaning, we need to make sure that the associations work and are appropriate for the relevant audience.
Now it's always surprised me how different everybody's answers are when I run my experiments. The unexpected answers are the best ones because they teach me something different or they reveal an interesting story.
When the three people at the event paired the smell of lavender with option A, we were all intrigued by their choice. But then it turned out that all three of them were flat mates and that the air freshener in their bathroom was lavender scented. So when they smelled lavender, it was a warning that meant go away because it was masking a much more unpleasant smell. And it made sense for them to pair it viscerally, emotionally, with the jagged and aversive option A because the smell was a warning of danger.
So this is experiential diversity. We all have our own different experiences to refer to. My experiences are different to yours. And we need to consider what messages will be read between the lines when we're designing for audiences.
Now I think back to my days as a rookie designer and I cringe at how I sometimes argued when somebody said, "Make the type bigger." I sort of knew that our eyesight changes as we get older, but I didn't really get it because I hadn't experienced it for myself.
I just thought that being asked to make the type larger was ugly.
Now from the age of 35, the lens in your eye becomes less flexible. This makes it harder to focus on near objects and to read small type. And now I know this from experience, and also how excluded it can make me feel when the type is too small to read. And in workshops, I sometimes give out glasses that are designed to alter your eyesight so that you can literally read through somebody else's eyes.
We all come in different shapes, sizes, ages, and bodies with a wide variety of physical attributes and needs.
What do I need to be aware of when I'm designing for people who are not me? Ideally, we'll work with a physically diverse team. This means we can combine our insights and we can understand the biases we might not otherwise be aware of. And of course, test our designs on our audience in situ and under the right lighting conditions.
And remember that the way each of our brains is wired is unique to every single one of us. No two brains are wired exactly the same.
If sometimes it seems like someone else is perceiving the world differently to you, that's probably because they are.
Have you ever wondered, do you see the same blue sky that I see? This is an example of a perceptual diversity conundrum. Professor Anil Seth researches and writes about this, that every brain experiences reality differently.
An example is synesthesia, a topic that I love. This is a rich and fascinating area of perceptual diversity. It's where the senses are linked in ways that are usually unique to every single synesthete.
And this, of course, is a topic that's enough for a whole talk and I spoke about it at MAX a couple of years ago.
Now I know that my brain is a bit, well, interesting.
I have no internal compass, so I get lost all the time. Numbers jumble themselves up and I notice connections all the time everywhere and I can't turn it off.
I always assumed that everybody else functions like this until I discovered that they don't.
Cerebral diversity or neurodiversity seems to be experienced more widely in the creative and entrepreneurial worlds. While it's well documented that 15% to 20% of the world's population is neurodivergent, creative review reports that this increases to up to 50% for those working in the creative industries. And dyslexia expert Dr. Gordon F. Sherman uses the term cerebral diversity to describe how we need for the evolution of the species to have different organizations of the brain.
Professor Marianne Wolfe is an expert on dyslexia. She says, "There's no coincidence that about 35% of entrepreneurs today and undoubtedly the history of art and artists and architects over the last two centuries have a history of dyslexia." Entrepreneur Richard Branson says dyslexic thinking is a skill that can give you an edge at work.
You're likely to have strong problem-solving skills, great imagination, and creative big picture thinking.
And LinkedIn has now added dyslexic thinking as a skill.
And yet as designers, we're encouraged to speak to dyslexics in Comic Sans.
If you're over the age of eight, how does this make you feel? Being dyslexic doesn't mean we want to be spoken to in a childlike voice.
And Comic Sans isn't even dyslexia friendly in the first place. It's a myth and here's the research to prove it. As part of a project to design a typeface for the globally viewed British broadcast service, the BBC, the readability group surveyed over 2,200 people. They tested 20 fonts, most of which were Sans Serifs for the purpose of this project, and each font was viewed over 16,800 times.
Now as you can see from the results, the three types that performed worst were the alleged dyslexia friendly fonts, including Comic Sans.
Out of the 20 tested, the best standard font was Verdana. And of course, this doesn't mean that you should always use Verdana. Please don't. The research finding give you really good clues and actionable insights that can help you choose the most accessible and inclusive fonts for your project. Watch the video about the research to find out more. The link is in the info sheet.
Now there are myths bouncing around about other supposedly neurodiverse friendly fonts and reading systems, and some of these make really big claims. But my recommendation is to always look for the science. What research has been done? What are the sources and where are they? Can you see them? And who commissioned it and why? But of course, if you find a particular font or reading system that works for you, then that's great. Keep using it. Just because it works for you, remember it doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody else.
We don't all experience the world as the same. This is because of how our brain is wired, our perception, and what we expect because we've experienced it before. And this combination is unique to every single one of us.
In other words, meaning is created by our experiences.
And sometimes, the divergence in meaning is small and negligible. Other times, it can be culturally fundamental. I have a question for you. Which of these two robots is walking forward into the future, A or B? Well, the correct answer is both. However, your answer most likely depends on the language you grew up reading. If you answered A, you most likely grew up reading a language like Arabic, which reads from right to left. So forward or future for you is likely to be to the left.
And if you answered B, you most likely grew up reading a language that uses the Latin alphabet, an alphabet that reads from left to right, so forward or the future view is most likely to be on the right. This is direction bias. It's a learned shortcut that shapes cultural representation of past and future, and it's created by something as seemingly invisible and every day as how you read.
So, when might this matter? Well, if you're designing adverts, how the eye moves forward across the space on a page or whether you want objects like cars or people's faces to be facing the future or facing the past.
Now we know that we each experience the world differently. So how can we become more aware of the assumptions we might be making? Well, we can surround ourselves with people who think differently to us and listen to them, of course, but we don't always have other people around us to ask.
So a technique that I use is one that author Noella Walsh calls decision friction. The idea is to deliberately interrupt our own thoughts before forming a judgment. It's about adding friction to the decision-making process and asking, "What assumptions am I making here?" So think about a project that you're currently working on. At what point could you interrupt the process to ask yourself, "Am I considering feelings as well as function? What assumptions am I making? And how can I test this project on the right audience?" When we consider the world through the experience of others, we operate with empathy.
We create designs that are inclusive and resonant by being aware of diversity and designing for feelings as well as for function.
This makes us better designers and better human beings.
[Music]
