Colour may have spoken first, but typography had a great deal to say once people started listening.
The typographic findings from the survey were more nuanced than the colour results, which is perhaps unsurprising. Colour associations in Austrian political culture are deeply institutionalised through party branding. Typographic associations operate at a slightly different register – more diffuse, more culturally absorbed, less directly tied to specific parties, but nonetheless remarkably consistent across respondents once the patterns were examined.
The clearest pattern to emerge was this: playful, irregular or humanist typefaces were consistently read as more liberal, while rigid, highly geometric or authoritarian-feeling letterforms were placed toward the conservative end of the spectrum. This finding maps closely onto what design theory would predict, but seeing it confirmed through actual street-level responses rather than academic argument gave it a different kind of weight.
Smallcap non-serif fonts and clean, rounded serif designs were frequently described as feeling open, modern or progressive. Participants used words that suggested accessibility and approachability when encountering these typefaces. There was something in the visual softness of rounded letterforms, or the slightly informal register of smallcaps, that read as ideologically non-threatening – even welcoming. Ellen Lupton’s description of typography as a visual form of language that structures emotional tone before content is understood proved accurate in practice (Lupton, 2010). These fonts felt like a certain kind of politics before anyone processed what the slogan was actually saying.
Traditional serif fonts with strong contrast and angular construction, and particularly ultra-geometric typefaces with rigid proportions and minimal optical correction, were placed firmly in the conservative register. Their visual associations with authority, institutional solidity and historical continuity appeared to transfer directly into political perception. Respondents did not describe these designs as dangerous or radical – but they did describe them as formal, serious and established. In the context of a political slogan, formal and established reads as conservative almost automatically.
The all-caps variable produced one of the more striking results.
The survey included versions of the slogan written entirely in capital letters, and these were consistently rated as more conservative than lowercase or mixed-case equivalents using the same typeface. This is worth pausing on, because it suggests that capitalisation itself carries ideological charge independent of font choice. All-caps typography has a long association with authoritarian political communication – monumental inscriptions, propaganda posters, official proclamations. It communicates certainty rather than dialogue, declaration rather than invitation. Respondents appeared to absorb this association instinctively, even when the typeface beneath the capitalisation was otherwise relatively neutral.
This finding connects to broader arguments about how political communication frames its relationship with the audience. Progressive political design frequently uses visual strategies that suggest participation and openness – lowercase text, conversational tone, inclusive imagery. Conservative political communication more often relies on the visual rhetoric of declaration and stability. Capitalisation is a small but legible part of that rhetoric.
What the typography results also suggested was that participants were not simply responding to individual design elements in isolation. They were reading combinations. A playful font on a red background felt different from the same font on a blue background. A condensed serif in all-caps on a black field produced a different response than the same font in mixed case on a softer tone. The interaction between variables shaped the overall political impression more than any single element alone.
This confirms what the design process itself already suggested: political visual coding is a system, not a collection of individual signals. Its legibility comes from the accumulated pressure of multiple simultaneous cues pointing in the same ideological direction.
When they contradict each other, audiences notice. They hesitate. They qualify their answers.
When they align, the response is immediate.
And that immediacy is precisely what makes political design so powerful – and so worth studying carefully.
Sources:
- Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
- Crowley, D. (2013). Graphic Design and Protest. Design Issues, 29(3).
- Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
- Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
