by selina.pichler -

20*A Semester in Print – Looking Back and Looking Forward

Every research project begins with a suspicion.

Not a hypothesis in the formal academic sense, necessarily. More of a feeling. A hunch that something you have noticed repeatedly in the world around you is worth examining more carefully. For this semester’s blog series, that suspicion was relatively straightforward: that analogue political media is not simply a leftover from a pre-digital era, but an active, meaningful and ideologically loaded form of communication that continues to shape how people understand politics in public space.

Nineteen blog posts later, that suspicion has largely held up.

But the process of testing it – through design theory, cultural criticism, printing, and finally a small survey conducted on the streets of Graz – turned out to be considerably more layered than the original hunch suggested.

The semester began with questions about why physical political media still matters at all. In a media environment dominated by algorithmic feeds, disappearing content and endlessly optimised digital branding, the persistence of posters, stickers, banners and printed pamphlets seemed worth accounting for. The answer that emerged across the early posts was not simply nostalgic. Physical political media occupies space in a way digital communication cannot replicate. It confronts rather than competes. It persists. It deteriorates. It leaves traces – on walls, and in memory – in ways that a sponsored post optimised for a six-second attention window simply does not.

From there, the series moved into the mechanics of political visual language: how colour, typography and composition function as ideological shorthand, communicating political orientation before a single word is consciously processed. This was perhaps the most theoretically dense section of the semester, drawing on design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics to build an argument that visual literacy is not a specialist skill but a widely shared cultural competence, absorbed through years of repeated exposure to political environments.

The argument about analogue authenticity followed naturally from this. Imperfection, it turns out, is itself a form of communication. Rough textures, visible print processes and DIY aesthetics signal human involvement, collective effort and resistance to institutional polish in ways that highly produced digital branding cannot easily replicate – even when it tries to imitate them.

Then came the practical work.

Designing the survey sheets forced every theoretical argument back into lived decision-making. Choosing colours meant navigating real cultural associations. Selecting typefaces meant working within – and sometimes deliberately against – the visual conventions that Austrian political culture has built up over decades. The design process confirmed, from the inside, what the theoretical posts had argued from the outside: there is no neutral visual choice in political communication. Every decision encodes something.

Printing confirmed it further, and added a complication. The colour divergence between the digital and risograph versions of the survey was not ideal from a methodological standpoint. It was, however, honest. Real analogue political communication does not exist in controlled conditions either. It is produced under time pressure, with available materials, in imperfect environments. The imprecision of the riso output felt, in retrospect, less like a research flaw and more like an accidental confirmation of the series’ central argument about the material nature of analogue media.

The survey results themselves were, broadly, what the theoretical framework predicted. Colour associations mapped closely onto local Austrian political conventions. Typography produced consistent ideological readings along the lines that design theory would anticipate. And the risograph format was reliably perceived as more liberal or radical than its digitally printed equivalent – a finding that felt almost too clean, and yet was grounded in the very real cultural associations that riso printing carries within contemporary visual and political culture.

The results mostly matched expectations. But matching expectations is not the same as being unsurprising.

There is a difference between believing something theoretically and watching it confirmed by a stranger on a street in Graz who glances at a printed sheet and immediately, without hesitation, places it politically. That moment – repeated across participants, across design variations, across printing formats – was genuinely striking. It made the abstract arguments feel suddenly very concrete. Visual political literacy is not a theoretical construct. It is something people actually do, quickly and confidently, without being asked to think about it.

That is the detail that will stay with me from this semester.

Not a particular survey result. But the speed of recognition. The automaticity of it. The way a person looks at a slightly misregistered riso print of three generic political words and immediately, instinctively, knows what kind of politics it is supposed to feel like.

There is a great deal more to understand about how that process works. How it differs across demographics and political contexts. How it changes over time as visual conventions shift. How it interacts with the circulation of political media in specific urban environments. How it might be deliberately disrupted or subverted by designers working against established ideological codes.

These are questions for a master’s thesis.

And after a semester spent moving from theory to design to printing to streets and back again, I cannot wait to keep asking them!

See you next semester!

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.
  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
by selina.pichler -

18*Reading Type – What Fonts Told People About Politics

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.