“Which of these typefaces match the taste of your coffee?” Sarah Hyndman asked the audience at the beginning of her Friday morning talk. After spending 15-20 years in graphic design, Sarah took a step back to “have a think” about whether what she does actually matters, asking herself, “does it make a difference? Does it bear out in this wider world of type consumers?” Sarah spent the last two years talking to mostly non-designers, answering “the most fundamental and difficult questions,” – “why does it matter? Prove it.”

But first, what exactly is typography?

Though typography is commonly believed to be a “dark, mysterious art shrouded in shadows,” type adds a richness to the world we live in, making it a more wonderful place. More specifically, Sarah defined type as a “carrier of words” – type is what our voice looks like, what language looks like. Functionally, type transmits nonverbal information.

To demonstrate, we played a round of Type Karaoke, during which the unrehearsed audience read each word on screen in one voice, the same tones and pitches. “Everyone instinctively understands,” Sarah noted, “it needs no further explanation.” In addition to the instinctive response to visual cues, there are two other learned methods of interpretation:

1. Instinctive responses based on the shapes of letter forms – for instance, angular shapes indicate danger, people are more biased toward contours that are rounded, etc.
2. Learned associations: our brains have a tendency to match new experiences with things they already know, to support preconceived notions of the world. This begins at a very early age.
3. Learned knowledge: this is the world of art critics and wine experts. In typography, there is an overwhelming wealth of information and complicated language to explain type.

 Typefaces communicate “a huge amount of information to our subconscious,” and “at any point, we can decide to consciously pay attention to typefaces.” Typography affects out how we feel, think, behave. With Type Tastings, Sarah investigates the association of different senses with typefaces, by matching smells and tastes to different typefaces. In one experiment, the typeface actually changed the way that a jelly bean tasted to participants.

What if, Sarah asks, we used these associations for good?

“Type is powerful,” Sarah concluded, “It makes our world a more evocative, magical place, and I’d like to share this with everybody.”