FontLex: A Typographical Lexicon based on Affective Associations

Abstract

The task of selecting suitable fonts for a given text is non-trivial, as tens of thousands of fonts are available, and the choice of font has been shown to affect the perception of the text as well as of the author or of the brand being advertized. Aiming to support the development of font recommendation tools, we create a typographical lexicon providing associations between words and fonts. We achieve this by means of affective evocations, making use of font–emotion and word–emotion relationships. For this purpose, we first determine font vectors for a set of ten emotion attributes, based on word similarities and antonymy information. We evaluate these associations through a user study via Mechanical Turk, which, for eight of the ten emotions, shows a strong user preference towards the fonts that are found to be congruent by our predicted data. Subsequently, this data is used to calculate font vectors for specific words, by relying on the emotion associations of a given word. This leads to a set of font associations for 6.4K words. We again evaluate the resulting dataset using Mechanical Turk, on 25 randomly sampled words. For the majority of these words, the responses indicate that fonts with strong associations are preferred, and for all except 2 words, fonts with weak associations are dispreferred. Finally, we further extend the dataset using synonyms of font attributes and emotion names. The resulting FontLex resource provides mappings between 6.7K words and 200 fonts.