Affective Font Selection: The Hybrid Of Japanese And Latin Typefaces

Typeface is a ubiquitous component in graphic design and multilingualism. It has increasingly become a common need in design works for people in different language systems. In this paper, we propose an affective font selection approach for exploring the juxtaposition of different languages. Japanese and English fonts are the targets. First, some evaluation experiments are conducted to gain the affective data for selected fonts. Second, these fonts are classified into several clusters proposed with similar affective propensity by hierarchical cluster analysis. Third, we analyze the relationships between type clusters and impressions by quantification theory type I. We propose to select and combine Latin and Japanese fonts in the clusters which have the closest relations with a specified impression. It is verified that the combination of Latin and Japanese type clusters could have a better effect than using original Latin letters designed with similar shape features in Japanese font packages.