IT'S one of the most visible choices Sen. Barack Obama has made, and it's burning up the blogosphere and YouTube, being debated on the radio, even parodied.
It's a typeface, of all things, one called Gotham that the Illinois Democrat chose for his rally banners and campaign signage, a collection of letter shapes some typographers are calling the hot font of 2008.
Though a discussion of fonts may seem obscure, anyone who has agonized over the look of a wedding invitation or spent hours sweating over a resume knows that letters can say nearly as much about a person as the words they spell out. And now that we are in the computer age, the message conveyed by a font is no longer subliminal, it's overt.
"We see type as the clothes that words wear," typographer Tobias Frere-Jones said. "You have more than one outfit in your closet, because you don't wear the same thing to the office that you'd wear to the beach."
Typefaces with big round O's and tails are considered more friendly, whereas linear fonts evoke overtones of "rigidity, technology and coldness," according to British psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman who published a 2001 study, "The Psychology of Fonts."
With artistic flourishes such as a tail on a lowercase "a," serif styles "conjure images of trustworthiness," whereas uncluttered sans serif styles "carry less emotional baggage," he says.
The serif typeface used in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's "Hillary for President" logo is New Baskerville, which is commonly used by book publishers, law firms and universities. The New York Democrat's choice has its roots in a 1757 typeface designed by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England.
Sen. John McCain's sans serif Optima is more recent, created in 1958 by Hermann Zapf (who, like the Arizona Republican, was once a POW). Simon Daniels, lead program manager of fonts for Microsoft's typography team, describes it as "classic, quirky, elite and just a bit old-fashioned" -- adjectives that dovetail with the candidate's cultivated image as a maverick.
Daniels noted, in addition to its role as a favorite of pharmaceutical packaging (Alka-Seltzer, for example) and hospital signage, one poignant and high-profile use of the typeface. "It's the same one used to engrave the names into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall," he said. "An interesting coincidence."
