I'm a typography fan, but let's admit it - 90% of the world population could live in world where Courier and Comic Sans would be the only fonts avaiable and would not notice a thing.
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If you had made the font choices Times New Roman and Arial, I'd have said it's 99.99%.
You need at least one monospace font. I'll die on that hill. Throw one in and I'm on your side.
Jokes aside, given all four combinations of serif/sans * proportional/monospace, with a good variety of weights and italics, and you’ll have covered the vast majority of use cases.
Done: Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier — because that's a name known to "normies" — it is!
I accept, thanks comrade.
Don’t you dare forget Papyrus!
https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=GYj6XGNv2AMAZqCg
But, the reality is 99.9999% of websites can use one of the free Google fonts. The other .0001% could too, but they want to show that they are not like all the other websites.
The ability of readers to identify a font is largely orthogonal to the psychological/emotional impact it has on them. Designers use distinctive fonts because they transmit a, mostly subconscious, feeling—reliability, innovation, vision, purpose, etc. This is usually tied to a brand and becomes a major part of a company's image, in which case it is crucial to the company's market reach. This is why there are many logotypes that consist of nothing more than the company name in a specific font. Typefaces are _that_ powerful.
So, yes, people would notice if most brands started "feeling" the same.
> they transmit a, mostly subconscious, feeling—reliability, innovation, vision, purpose, etc.
I do not believe this for a second. Has there been any serious research done on this?
Not sure what you mean by "serious", but this is well known in design circles. Maybe this[1] will convince you?
Typography is visual design after all, and is not any different from other design elements we see all around us. It's obvious that it has an impact in how we perceive and experience brands, and the source of any text we read.
[1]: https://www.monotype.com/company/news/monotype-study-shows-t...
Thank you. Also found additional discussion in https://designmodo.com/font-psychology. I'm still skeptical that there is anything intrinsic about the meanings specific fonts convey outside of being used in previous contexts (e.g. conveys "fashionable" because it's overused in fashion industry, per one example). That said, I'm more open to the idea of font psychology now.
That study was funded by Monotype, a company with an incentive to find the result they found. Is it any more credible than other corporate funded research?
That study is interesting to understand the psychological effects of typography. It's not needed to prove that typography _has_ a psychological effect, which we've known for decades.
A sibling comment pointed out font psychology, which you might want to look into. Most of this is rooted in visual design, which is an inexact science, so you probably won't find the type of studies you want to see, for the same reason you won't find studies about other art forms.
Do you not believe in subconscious psychological effects of esthetic choices in general, or just when it comes to typography? If the latter, what about type makes it different from things like color, position, hierarchy, etc.?