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How to manipulate people with font type? (scientificamerican.com)
49 points by JarekS on April 25, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments


Original, and far more meaningful and accurate, title: A Recipe for Motivation: Easy to Read, Easy to Do.


For the first 20 minutes this post had different title (much closer to the original one). No one has voted.

I thought of a little experiment and put on much more provocative title - and what do you know! It ended up on the main page few minutes later...


I see. So it's basically "how to manipulate Hacker News readers by using a hyped up headline"?


Hyped up? Maybe a little. But notice the font! It's totally readable! :)


Welcome to social media.


The current title ("How to manipulate people with font type") relays two pieces of information about the article: that it is about fonts, and that it is about psychology (manipulation of people). The original article title does neither, at least to one who has not yet read the article--it could be about those inspirational posters, for all I know.

Though perhaps the title changed between our comments? I cannot tell.


Psychology is "manipulation of people"? Really. I didn't know that.


No, but manipulation of people is largely applied psychology.


I would be far more interested to know how similarly "easy-to-read" typefaces fared. Does an androgynous typeface like Helvetica have a different result than one more aligned with a gender? Does one with sharp aggressive serifs like the Copperplate family cause a different reaction than the smoother Garamond?


How about telling us what font type is best for various writing situations.




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