The significance of typography in the linguistic landscape of the 1960s and 1970s: Hippie vs. punk
List of Authors
  • Coluzzi, Paolo

Keyword
  • Fonts, Hippies, Lettering, Psychedelic posters, Punks, Typography

Abstract
  • This article looks at the use of letterings and typefaces in the linguistic landscape through a comparison of hippie and punk concert posters. After a general introduction, some definitions and an overview on the hippie and punk movements and the posters they produced, the article introduces the methodology employed, which consisted of both an analysis of the lettering used in hippie and punk posters and a survey carried out among a sample of students at Universiti Malaya (Kuala Lumpur). This is followed by an analysis and a discussion of the data, which have led to two main findings: not only were the antithetical ideas behind these two youth movements portrayed through the specific lettering and fonts used, but the latter feature specific traits that may be linked to our mental processes and possibly our limbic system, the most primordial part of our brain.

Reference
  • 1. Amare, N., & Manning, A. (2012). Seeing typeface personality: Emotional responses to form as tone. Paper presented at the 2012 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, Orlando, FL, USA. Accessed 10 April 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/A_Manning/publication/261038657_Seeing_typeface_personality_Emotional_responses_to_form_as_tone/links/54ca8ce50cf22f98631b87af/Seeing-typeface-personality-Emotional-responses-to-form-as-tone.pdf
    2. Amazon. Accessed 11 June 2017. http://www.amazon.com (‘The hippies’, ‘Please kill me’)
    3. Androutsopoulos, J. (2004). Typography as a resource of media style: Cases from music youth culture.’ In K. Mastoridis (Ed.), Proceedings in the 1st international conference on typography and visual communication (pp. 381-392). Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia Press.
    4. Bar, M., & Neta, M. (2006). Humans prefer curved visual objects.’ Psychological Science, 17(8), 645-648.
    5. Bar, M., and Neta, M. (2007). Visual elements of subjective preference modulate amygdala activation. Neuropsychologia, 45, 2191-2200.
    6. Bertamini, M., Palumbo, L. Gheorghes, T. N., & Galatsidas, M. (2016). Do observers like curvature or do they dislike angularity? British Journal of Psychology, 107, 154-178.
    7. Brumberger, E. R. (2003). The rhetoric of typography: The persona of typeface and text. Technical Communication, 50(2), 206-223.
    8. Crystal, D. (1998). Toward a typographical linguistics. Type, 2(1), 7-23.
    9. D’Alessandro, J., & Terry, C. (Eds.) (2017). Summer of love: Art, fashion and rock and roll. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the University of California Press.
    10. Garfield, S. (2012). Just my type. New York: Avery.
    11. Google images. Accessed 5 June 2017. www.google.com (‘psychedelic posters’, ‘punk posters’)
    12. Hupka, R. B., Zaleski, Z., Otto, J., Reidl, L., & Tarabrina, N. V. (1997). The colors of anger, envy, fear, and jealousy: A cross-cultural study.’ Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 28(2), 156-171.
    13. Hyndman, S. (2016). Why fonts matter. Berkeley: Gingko Press.
    14. Järlehed, J., & Jaworski, A. (Eds.) (2015). Social Semiotics, 25(2).
    15. Järlehed, J., & Jaworski, A. (2015). Typographic landscaping: Creativity, ideology, movement. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 117-125.
    16. Järlehed, J. (2015). Ideological framing of vernacular type choices in the Galician and Basque semiotic landscape. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 165-199.
    17. Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: A new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235.
    18. Juni, S., & Gross, J. S. (2008). Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 106, 35-42.
    19. Koch, B. E. (2011). Human emotion response to typographic design. PhD diss. University of Minnesota, USA.
    20. Leeman, J., & Modan, G. (2009). Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(3), 332-362.
    21. Londoño, J. (2015). The Latino-ness of type: Making design identities socially significant. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 142-150.
    22. McNeil, L., & McCain, G. (2016). Please kill me: The uncensored oral history of punk. New York: Grove Press.
    23. Miller, T. (1999). The 60s communes: Hippies and beyond. New York: Syracuse University Press.
    24. Montgomery, S. B. (2016). Making a poster dance: Victor Moscoso’s four-dimensional posters and adventures in exhibition concept, design, and archiving. Reconstruction, 16(1), 1-23.
    25. Moretta, J. A. (2017). The hippies: A 1960’s history. Jefferson: McF.
    26. Morrison, G. R. (1986). Communicability of the emotional connotation of type. ECTJ, 34(4), 235-244.
    27. Palumbo, L., Ruta, N., & Bertamini, M. (2015). Comparing angular and curved shapes in terms of implicit associations and approach/avoidance responses. Plos One. Accessed 12 October 2019. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0140043
    28. Owen, T, & Dickson, D. (1999). High art: A history of the psychedelic poster. London: Sanctuary Publishing Limited.
    29. Oyama, T. (2003). Affective and symbolical meanings of color and form: Experimental psychological approaches. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 21(2), 137-142.
    30. Peterson, C. A. (2002). Photographic imagery in psychedelic music posters of San Francisco. History of Photography, 26(4), 311-323.
    31. Scollon, R., & Wong Scollon, S. (2003). Discourse in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge.
    32. Spitzmüller, J. (2012). Floating ideologies: Metamorphoses of graphic 'Germanness'. In A. Jaffe, J. Androutsopoulos, M. Sebba & S. Johnson (Eds.), Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power (pp. 255-287). Berlin: De Gruyter.
    33. Stöckl, H. (2005). Typography: Body and dress – A Signing mode between language and image. Visual Communication, 4(2), 204-214.
    34. Strain, C. B. (2017). The Long sixties: America, 1955-1973. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
    35. van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Typographic meaning. Visual Communication, 4(2), 137-143.
    36. van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Towards a semiotics of typography. Information Design Journal, 14(2), 139-155.
    37. Terry, C. (2017). Selling San Francisco’s sound: Artistry in 1960s rock posters. In J. D’Alessandro & C. Terry (Eds.), Summer of love: Art, fashion and rock and roll (pp. 31-51). San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the University of California Press.
    38. Triggs, T. (2006). Scissors and glue: Punk fanzines and the creation of a DIY aesthetics. Journal of Design History, 19(1), 69-83.
    39. Worley, M. (2011). One nation under the bomb: The Cold War and the British punk to 1984. Journal of the Study of Radicalism, 5(2), 65-83