Shannon Zenner’s new research explores how typography reflects political polarization | Today at Elon

Shannon Zenner, assistant professor of communication design, is a co-author of a newly published peer-reviewed study exploring how Americans attach political meaning to typography – revealing that fonts themselves can function as markers of affective polarization. The article appears in the December 2025 issue of Visual Communication Quarterly, a quarterly academic journal.

Titled “You’re Just Not My Type: How Attitudes Towards Fonts Explain Affective Polarization,” the study is co-authored by Katherine Haenschen of Virginia Tech, Zenner, and Jessica R. Collier of Purdue University. Through a series of survey experiments, the researchers examine how people interpret typefaces as political signals rather than neutral design choices. “Fonts have become another site where affective polarization shows up,” Zenner said. “People are not just polarized about parties and candidates, but also about visual design choices that they interpret as political signals.”

The research finds that when individuals like a typeface, they are more likely to perceive it as sharing their political views. When they dislike a typeface, they tend to associate it with the political out-group. These effects are especially strong among people with more intense partisan identities.

Those perceptions are reinforced by consistent partisan patterns in typographic preference. This study builds on previous research (Haenschen & Tamul, 2019), which found that Republicans are more likely to gravitate toward serif typefaces, while Democrats more often prefer sans serif – preferences that function as subtle but meaningful political cues.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate that typography plays a role in shaping impressions of credibility, professionalism and ideological tone – often before audiences engage with the written message itself. “Typography is not neutral,” Zenner said. “It shapes perceptions before people read the content.” The findings extend earlier work on political branding and design, situating typography within broader conversations about polarization and visual communication.

Zenner’s expertise was recently featured in an interview with Dezeen, which published a Dec. 11 story on the U.S. State Department’s decision to abandon Calibri and return to Times New Roman as its official typeface. In the piece, Zenner discussed how design decisions in government communication can become politicized, particularly when accessibility is involved. She noted that the framing of Calibri as a “wasteful DEIA program” illustrates how even typographic choices can be pulled into partisan narratives – a real-world example that mirrors the study’s findings on how fonts operate as political signals.