In my investigation into aesthetic, I have spent a fair amount of space trying to understand how my history has informed my aesthetic, and how I’ve been conditioned to respond to stimuli in specific ways. However, I have thus far neglected to address a psychological perspective.
In 2004, Helmut Leder and his colleagues proposed a model of aesthetic experience (see below) which has been used by several psychologists in order to further understand the ways in which people respond to art and cultivate their aesthetic. |
1. Perceptual processing stage
2. Implicit memory processes 3. Explicit classification stage 4. Cognitive mastering 5. Aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion |
While much research has been done with traditional art pieces, little has been done investigating typefaces for the same sort of aesthetic experience, and it’s clear from looking at Leder’s model why: for something to even get past the first stage of perceptual processing it has to be classified as art. In Leder’s case, this context was often given. If someone was viewing a piece in a museum they could readily assume that the piece was commonly understood as artwork. Typography is much trickier considering that most people interact with typefaces exclusively as a vehicle for information transmission rather than art. So in order to get past Leder’s initial stage, we must train our brains to interact with letterforms as images, rather than language.
After that, the implicit memory process can begin. Within this stage we look at a piece of art for three main things: familiarity, prototypicality (the idea that a work of art is representative of other works of art), and discontinuity, which Leder refers to as peak shift. The best example I have of this stage is from my own history. In eighth grade, I could easily associate a scripted font with the adjective ‘girly’ because I had seen other girls write in a way that looked similar to that. This leads us to the explicit classification stage. This stage is most concerned with classifying something based solely on its physical elements. This is the first schema that is built. Our brain takes in the physical characteristics and sorts them with things that are similar. With my experience with typefaces I noticed this stage happening when I learned the words ‘serif’ and ‘sans serif’ and was able to distinguish between them. Separating serifs from sans serifs allowed me a way to talk about typography more specifically. In the cognitive mastering and evaluation stage, these classifications become more robust. When I was learning those classifications, I was absorbing not just the knowledge needed to identify each typeface, but the more subtle social environment associated with this learning as well. I learned how to classify typefaces in my journalism class in high school where we were using type in a standard and strategic way. We were going for the most readability – and Myraid Pro and Adobe Garamond Pro came out on top. I was learning the reasons why these choices were made, and how to classify them (explicit classification), but I was also learning that that a person could make incorrect typeface choices when I heard my advisor react negatively to seeing cooper black and comic sans. There was a lot of implicit social pressure present in that situation. Learning the differences between typefaces became a valuable skill; one that would give me both a protection against wrong choices and a feeling of superiority over those who didn’t have my knowledge set. It was no longer enough that a typeface fit a particular mood, but it needed to look good as well. No one laid out a road map for ‘good’ but I picked things up almost by osmosis by watching how others responded to letters and adding those typefaces to my schema. The cognitive mastering and evaluation stage is all about asserting value judgments contextualized by information other than personal experience. A ‘feeling’ – like what I was going off when pairing font choices so many years ago – was no longer enough. The aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion stage is the result of two differing ways of going through the stages. A person achieves an aesthetic judgment with a successful completion of the cognitive mastering and evaluation stage. Throughout his work Leder points out that this is often the result for experts, or people who have been studying the field for a while now. A lay-person often experiences an aesthetic emotion. Some of the cognitive elements are still lost on the lay-person, and they may not be able to quite articulate what minute details they’re reacting to, or why they are reacting to it, but the person can feel the difference. Leder separates these two endpoints, but in my experience they feel hopelessly intertwined. Regardless of how much I learn about Comic Sans’s history and am able to contextualize its existence, I can’t shake the emotional response I have to its doughy appearance any more than I can wipe it of its historical social disdain. Learning how to categorize it gives me more language with which to understand the typeface in context, but it doesn’t remove these other factors. Considering all of this, in my next section I will make immediate value judgments of system fonts, chart those judgments, and then see how analyzing those judgments helps me to better understand my current typographic aesthetic. |