Which Parts Determine the Impression of the Font?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how specific local parts of fonts influence the overall impression they give, using a novel combination of SIFT and DeepSets for part extraction and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a new method combining SIFT and DeepSets to analyze font impressions based on local parts, enabling font-shape independent insights.

Findings

Fonts with similar parts tend to have similar impressions.

Certain impressions are strongly linked to specific font parts.

Some impressions are largely unaffected by font parts.

Abstract

Various fonts give different impressions, such as legible, rough, and comic-text.This paper aims to analyze the correlation between the local shapes, or parts, and the impression of fonts. By focusing on local shapes instead of the whole letter shape, we can realize letter-shape independent and more general analysis. The analysis is performed by newly combining SIFT and DeepSets, to extract an arbitrary number of essential parts from a particular font and aggregate them to infer the font impressions by nonlinear regression. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses prove that (1)fonts with similar parts have similar impressions, (2)many impressions, such as legible and rough, largely depend on specific parts, (3)several impressions are very irrelevant to parts.