Can Typography have a Gender? Masculinity vs. Femininity on lifestyle magazine covers

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Language and Literature), course: Sociolinguistics and Varieties of English: Language and/ in Society, language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze and describe the typography, which is employed on the lifestyle magazine covers that seems to characterize and represent the ideologies of gender roles. The material of the study will be two title giants, the Women¿s Health and its male equivalent Men¿s Health. Different components of the two cover¿s typography and their representation of gender will be examined and compared. The covers will be analyzed using principles of the typographic communication theory by Jürgen Spitzmüller and branding to discuss the important typographic variants. Different components of typography will be examined to see whether or not typography plays a part in conveying gender roles, which would then have societal implications. If the typography on the cover is the same for the Women¿s Health as for the Men¿s Health and whether it represents gender ideologies will be the vital question of this paper.

In the course of digital mediazation, scriptural-graphic communication has become an everyday practice, and typography has been a fixed part of companies¿ corporate identity serving as a tool within written communication. Especially, in lifestyle magazines, the choice of typography as an identity-building stylistic element that is not to be underestimated. The digitization allows for more choice and control of how the consumer¿s text looks. Typography produced for magazine covers exists so that the reader can extract the meaning of the text in an efficient and effortless manner. However, from a sociolinguistic perspective, variations on the graphical level as well as on the social relevance of typography, can be viewed as a neglected research topic. Usually, research concerned with components of typography focuses on a semiotic point of view.