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D is for discomfort

In my article enti­tled E is for erring, I talked about a mast­head design I did for our weekly digest mail which made a lot of people feel uneasy due to the typog­raphy. I offered a few exam­ples of the nega­tive responses people had, I offered a spec­u­la­tive cause for the phenom­enon, and I described what I did to rectify the problem. The image below is the mast­head in ques­tion (a.k.a. “the problem”), which has since been changed.

The initial masthead design for Embrace ASD’s Autism Weekly.

Since I published that article, I have received a lot more nega­tive responses. In this post, I would like to share some of those, given the homo­geneity (i.e. same­ness) in responses from autistic people.


Discomfort

It has really surprised me to find out how common it appar­ently is among autistic people to feel discom­fort and nausea when looking at wavy shapes, or shapes that are other­wise sugges­tive of move­ment.

Although I do have sensory issues as well (espe­cially with partic­ular lighting), I don’t expe­ri­ence anything like the reports I have been getting on the display type­face I used above. The type­face in ques­tion is Digestive by Jérémy Landes (Studio Triple), which is a novel and masterful design, but appar­ently not equally digestible to everyone.

Digestive, a type­face autis­tics find hard to digest.

Jérémy states that Digestive delib­er­ately plays with this idea of discom­fort and disgust, but empha­sized that he did not want to discrim­i­nate any partic­ular group, but instead bring discom­fort uniformly to everyone. Although he knew that playing with legi­bility would bother some people, he showed intrigue at the idea that his type­face seems to evoke an intense response from autistic people in partic­ular.

So here are the responses I collected from autistic people, divided into three cate­gories (uneasy/discomfort, dislike/disturbance, and nausea/sickness):

 

Unease & discomfort

Eeeek that font genuinely makes me feel uncom­fort­able.
There is some­thing slith­ering about the move­ment in it. (Neil)

It also made me feel uncom­fort­able in my stomach and almost hurt
my eye to brain connec­tion, if that makes any sense.
Like I had to strain to focus to read it. (Wendy)

I just read the article and I have to admit that the double e
had a similar effect on me (unease). Strange! (Said)

I am very glad you changed it. It actu­ally does make my stomach feel uneasy.
And it just unset­tling in general for some reason. It would really be inter­esting to find out why we react that way and if it spills over to NT’s as well. (Alyson)

I did not like the orig­inal one. I can't explain why but it disturbed me enough that I would not read the newsletter. The simple one that you changed to feel better. It was a good creative attempt though, it just made me not feel good. (Kimberly)

THANK YOU!!! Thank you very much for listening to feed­back and critique in a construc­tive manner. Personally, the previous “e” design made me uncom­fort­able because to me they looked a lot like eyes. (Hugo)

I have to admit I keep staring at the type­face. I like it and the ‘ee’s make me uncom­fort­able. I’m not sure what that says about me?! (Ziggy)

I just clicked on the link and scrolled down curious.. when I got to the mast­head I had to squint my eyes and scroll until it was no longer on the screen! I managed to look at it for maybe a few seconds before I started to feel uncom­fort­able… mostly in and behind my eyes.

It was a defi­nite phys­ical sensa­tion and aver­sion rather than anything else. (Hollie)

 

Dislike & disturbance

While it is not “finger­nails on the chalk­board” bad, it is disturbing visu­ally. More like squeaking chalk which is annoying to me but does not make me invol­un­tarily cringe like the finger­nails does. (David)

It makes me feel nause­ated and uneasy. I don’t know why.
I just really dislike it and it makes me uncom­fort­able. (Cain)

 

Nausea & sickness

I just felt really nauseous from looking at the ‘e’ 😅 (Agnieszka)

Your first choice of type­face made me feel instantly nauseous as well.
Something to do with swirly move­ment. (Francesca)

Made me feel sick just looking at it.
Also makes me think of tape­worms, espe­cially their segments…
If you took the outlines of tape­worms I’d imagine it looks like that font. (Tania)

Funnily enough, fluo­res­cent lights aren’t gener­ally prob­lem­atic for me, but the wibbly wobbly timey wimey font made me feel really nauseous – and, yes, the e was the worst. A horrible sensa­tion, really. (Caroline)

Thank you for changing it. The other one was hard to read
and would make people sick if they read it while moving. (Jane)

It reminds me of Jaegermeister. It’s kind of great but also kind of sick­ening. It defi­nitely makes me motion-sick, like trying to read in a moving car. I like the indi­vidual letters in the font, but it seems like the act of stringing the letters together is too much. (Aaron)

Ms. Anonymous shows that there may be more autistic people out there who felt too inse­cure to speak up and share their discom­fort:

Well, crap, this explains! I actu­ally discov­ered this thing I do when I don't like some­thing: hide. So, I saw the post where you asked for comments and I thought the font was hideous and it made me feel sick.

So, instead of saying this, I thought it’s some art I don't get, and so it must be my fault I don’t get its bril­liance. I said nothing. 🧐 And it both­ered me for this whole time!

I subscribed to the newsletter a good while ago and thought, well, looks like there are no new arti­cles, they’re on a dry spell. And then, this expla­na­tion shows me I just wasn't appre­ci­ating myself enough to speak my truth and ask for things! Autistic, a bit? 😆

So, thanks for the expla­na­tion and all, I’m a much happier person now, and will also pay atten­tion to standing up and saying stuff – more 🤩 (Anonymous)


NT responses

The discom­fort may be more common among—but not exclu­sive to—autistic people, based on a report by Aman:

Just a single data­point, but as an NT my imme­diate impres­sion of the logo is that it was unset­tling, partic­u­larly the e’s. I don’t tend to ever feel nause­ated from the sight of things, but I reacted to it the same way I react to things that make most people nauseous.

For what it’s worth, I’ve taken some of those online assess­ments about neurotyp­i­cality and I certainly am more neuro­di­verse than the average person but am still prob­ably an NT. (Aman)

I tried to acquire more responses from neurotyp­ical people. I real­ized it’s not straight­for­ward to verify that someone is not autistic; just because someone thinks they are not autistic doesn’t neces­sarily mean they aren’t. But if we accept that these people are indeed neurotyp­ical, then indeed autistic people are not alone in their discom­fort:

I’m not autistic, but I am an engi­neer, so maybe I have some traits in common. I find the wavy lines disturbing in a way I can’t define and uncom­fort­able to view. I wouldn’t read a page with that font at the top. (Jeff)

I’m not autistic, but I do find it a little uncom­fort­able once I reach those much-maligned ‘E’s. They just seem to stop me in my tracks; passing over them to reach the ‘K’ feels more like drag­ging my eyes out of them. It doesn’t make me feel nauseous or anything, just slightly dizzy and lost. (Callum)

As a neurotyp­ical it makes no sense at all to me. (Cheri)

It will have to be scien­tif­i­cally tested whether there is statis­tical signif­i­cance to the discom­fort and nausea reported by autistic people compared to non-autistic people.


Research

In my previous article on this, I don’t think I estab­lished the actual cause of this phenom­enon, so if you have ideas about how to research this or what research to explore, I would love to know!

Carolyn alluded to one possible expla­na­tion:

Oddly, it doesn’t bother me as much looking at a large version of the ‘e’ in isola­tion.
I think it may have to do with the way the eyes scan and jump whilst reading that trig­gers the queasi­ness when it is used as a font. (Carolyn)

Thomas also figured there is some­thing about the effort it takes to deci­pher that causes discom­fort:

The ‘e’ you show here does some­thing visu­ally “uncom­fort­able”. There is some strange motion in the wavi­ness of the letter. It is hard to see first off as an ‘e’ and by context, I figured it out. Maybe it is disturbing because of the effort it takes to deci­pher the shapes into recog­niz­able words. It’s not just obscure but pushes some other button of uncom­fort­able. (Thomas)

Francesca offered another possible avenue for research on this:

Women are more suscep­tible to motion sick­ness (I have read). I wonder if there is a notice­able gender bias in the nega­tive feed­back you received. (Francesca)

Based on the responses received, it does seem there are more women reporting this sensory issue.


What is your expe­ri­ence of the type­face Digestive?
Do you think it relates to autism, or is it inde­pen­dent of it?

Digestive (typeface), Legibility, Motion sickness, Nausea, Neurotypical, Perception, Reading, Sensory differences, Sensory overload, Typefaces

Comments (2)

    • Interesting thought! That may very well contribute to the aver­sion we expe­ri­ence. I think it doesn’t quite explain the motion sick­ness some people expe­ri­ence, but there are prob­ably different factors that contribute to varying degrees depending on the person.

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