Comment by dhosek
10 hours ago
At the 1996 ATypI meeting in Den Haag, one of the speakers coined the term “sterotypography” to refer to certain cliches that get used in type usage. Another case of this is the use of Neuland and Neuland Inline to represent Africa, and of course the assortment of faux Chinese fonts that were ubiquitous on Chinese takeout menus in the 80s and 90s (and probably still are, but are there still takeout menus in the era of Grubhub?).
We use this sort of short hand all the time.
There's "ye olde" in a gothic font.
Walk into a super market, every product is giving you non textual clues as to what it is, and why it's different from the identical thing right next to it.
You notice the odd ones out because you have to stop and work out what the thing is.
Edit. An example is spreadable 'butter', in the UK and Europe you can't say it's butter, it doesn't say it's butter, but I bet most people have never noticed that because it's in butter type packaging with the design language you'd expect.