Association is a vehicle to express meaning. A party invitation, for instance, contains a happy message, which is best supported visually by a typeface that people consider to look happy. When the invitee opens the card and sees with round shapes, he will have a good indication of what the message content will be even before having read the text. This will be because the reader immediately associates the casual shape of these conspicuous characters with a casual setting. In this instance, the characteristics of the typeface used were only assumed to correspond to certain characteristics of a party setting. However, it would be tempting to believe that they do indeed trigger these associations in the minds of most people. Another example of association is the common use of the following typeface on . In this case, people do not need to read the words to know that they are looking at a university student, since that particular typeface is exclusively used in one context.

With these two examples, two kinds of association have been introduced, which could call association of personality and association through convention respectively. Whereas the first example is based on features shared by the typeface and a sensation of happiness, the second results from shared knowledge and is not based on shared features. Personality implies a subjective link between character form and the impression it evokes. Convention, on the other hand, does not; it is based on an arbitrary link established by frequency of use by a number of people.