The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Behavior Lab designed a typeface called Sans Forgetica. Its purpose is very clear-to strengthen people's memory of the text through a special design based on cognitive psychology, and to make memory retention more durable.
This typeface is poured 8 degrees to the left (anti-slant), with truncations at key points of the stroke, which can be completed by the imagination of readers who have traditionally read by identifying the periphery of letters.
A large block of Sans Forgetica text looks like incomplete text, and readers need to read longer to extract information. This is exactly what the designers are aiming for. The main theory they rely on is "desirable difficulty". The key words of beneficial difficulty are "difficult" and "worthy". It refers to inserting an obstacle in a learning task, making it require more energy to complete, and these efforts will slow down the early learning progress. But the long-term payoffs certainly outweigh other simple tasks.
When reading the text in this font, the brain will naturally complete the letter prototype, which is equivalent to investing more time and brainpower to deal with incomplete information. The brain is involved in a deeper cognitive process, although it reduces Reading speed, however, also triggers memory.
According to the founder of the laboratory, Dr. Jo Peryman, a behavioral economist, typical fonts, such as Arial, Times and Helvetia, are too common, and people will not generate any memory traces (memory trace) in their brains at a glance; but For some fonts that are too special, the brain cannot perform deep processing, so there will be no memory traces. Sans Forgetica sits somewhere in between, "breaking just enough rules to leave a mark on the brain".
Working with Stephen Banham, lecturer in typography at RMIT's School of Design, the lab designed three typefaces for testing, each more radical than the previous, namely "void", "void and backslope", "void, Anti-slant and asymmetry" - which breaks two key design principles, that is, the use of anti-slant (our common italic is slanted to the right, and the font slanted to the left is only used to mark rivers on maps) and the middle of the letter void. They tested more than 100 students with three fonts and determined that the one that was the most memorable ("Gap and Slant") took longer, but not so unintelligible.
A test of 400 people proved that the font does help memorize the text slightly - the students who learned the Sans Forgetica and Arial texts respectively, the recall percentages of the texts reached 57% and 50%, respectively.
It was originally designed to help students through exam week, so it's available as a free download for everyone. Anyone can go to RMIT's website to convert their notes, download fonts or chrome browser plugins. It can also be used for learning foreign languages and can also help the elderly to strengthen memory. "But it's best not to use this font to print novels, or you will have a headache."
It was also an inspiring experience for project participants to see the intersection of disciplines turning theory into something truly useful.
Title image from RMIT
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