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Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

sansforgetica.rmit

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Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#31

Post by diminoten »

erichurkman wrote: post #6
Freak_NL wrote: post #3

That font seems quite legible actually. The letters are all quite distinct and apart from the gaps and backward-slant, follow proper typographical conventions. I would have made the letters monospaced at least (no kerning either), and would have used base letter shapes that look much more alike (e.g., the bowls of the d, a, q, and c should be the same, because slight differences in them help you identify letters more…

Re: top-level domain, there's a good number of universities on the list. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db It's about $200k.

I think it's pretty cool! Would definitely matter to me from a "what school should I go to" standpoint.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#35

Post by NeedMoreTea »

make3 wrote: post #22
codetrotter wrote: post #8

> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing. But does the effectiveness of this hold up over time or will your brain get accustomed to the font after a while such that reading it eventually becomes no different than reading whatever…

exactly. after about 10 seconds, I had no difficulty reading it at all, just as if it was a regular font. I'm extremely skeptical of this

That may not matter if it's based on how many neurons are firing to read it as though a regular font.

If it needs more CPU usage maybe the reinforcement is stronger.

I'd love to see some studies on the effect to give something a little more concrete than a pretty graph.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#36

Post by jawns »

The basic idea has to do with a concept called processing fluency. Studies have shown that the harder your brain has to work to process the information, the more likely you are to absorb it -- at least to a point.

One recent study that manipulated processing fluency using a hard-to-read font is "Fluency and the detection of misleading questions: Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses illusion," Social Cognition, 2008.

The study found that people who read information in a hard-to-read font were better at spotting a certain category of error than people who read the same information in an easy-to-read font.

(Incidentally, this study is one that I adapted for my book "Experiments for Newlyweds: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform With Your Spouse," due out in April. So if you know any couples who'd like to try it out together, it makes a great wedding gift!)

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#38

Post by yorwba »

adrianmonk wrote: post #20
codetrotter wrote: post #8

> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing. But does the effectiveness of this hold up over time or will your brain get accustomed to the font after a while such that reading it eventually becomes no different than reading whatever…

I don't think it's true that all fonts eventually approach the same level of easy readability. Yes, you will get better at reading this font than you were at reading this font initially, but probably you still won't be able to read it as fast as you can read some other font.

This font has easily distinguishable glyphs for all letters. Some fonts make "Ill" looks like ||| and it's still possible to read most texts written in such fonts easily. Considering that it's possible to learn to read a completely different alphabet, I'm not convinced that there's anything to font legibility besides familiarity, so long as all glyphs are distinguishable.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#39

Post by metalliqaz »

jawns wrote: post #36

The basic idea has to do with a concept called processing fluency. Studies have shown that the harder your brain has to work to process the information, the more likely you are to absorb it -- at least to a point. One recent study that manipulated processing fluency using a hard-to-read font is "Fluency and the detection of misleading questions: Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses illusion," Social Cognition,…

Do any of those 50 experiments involve being naked? Asking for a friend.

Re: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes

#40

Post by slg »

liamzebedee wrote: post #13

I tweeted about this yesterday, from the article: > "Students remembered 57 per cent ... written in Sans Forgetica, compared to 50 per cent .... in Ariel" 7% delta retention isn't so much, is it?

You also have to factor in reading speed. If you can remember 7% more but end up reading more than 14% slower, you are better off reading more (or rereading) with the lower 50% retention rate.
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