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Kermit: A typeface for kids

microsoft.design

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Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#31

Post by jennyholzer »

The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.

Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.

In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.

Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.

Kermit will not survive.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#32

Post by JKCalhoun »

flusteredBias wrote: post #18

This is anecdotal and I hope someone who has some research experience can say whether this is true or not generally, but I recently got a Kindle and found that if I use really large font sizes where there are fewer than 50 words on a page it's easier for me to stay engaged. Maybe this has something to do with cognitive load or chunking information. Some fonts look quite a bit better at these large sizes. So for me I…

At the same time, don't all fonts, typographically, look better larger?

I don't know what the DPI of the Kindle display is. But since you called it out specifically, perhaps the issue you are having is more specific to that device. Contrast with how you perceive reading on a high-DPI laptop display perhaps.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#34

Post by nkrisc »

I thought the font was overall very pleasant easy to read… except for every variation of it beyond the standard weight. Every thin, bold, and italicized version of it I thought was actually quite difficult to read.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#36

Post by jennyholzer »

hajile wrote: post #23
iNic wrote: post #6

Is there any evidence that any font has a positive impact on reading (beyond obviously bad fonts being slow)? I'm very suspicious of this whole idea.

There's certainly a large amount of anecdotal evidence that a decent percentage of dyslexic people benefit from using Comic Sans. I don't know if there has ever been a formal study though. There's also a view that all dyslexia doesn't have a single cause. If that is true, then there may be different things that are helpful depending on the exact cause.

Comic Sans is a great font.

Kermit seems like an impressively shoddy imitation in my opinion.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#40

Post by abanana »

Pxtl wrote: post #8

Maybe it's easy for kids to read, but I found the font too bold and the letters too close-together to read comfortably. I gave up before I could read all their justifications for those decisions. But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.

> letters too close-together

The CSS has { letter-spacing: -.04rem; } It's across the entire site - no exclusion for this page (or for their .kermit-font class). So it appears they've missed the fact that they're altering the look-and-feel of the very font they're presenting in this post.

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