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Kermit: A typeface for kids

microsoft.design

91–100 of 181 posts

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#92

Yikes, I gave up reading this after about 20 seconds, idk what it was but this font is unreadable.

It feels fatiguing to read; and I'm supposedly in one of their target demographics.

Personally I've always found Monospace fonts the easiest like Microsoft's Courier New or Consolas. It feels like you're time travelling back to the 1980s visually, but they're so comfortable to read because your brain can make assumptions which are accurate.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#93
Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.

I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#95

> While we haven’t implemented automatic prosody yet That is a really interesting use for LLMs I would never have even considered. The example video with JFK's speech is pretty compelling.

I think the JFK video is actually not a great example. When the video turns the sound off, the audio clip is so well known that I think your brain fills in the inflection and JFKs way of speaking. I think a better example would be to take a relatively unknown speech and do the same thing to see if the subtitles can communicate the prosody of speech or not.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#96
post #55

> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension. As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet). In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own s…

As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, becaus…

School administrators sometimes implement the stupidest policies based on correlations of various strengths. But even a strong correlation might have nothing to do with causation.

E.g.: A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#98
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say this. I don't get why this is necessary at all - it's literaly just bog-standard scrolling content?

I'm convinced most "designers" in big tech are just trolling at this point.

It’s akin to fashion designers sending models out in burlap sacks.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#100
post #55

> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension. As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet). In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own s…

As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, becaus…

Psychology is filled with bad science and bad scientists. It's not that good psychology research doesn't exist, it is just rare.
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