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Kermit: A typeface for kids

microsoft.design

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Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#141

Post by tomatovole »

taco_emoji wrote: post #96
cjs_ac wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Somewhere out there, an economist who has dedicated their life to causal inference is crying

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#142

Post by Heliodex »

The wide (and growing, which is great) variety of fonts designed to be easily readable are so interesting to me because they all start with similar aims, use different metrics, and come up with wildly varying font designs.

Take Kermit, Inter, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Bookerly, and my personal favourite Lexend. They are all expertly designed, do great work at improving readability and legibility, though have very different target readers. Some look hand-drawn/modern/geometric, are bold/thin, single/double storey a, I with/without crossbars, t/l/q/y with/without flick, 3 with/without flat top, are slanted/upright by default, or have `font-variation-settings` to control all of the aforementioned.

Searching "easily readable fonts" brings up even more choice, some of which seem awesome and I'll have to look into. It's a shame that good scientific evidence on font readability/legibility is so difficult to find, as at best there's a case study showing that the font is beneficial to a small, select group of readers, and at worst (Sans Forgetica-style) it's the same but there's a follow-up study a few years later showing that the improvements are negligible or nonexistent.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#143

Post by titaphraz »

> Combining science and design creativity can improve a child’s confidence in reading, changing their trajectory in life. Kermit is, therefore, ...

You don't get away with just slapping out a statement like that unless you provide a scientific paper to back up your work.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#144

Post by sitkack »

scelerat wrote: post #91
seba_dos1 wrote: post #67

It's super hard to read when you hijack scrolling (and do a poor job of it), regardless of the font used.

Very annoying. Designers, ui developers: please don't do this, it sucks.

Feels like a very smooth, "Is my machine swapping?" simulator.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#145

Post by dgreensp »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #99

Is this open / free / something we can download and try out? I did a super-brief search on the page but "download" didn't turn up any results. Does anyone else know where we can download this from?

I don’t think it’s anything we get to use. All it says is if you are interested in the font, you can contact the company that made it. It’s weird. Sometimes these announcements are more like, “We commissioned this cool thing and made it free,” like when Microsoft came out with their latest emojis.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#146

Post by rozab »

Heliodex wrote: post #142

The wide (and growing, which is great) variety of fonts designed to be easily readable are so interesting to me because they all start with similar aims, use different metrics, and come up with wildly varying font designs. Take Kermit, Inter, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Bookerly, and my personal favourite Lexend. They are all expertly designed, do great work at improving readability and legibility, though ha…

I've looked into the state of research on font legibility many times over the years, and this time I came across this thorough thesis from one Dr Liz Broadbent[0] (who sadly passed away recently).

It includes a great rundown of all the studies that have been done regarding font legibility and dyslexia. I remain completely unconvinced that any of these fonts offer a measurable improvement in readability over, say, Arial.

A big problem I see again and again is that the sizes compared are not fair - the author notes that spacing likely has a large effect on results and that different studies have tried to account for this in different ways. In her own study the author compares 16pt Arial with 15pt OpenDyslexic in an attempt to match the x-height. But in terms of how much space on a page a given text takes up, 15pt OpenDyslexic is actually equivalent to 25pt Arial! On page 154, a study participant even points out that it's clearer to read because it's bigger.

But overall I'm just glad funding is being directed to serious research on this topic.

[0] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173561/2/L.Broadbent...

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#147

Post by thaumasiotes »

cjs_ac wrote: post #55
FjordWarden wrote: post #52

> 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…

> I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was [un]motivated

That's not just educational psychology. All of child psychology and child development is like that. People still talk as if Piaget might have been on to something.

Note that while the article doesn't really provide anything convincing, there is good reason to believe that indicating prosody makes it easier for children to understand written text.

The argument is just that, despite the writing system making absolutely no provision for any indication of prosody, native speakers keep spontaneously adding such indications to their writing. Look at this sidethread comment:

> 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. [italics show prosody]

> Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody, and since that wasn't enough here, capitalization does too]

Or here's the New York Times in 1993:

> I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. "Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?" [question marks show prosody]

( https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like... )

If it's important enough that everyone feels the need to write it down even though they aren't supposed to, it's probably important to children too.

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