When new fonts are released, they always include what they tried to improve: readability, comprehension, etc. Just once I'd like to know what they sacrificed.
In this case its subpixel rendering on low-dpi displays.
Kermit: A typeface for kids
131–140 of 181 posts
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#132I find the font very readable and somewhat unique.
I would have preferred a double-storey a instead of single-storey ɑ. I find it more readable and easier to distinguish against a o.
Though I can understand the need to be similar to handwriting. I'm guessing they had a long debate to decide between a and ɑ.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#133It feels like poor taste to force smooth scrolling on a page that is intended probably to be read by a target audience who is more likely to use assistive technologies than not.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Continuing with the logic of that school, most wildly successful people were bullied at school.....
And many of them lost a parent at an early age.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#135> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.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 dyslexic font nerd, I have a question for you. Does Comic Sans actually help? Lots of people claim it's the easiest for dyslexics to read. I'm not dyslexic, but I set all my chat windows to Comic Sans because I've found that it helps me read it. Curious if the claims have truth to them.
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.
Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.
Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.
I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#136Is 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 know what the licence is, or the legality of using it, but the download urls for the fonts on the linked site are
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#137Wow, the lag as I scroll the page makes me sea sick, I had to stop reading. Why reimplement scrolling??
I wanted to read and enjoy this article, it looked so interesting. But same, the scroll hijacking makes it unreadable.
I don't understand how anyone focusing on design or UX can think this is a good idea.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#138I find the font very readable and somewhat unique. I would have preferred a double-storey a instead of single-storey ɑ. I find it more readable and easier to distinguish against a o. Though I can understand the need to be similar to handwriting. I'm guessing they had a long debate to decide between a and ɑ.
Using single storey a is the most fundamental thing a font for early readers needs to do. Double storey a only exists in computer typography
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#139Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#140As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids. Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" s…
the "serif" on the "n" is called an "exit stroke". You often find lots of glyphs that get an exit stroke (the "l" and the "i" come to mind, but it is most glyphs that have a single vertical stem, or on the right most vertical stem) when you get the italic version of the typeface.