Is there any information on the licensing of this?
It's going to be included with MSWord, sure, but what if I want to use it as a webfont?
Kermit: A typeface for kids
161–170 of 181 posts
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#162It's a good-looking informal font, with a very flexible model, and an interesting way to animate it. Wonderful! I'm happy to see what have they achieved technically and aesthetically. Any claims of pedagogical helpfulness should be made very cautiously though, before there are multiple independent studies of that.
yes! and the animation and flexibility is the point that's missed by most fellow commenters.
they enable a font to be parameterized in two dimensions: time and prosody, i.e. speech pattern.
so subtitles and learning materials can be animated to reflect the speech pattern (stressing words, rasing and falling pitch, volume overall, ...) and they can --- independently --- be animated to teach writing, by reading the example.
this is a curious novelty that allows experimenting with the representation of speech and I'm looking forward what will come out of it.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#163As 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…
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to sta…
Man, I thought I was putting in work by doing the lessons from the book (which is INCREDIBLE) with my 1st grader…way to go above and beyond!
This honestly very cool and I’m going to pass along to some of the literacy teachers in our district. Thank you!
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#164I'd be happy to try it out in Kindle, to combat focus problems. Open dyslexia was somehow helping for some time, but I reverted it back eventually.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#165Anyone remember Microsoft's McZee font from Creative Writer/Fine Artist?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/mczee
This was my go-to many years ago!
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#166As 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…
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to sta…
In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#167I 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
Double-storey a is based on handwritten A with an exaggerated right-hand downward stroke (before distinguished upper and lower case was a thing) and historically precedes single-storey ɑ. So teaching a different handwriting style closer to printed fonts would also work.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to sta…
In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?
Just wanted to mention this, but actually it has more issues.
trouble / about: the 'u' should be marked, at least for 'trouble' to make it silent (or probably in both cases but differently, not sure about other similar words). But then there's 'o' in lemonade which is different from 'o' in 'trouble'. Also 'oo' in 'loot' seems strange (should be ⊚⊚ with the recommendation above). Or am I misunderstanding something in the point of the markings? Anyway, it hurts my eyes.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#169Dont they already have comic sans? also nice timing over easter to stimulate the normies and thier kids.
Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids
#170Earlier 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…
> 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…
Actually, I should point out that commas show prosody and are often covered as doing so in formal instruction, though formal instruction is at least as likely to take the viewpoint that commas occur for no particular reason and you just have to memorize when it is or isn't appropriate to use them.