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Kermit: A typeface for kids

microsoft.design

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Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#171

Post by dmboyd »

yorwba wrote: post #166
dmboyd wrote: post #152

Earlier 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. ⊚?

Thanks for that. Working on automating that but currently relies on macrons being typed manually.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#172

Post by Galanwe »

As someone teaching his kid to read, this font doesn't seem to help.

Most of the arguments seem to be biased by "what an adult think is playful and fun", while my kid has a very different view of things.

Things like lower vs upper case are a struggle for him, it basically forces him to remember twice as many letters. Also the handwriting style just makes letters harder to recognize, especially for n and r, u and v, etc.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#173

Post by dmboyd »

pajko wrote: post #168
yorwba wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m working on a workflow to automating font weight and sizing to cover silent letters and prosody which should cover a bit of that. One of the key aspects though as a transitional learning tool is to teach children the diversity of sounds. So it’s intentional to not have a 1:1 mapping between phonemes and graphemes.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#174

Post by upofadown »

losvedir wrote: post #102

As 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…

>I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, ...

I stumbled across Andika[1] while looking for examples of high legibility typefaces. It's supposed to be all about making the problem characters more easily distinguishable for new readers.

[1] https://software.sil.org/andika/

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#175

Post by rogual »

ratatoskrt wrote: post #43
whalesalad wrote: post #4

Scroll hijacking on this website is atrocious. Ironic for a site that is focused on good design.

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

Boss on Windows with a click-wheel mouse: "Make the scrolling smoother"

Devs: "It's because of your--"

Boss: "Other sites do it. Get on it."

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#176

Post by taco_emoji »

chrismorgan wrote: post #153
taco_emoji wrote: post #96

Earlier 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…

Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.…

The point is that they're teaching algebra without ensuring that the students are proficient in the prerequisites, so those students who are behind are not actually learning anything. You might as well teach it in first grade for all the good it's doing.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#177

Post by empressplay »

taco_emoji wrote: post #176
chrismorgan wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.…

The point is that they're teaching algebra without ensuring that the students are proficient in the prerequisites, so those students who are behind are not actually learning anything. You might as well teach it in first grade for all the good it's doing.

honestly, teaching the concept of a variable in first grade might not be the worst idea in the world

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#178

Post by empressplay »

losvedir wrote: post #102

As 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…

Open Dyslexic kind of looks like a kid-font while being easy to read: https://opendyslexic.org

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#179

Post by WillAdams »

2b3a51 wrote: post #113
WillAdams wrote: post #20

It is unfortunate that this sort of mathematics wasn't available to the students who were creating the Euler font. https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where…

Initial Teaching Alphabet perhaps? - a bit more radical than what you are describing though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.

No, that's not it.

I suspect that it was a personal project of some teacher at some school I was attending, or maybe it's something which I came across while studying typography which was never actually implemented.

Anyway, I think it's an idea which someone should give a try --- maybe I will some day in a future font design.

Re: Kermit: A typeface for kids

#180

Post by quuxplusone »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #138
speedgoose wrote: post #132

I 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" refers to the lowercase "a" with a sort of bent-over bit at the top, distinct from the handwritten cursive "a". So you can say it relates to "typography," perhaps, but certainly not that it's limited to "computer" typography.

Early readers — anyone learning the letters for the purpose of reading — will need to recognize the double-storey "a" in order to read books, road signs, or even a smartphone's pop-up keyboard. And certainly to read "The Cat in the Hat" (which is set in Century Schoolbook, according to a quick google).

Sure, we don't (often?) write it like that in cursive, but we read it that way in almost all written material we encounter in our entire lives. You just don't notice because you're used to it — it's the "natural" way for an "a" to look in print.

...Now let's do looptail "g" versus opentail "g"! At least for that one you'll have the smartphone keyboard on the opentail side of the debate (and "The Cat in the Hat" on the correct, looptail side). ;)

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