A team of designers and behavioral scientists created a new set of letters to help your brain engage in deeper processing – and you can download it for free.
New typefaces may be a dime a dozen, but I recently came across a very novel one – and I'm smitten. It's called Sans Forgetica and it is designed to be ... wait for it ... hard to read.
What??
The idea was brought to life in a collaboration between designers and cognitive psychologists at RMIT University in Australia. And it's brilliant. It employs a phenomenon called "desirable difficulty" in which minor obstructions to the learning process urge the brain into deeper cognitive processing, thereby improving memory retention.
Typographer Stephen Banham worked with the university's Behavioural Business Lab to trial and tweak a number of different designs, testing them out on students to find that sweet spot between being hard enough to read and illegible. When sampling the final version of Sans Forgetica on a group of around 400 students, the researchers found a notable jump in memory retention as compared to reading text in Arial.
© Sans Foregtica
