Type Tips Weekly

- [Instructor] Welcome to Type Tips. I'm Nigel French. This week's tip is about a font designed to help readers remember information. The font is Sans Forgetica and it's the result of a collaboration between the Behavioral Business Lab and the Design School of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Sans Forgetica has an eight degree back slant and gaps in each letter. The idea is that by challenging the mind to complete the letter shapes, reading is slowed and memory retention is increased.

This concept of challenging the reader is known as desirable difficulty. The creators of San Forgetica believe that many contemporary fonts are just too easy to read and so the information washes over us without leaving a trace. Of course if the reading is too difficult, that won't leave a trace either. Sans Forgetica aims for that sweet spot of providing just enough abstraction. It was designed with year 12 students cramming for exams in mind, but it might also be useful for people studying foreign languages and those grappling with memory loss.

Sans Forgetica won't look good in a novel, but then it's not intended for continuous reading, but rather to highlight key passages. Sans Forgetica is available as a free download and there's also an interesting short video and an attractive PDF explaining the research that went into its creation.