Sans Forgettica : cognitive easy gone horribly horribly wrong

I'm not sure if this is intended as satire or not... One of my pet hates is that by demanding emotionless language, extreme precision, and to some extent detail, academic papers become so nightmarishly unreadable that nobody reads them unless they're seriously determined. Consequently they become useless. This font appears to be an extreme incarnation of that. It's so ugly I'm never going to read it at all, hence it will have exactly the opposite effect to its intent of boosting memory. Surely designers can come up with something better than this ?

Now a team of experts have developed a font specifically designed to help you remember things, aptly named Sans Forgetica. But how can a humble typeface improve your mental processes?

Stephen Banham, a lecturer in typography at RMIT who helped create it, told RN Drive San Forgetica was actually a good font to discuss on the radio because it was designed on a highly conceptual basis. "Sans Forgetica is a typeface that's been specifically designed with features in it such as back-slanting and little gaps inside the letters," Mr Banham said.

The unexpected elements encourage the reader to take more notice, he said, triggering memory because of the effort required to process the text.

"Sans Forgetica in some ways subverts the conventional reading process … [which] really exists through reading a very familiar form — a familiar form of the letter, a familiar form of the word outline," he said.

Sans Forgetica slows that process down, he said, demanding that the reader's mind complete the circles and verticals of the distorted letters. So how exactly does it work?

Essentially, Sans Forgetica makes readers work harder; and working harder helps what they're reading stick in their head, Mr Banham explained.

"This font is one of those rare products of research from both psychology and design, and it's not very often that those two kind of work together," he said.
https://www.sansforgetica.com.au/