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Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you remember your study notes
- lysp 8y agoAustralian news articles about it (may be behind paywall / geo block): https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/sans-forgetica-rmit-university-creates-font-to-help-remember-words/news-story/8774999e6e02eddc6d66701b9310bd79 https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/sans-forgetica-rmi... https://www.theage.com.au/education/the-new-font-that-promises-to-boost-your-memory-20181003-p507ju.html https://www.theage.com.au/education/the-new-font-that-promis... https://mumbrella.com.au/naked-creates-font-for-rmit-which-is-designed-to-help-students-study-544049 https://mumbrella.com.au/naked-creates-font-for-rmit-which-i...
- Freak_NL 8y agoThat font seems quite legible actually. The letters are all quite distinct and apart from the gaps and backward-slant, follow proper typographical conventions. I would have made the letters monospaced at least (no kerning either), and would have used base letter shapes that look much more alike (e.g., the bowls of the d, a, q, and c should be the same, because slight differences in them help you identify letters more readily, which is precisely what proper fonts do). Also, does that university actually own their own top-level domain? Those don't come cheap do they?
- jeieo3949 8y agoAgreed. Typed some quasi-looking-Python in their demo. It was not hard to “read” at all A mono space version, with all the appropriate symbols, would be interesting to try out as a daily coding font.
- erichurkman 8y agoRe: top-level domain, there's a good number of universities on the list. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db It's about $200k.
- diminoten 8y agoI think it's pretty cool! Would definitely matter to me from a "what school should I go to" standpoint.
- p4bl0 8y agoReally? I would prefer to go to a school that spend money on useful stuff.
- coverband 8y agoHonestly, I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic... Both cases sound reasonable to a degree.
- diminoten 8y agoNot being sarcastic, learning the extra stuff related to managing a TLD sounds interesting to me, and it sounds like this program has someone on it that likes doing cool stuff like that.
- thanatropism 8y agoThis is cool. Shame most of my study notes are equation-heavy.
- anonymfus 8y agoIs Cyrillic support planned?
- solarkraft 8y agoIt doesn't seem that hard to do it yourself :-)
- mxfh 8y agoA side note: I sometimes transliterate latin text to cyrillic. This doesn't exactly help with remembering things, but by now I have a somewhat better understanding of the cyrillic alphabet, even without being able to speak any of the languages using it, and only fleeting experience with any slavic one. It definitely takes away the alienness of it.
- codetrotter 8y ago> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing. But does the effectiveness of this hold up over time or will your brain get accustomed to the font after a while such that reading it eventually becomes no different than reading whatever font you used to use before?
- adrianmonk 8y agoI don't think it's true that all fonts eventually approach the same level of easy readability. Yes, you will get better at reading this font than you were at reading this font initially, but probably you still won't be able to read it as fast as you can read some other font.
- yorwba 8y agoThis font has easily distinguishable glyphs for all letters. Some fonts make "Ill" looks like ||| and it's still possible to read most texts written in such fonts easily. Considering that it's possible to learn to read a completely different alphabet, I'm not convinced that there's anything to font legibility besides familiarity, so long as all glyphs are distinguishable.
- ClassyJacket 8y agoI agree. Maybe this effect will only work if you rotate fonts every so often to one you're not familiar with. If this effect works at all.
- DonHopkins 8y ago¡pɐǝɹ oʇ ɹǝpɹɐɥ uǝʌǝ ǝɹɐ sʇuoɟ pǝʇɐʇoɹ ʇnq
- komali2 8y ago
- neom 8y agoContender for a considerably better dyslexia font.
- have_faith 8y agoI thought it was something to do with forging essays or something similar as I kept reading it as Forge-tica. I always thought the use of study notes was just in writing them to stimulate memory, not actually reading them (for me at least).
- adrianmonk 8y agoMe too. Taking write-only notes was one of my best study weapons in college. Though, just think of your memory retention if you take notes by hand-drawing this font. Sure, it's time consuming, but you're never going to forget those two sentences that you got through.
- gvx 8y agoI had the same problem with the name, although in my case I attributed it to associating it with FontForge.
- edent 8y agoAnyone know what the licence is for the font? It is free to download, but doesn't come with anything explaining usage and distribution restrictions.
- gnicholas 8y agoI wondered the same thing. No contact info on the Chrome Store page either — just a place to send feedback.
- lostatseajoshua 8y agoI reached out to them directly (RMIT) about the license and they responded that is not available for commercial use. “Sans Forgetica is designed for non-commercial use only. It is bound by a creative commons, non-commercial, attributed (CCBYNC) license.”
- edent 8y agoThanks!
- frankzander 8y agoHm made an Ad with this font and your future customers will remember. Have to hurry up to create a brand ;D
- liamzebedee 8y agoI tweeted about this yesterday, from the article: > "Students remembered 57 per cent ... written in Sans Forgetica, compared to 50 per cent .... in Ariel" 7% delta retention isn't so much, is it?
- tudelo 8y agoI honestly will take 7% less retention to not have to look at this font any longer than I have to...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- curiousgal 8y agoHey, it's based on "the principles of cognitive psychology", a field that's renown for its accuracy and reproducibility.
- unit91 8y agoYeah, they should rename it "Sans Scientifica".
- HarryHirsch 8y agoHow about litteræ pinguis serpentis?
- unit91 8y agoBeen a long time since my Latin days and there's so much nominative/genitive overlap in those words I can't figure it out. "Writings of a fat snake" or something, I don't know. Help? :-)
- HarryHirsch 8y agoIt's "snake oil font". littera is a letter, and I hope that the plural form means "font" or "script". But litteræ definitely means "science" as well, so that's OK. Tufts University has Lewis & Short online: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/resolveform?redirect=true&lang=Latin http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/resolveform?redirect=tru...
- jaclaz 8y agoNot to be the usual skeptic, but "scientifically designed" doesn't really-really mean (at least to me) "designed by scientists" (which this thingy is). I mean, nice and all, but what about some actual tests/reports of it actually being noticeably better at remembering what you have read? The concept is very nice and interesting, but besides it: >The science of Sans Forgetica >Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing. I would like to have something more than a video by the scientists that designed it. If it wasn't a UNI backed thing, I would have thought that the video was a sales pitch for Kickstarter or similar. I had some expectations for the .pdf inside the downloadable .zip but basically all there is in it is: >Learn more about the science behind Sans Forgetica at sansforgetica.rmit
- neaden 8y agoRight, I would want to see a study comparing people's ability to remember things written in this and another font before I believe any claims.
- tuco86 8y agoI tried to find a paper or something on it, nothing (don't actually know how to search for papers, no scientist). I checked the credits on https://mumbrella.com.au/naked-creates-font-for-rmit-which-is-designed-to-help-students-study-544049 https://mumbrella.com.au/naked-creates-font-for-rmit-which-i... where i see no psychology anything but maybe Behavioural Business Lab. Granted, this was no list of the scientists working on it, but there sure seems to be a lot of marketing and brand management involved. I can't be sure on this one, but it seems adding science to a claim is just a good marketing practice. Are there science news sites that add paper references or something to fact check against, to their articles?
- aqme28 8y agoThere's a video on the page where they talk about a test they run on it and that it performed "better." No idea how much better, or if the test was terrible. At least they're on the right track.
- 8y ago
- bitwize 8y agoIt reminds me of the lettering on the signs in Lucis in Final Fantasy XV.
- keehun 8y agoWow, they have their own TLD! https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/rmit.html https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/rmit.html Interesting that the university's website is not on that TLD but rather https://rmit.edu.au https://rmit.edu.au
- r00fus 8y agoYeah, so what's the usecase for usage of a TLD if most of your presence is on a more well-known TLD like .edu.XX or .com?
- dorian-graph 8y agoAs a grad from a sandstone uni, I feel disappointed. ;)
- addicted 8y agoIt makes a lot of sense to me. You want your primary public facing site with a TLD that people know about. .edu immediately confers legitimacy by assuring the visitor that its a legitimate educational institution (I’m assuming .edu.au is the Australian equivalent). But when it comes to sites and services students and professors would want to use, go for the TLD, (e.g.s alumni.rmit, bursar.rmit, athletics.rmit). It’s a much more pleasing (I don’t know whether rmit actually does that or not).
- gowld 8y agoThe unusual TLD makes it more memorable. Anyone can apply for their own gTLD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain Interestingly, one of the major promoters of gTLDs is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_IT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_IT a neighbor of RMIT
- peterwwillis 8y ago"The initial price to apply for a new gTLD was $185,000" Using that student tuition fee wisely. (ICANN's website confirms this is still the initial cost + deposit, and more fees can pile on)
- dwighttk 8y agoMan, my learning process had very little to do with reading the notes that I wrote down. I can maybe remember one or two tests where I actually read over my notes, but most of the time it was just the original writing down that seemed to help with learning. Maybe if the textbook was printed in this font...
- solarkraft 8y agoUh. I have a feeling I'll just not read it properly and learn worse, if anything.
- inawarminister 8y agoHow do I use this in Anki? Could be a really great help!
- chaostheory 8y agoIt's free. It's easy to install. There's no hidden catch like giving up your privacy. Skepticism aside, I don't see the harm in trying it. What would be cool is if they conducted a larger study via the Chrome plugin.
- roynal 8y agoTried the chrome extension - doesn't seem to be working. Can you guys look into this?
- xfz 8y agoI'm inclined to think someone behind this was having a lot of fun, and it looks nice. If it turns out not to be a joke/hoax/psychology/social experiment, I will be sure to remember - I made a note to check back later, using this special font that aids memory.
- bluetwo 8y agoResume builder.
- DonHopkins 8y agoI can think of a practical use case for Forgetica Light, a font with the opposite design of Sans Forgetica: Instead of simply deleting messages after a short time, Snapchat should render them in Forgetica Light, so you can't even remember them!
- Someone 8y agoIf “more difficult to read” indeed implies “better retention”, we need a browser extension that shows a captcha on every page load that uses text phrases supplied by the user. I fear that’s a fairly fat if, though.
- agumonkey 8y agoengineered information loss to streghten your cranial muscle, fun
- threatofrain 8y agoThe mediating factor for these studies is going to be reading time. Similarly I would presume reading a mathematics text out of order will also boost recall on a test.
- MrUnderBridje 8y agoErr, the 'n' resembles 'η' (the greek letter eta). The 'W' looks like 'Λ' (a capital alpha with quotes). Maybe there are other confusing similarities. I wouldn't use that font for maths, if it means I end up remembering an incorrect formula.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoRegardless if it works, its a pretty neat font. I didnt see a license though, does anyone know what is allowed?
- jawns 8y agoThe basic idea has to do with a concept called processing fluency. Studies have shown that the harder your brain has to work to process the information, the more likely you are to absorb it -- at least to a point. One recent study that manipulated processing fluency using a hard-to-read font is "Fluency and the detection of misleading questions: Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses illusion," Social Cognition, 2008. The study found that people who read information in a hard-to-read font were better at spotting a certain category of error than people who read the same information in an easy-to-read font. (Incidentally, this study is one that I adapted for my book "Experiments for Newlyweds: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform With Your Spouse," due out in April. So if you know any couples who'd like to try it out together, it makes a great wedding gift!)
- metalliqaz 8y agoDo any of those 50 experiments involve being naked? Asking for a friend.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.
- metalliqaz 8y agoJust curious, why else would it be specifically for newlyweds? What's the big deal?
- Y_Y 8y agoI have a book on shameless shilling you might like to read.
- dang 8y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them when posting here.
- newmediapilot 8y agoThis is like the opposite of a dyslexia friendly font.
- russfink 8y agoDoes someone have this as a LaTeX font package?
- mkesper 8y agoModern LaTeX can use TTF and OTF natively.
- gojomo 8y agoI can't find it at the moment, but the last time I looked, attempted replications of an early "illegibility improves recall" study failed. (IIRC, that didn't use a custom font, but rather some de-contrasting/visual-noise applied.) I see no cited papers here, just the claim, in the video, that "over 100 students" were used in testing to pick this font from several candidates. I'm doubtful of any long-term value here. Even if "desirable difficulty" mechanism is real, I'd expect different readers to need wildly different levels of interference, and for their perceptions to adapt quickly to consistent letterforms. (So, to really get the benefit, you'd have an adjustable and dynamic level of perceptual-interference.)
- DonHopkins 8y agoWho can possibly forget the font that Mike Koss's "The Terminal" Apple ][ terminal emulator used to get 32 lines of 70 characters each in HIRES graphics mode in 1981? It's the most difficult to read font I've ever used regularly! (Don't try using it on a color TV, though.) https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com/jscript/tinyalice.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com... >Tiny (3x5) Font >Created for the Apple II program The Terminal. Copyright (c) 1981 Michael C. Koss >In 1981 I wrote a terminal emulator for the Apple II. At the time, the Apple II could only display upper case characters. I used the hi-res display (280 x 192 pixels!) to display my own character set. In order to come close to showing an 80-column display, I created a truly tiny font, displaying the full ASCII character set (upper and lower case). >I created a font within a 3x5 pixel dimension, allowing the display of 32 lines of 70 characters each. The font definitely takes some training and getting used to (especially recognition of characters that use descenders); but I found it to be quite readable after a while.
- ubittibu 8y agoInteresting. Too bad the link to download the font is not working.
- regularfry 8y agoThe type of illegibility matters, apparently. Decontrasting and visual noise stress a different part of the visual pathway to hard-to-read letter shapes. I'm trying to find the paper which describes this, but it's been at least a year since I saw it. http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf reproduces the original effect. What's interesting here is that the effect is measured as significantly more pronounced in dyslexic students.
- burtonator 8y agoThis is actively being discussed in the memory and mnemonics community along side spaced repetition. I'd like to see more research here and see where it can be used and how it can be used. I've been working on an integrated offline browser for documents and annotation named Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ which is mostly designed around annotation and spaced repetition. You can store all your documents and web content in one place and since you're obviously trying to read and retain all that information it might be interesting to enable this as a one-off feature to see if it helps. Another idea could be to just have them for the flashcards since this is the key information you're trying to retain.
- quadrangle 8y agoMy favorite "desirable difficulty" from cog psych is to practice recall. I recall a study with 3 groups of students: 1. read essay 4 times 2. read and take notes, study notes 3. read once, then have to write out (a few times) what can be recalled on a blank piece of paper The groups were from most to least confident in their learning but the actual success on a test for concepts (which requires recall) was opposite. So, better than using a weird font to push encoding of memory is to plan for and then do recall practice. Like tell other people about what you learned or test yourself on it. You get good at whatever you practice. If you reread something over and over, you don't get better at recalling the ideas, but you do get better at reading the thing. I bet the first group above would do better than the others at giving a live reading of the essay.
- mujoco 8y agoYour method (3) is a great way to study, and it's very similar to the "Feynman Technique": https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-model https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-m... The Feynman Technique is basically alternating between writing a description of a concept on paper from memory, and looking up whatever you couldn't remember.
- quadrangle 8y agoIt's not my method, I was recalling something I learned elsewhere. I've told lots of people about it, so I recall the points that mattered for telling people. I haven't practiced recalling the study authors and name of the study, so I can't recall that stuff.
- real-hacker 8y agoI think I learned about it in "Learning how to learn" video course. One principle: don't reread, recall.
- glitchc 8y agoIt's having the opposite effect on me. I usually remember images outright(including the shape the letters took, word positions, some smudged portion of the page, other defects, etc.) and read it out mentally in real-time as I need it. This font is completely messing with my mnemonic. I have trouble visualizing anything I write in it.
- yusee 8y agoI would LOVE a monospaced version of this. If any type designers are out there, please make this happen.
- justinpombrio 8y agoYeah, it's surprisingly attractive and easy to read.
- vinayms 8y ago> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing Based on this logic - harder the process better the processing - its obviously a mistake that schools are increasingly using technology to teach, like visualizing geometric shapes on screen in 3D instead of painstakingly drawing on the board and letting students see it in their heads.
- DonHopkins 8y agoAnd based on this logic, I'm asking everyone to please downvote my comment to lower its contrast, so it's harder to read and unforgettable! Edit: NOOOO!!! I said DOWNVOTE! ;(
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- feverishaaron 8y agoI realize this is a corner case, but I wonder how dyslexics will perform using a font that looks even less like a letterform — when it is already a struggle to combine several into a word.
- regularfry 8y agohttp://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf I was worried about exactly this when I was thinking about using it for company training materials. Apparently the benefit for dyslexics (if you believe this study) is even greater than for non-dyslexics.
- Luc 8y agoIt takes on the order of a few minutes for your brain to learn to read that font fluently. It all seems rather silly. Does RMIT have a good reputation?
- dorian-graph 8y ago> Does RMIT have a good reputation? It's definitely one of the better universities in Australia, and has a good design reputation. So, yeah.
- glitchc 8y agoTo throw a match onto the powder keg: Does the reputation of the university have any bearing on the quality of the research? Sounds like the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy to me.
- DonHopkins 8y agoDoes it include a full set of unforgettable emojis?
- mirekrusin 8y agoSo you'll learn it after a while and it won't serve it's purpose anymore? Each letter should slightly animate like a little slug or render randomly to get benefits of forcing brain to read-with-focus or whatever that is.
- DonHopkins 8y agoI wrote a PostScript font like that once. You just have to use the "setcharwidth" operator instead of the "setcachedevice" operator in your font's BuildChar or BuildGlyph procedure, so your glyphs don't end up getting cached. Here's an even more dynamic (albeit less efficient) PostScript font I made for NeWS that forks off a light weight process to draw each character in the background. It actually creates a separate canvas (window) for every character with a lightweight input event manager process listening for mouse events that lets you slide each character around the screen by dragging with the middle mouse button. Some of the characters are "CycleItem" widgets you can click on with the left button to cycle between different glyphs, and even "SliderItem" sliders and "TextItem" input fields! Because why should't you be able to create fully interactive editable user interfaces just by drawing text? https://donhopkins.com/home/code/ifont.ps.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/code/ifont.ps.txt
- bayesian_horse 8y agoI'd like to see a Chinese version of this...
- quickthrower2 8y agoDoes Chinese even need this?
- KaiserPro 8y agothats a nightmare if you are dyslexic/practic/etc
- regularfry 8y agoThat study has also been done: apparently the effects are even better. http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf
- fliesblackflags 8y agoI can't actually see the font. The page has the font samples at #ccccdd with a white background. If someone doesn't seem to understand something as simple as contrast, why should I think they understand memory? Webaim has a tool to help with contrasts. Anything lighter than #595959 on a white background can be hard to see. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
- LeicaLatte 8y agoI don't get it.
- irisli 8y agoIt would've been nice to have the whole page to be in the Sans Forgetica font to see it in action. I tried copy-pasting the whole website into the "Type something you want to remember" box near the bottom. Unfortunately, it's a <div contenteditable> and the original font styling got copied inside too. :|
- michaelkeenan 8y agoThere was excitement when the first study showed hard-to-read fonts improved test performance in 2007[1]. Since then, there have been enough attempted replications for a 2015 review to conclude that there's no effect[2]. [1] Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning: http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-16657-003 http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-16657-003 [2] Disfluent fonts don’t help people solve math problems: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-13746-007 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-13746-007
- kradroy 8y agoCompelling, but the Sans Forgetica font's effect is focused on recall/remembering. From the two abstracts you linked (I'm not paying for the papers) it appears the experiments were testing the effect of disfluent fonts on reasoning. These are different cognitive activities, so it doesn't really disconfirm the font's creators' claims.
- michaelkeenan 8y agoI just checked the review with Sci-Hub, and you are correct. I was much too hasty. The memory effect is still plausible, they write: > "Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning." (my emphasis)
- kradroy 8y agoWhat I'm puzzled by is their need for creating a new font and marketing it. All prior studies finding this improved recall effect used already available fonts in the experiments. I can't find any license for Sans Forgetica, so I assume it is free to use. Maybe exposure/fame for the lab?
- xte 8y agoAhem, my knowledge of cognitive psychology (and psychology in general) are certainly not relevant but I pretend to be a decent reader... Sorry, your font is terrible to read. I spent more time in deciphering it than in understand the written concept. BTW personally I always found FAR MORE effective to take notes with pen and paper and after transfer them on personal desktop, in org_mode in my case so without any fancy distracting typography. The same for reading: I learn far more reading a printed docs than from an on-screen one. I test many times and techniques from high school to university to work training/conference etc. ALL "PC made from the start" was a fail, including photos and voice recording. Of course I'm not a statistical valid sample but I pretend to be not much different than any other human around.
- jessep 8y agoI can't tell if you are joking or not. The point of the font is being terrible to read. There's an explanation on the page. Making your brain work harder to get the info makes it more likely to remember the info.
- gowld 8y ago"makes it more likely to remember the info" is a dubious claim, not an established fact.
- xte 8y agoNo it's not a joke, claiming that being harder to read help understanding things remind me the ancient Victorian era, the Cilicium idea, the "all work and no play" song etc. I do not consider it a scientific truth but only another reactionary claim that can be as scientific as Franklin idea of forcibly wake up people with a cannon shoot in any road.
- regularfry 8y agohttp://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf http://www.matthewfrench.net/pubs/fontspreprint.pdf (to pick one example) You may not know it, but there are studies backing this up. Whether you consider it a scientific truth or not is barely relevant. What is interesting to know is that not all disfluencies are created equal: blurring text and adding visual noise don't help, apparently because they don't engage the right part of the visual pathway.
- 21 8y agoRecalling the recent "how to smell BS papers" article, this doesn't pass the grandma test. More specifically, you would imagine that if such a simple hack existed, we would be well aware of it in 500 years of printed press.
- rtkwe 8y agoThat can really change though just depending on how long we've bothered systematically studying $SUBJECT.
- snappyTertle 8y agoComic Sans was ahead of its time
- rodneyzeng 8y agoI tried and feel this is crazy. I cannot focus on the content because my brain struggles in recognizing the letters.
- rodneyzeng 8y agoI tried and feel this font is crazy. I can hardly focus on the content because my brain struggles in recognizing the letters. It does exactly the opposite goal as it claims.
- bmmayer1 8y agoIt's cool, but has this been tested under replicable scientific conditions?
- robaato 8y agoReminds me of Steve Yegge: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV... Fortunately I’d spent years watching Jeff in action before my turn came, and I had prepared in an unusual way. My presentation -- which, roughly speaking was about the core skills a generalist engineer ought to know -- was a resounding success. He loved it. Afterwards everyone was patting me on the back and congratulating me like I’d just completed a game-winning hail-mary pass or something. One VP told me privately: “Presentations with Jeff never go that well.” : To prepare a presentation for Jeff, first make damn sure you know everything there is to know about the subject. Then write a prose narrative explaining the problem and solution(s). Write it exactly the way you would write it for a leading professor or industry expert on the subject. That is: assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have ground-breakingly original ideas in your material, just pretend it’s old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material. You’re almost done. The last step before you’re ready to present to him is this: Delete every third paragraph.
- felipeerias 8y agoIn my experience, a good strategy is to read your notes aloud, preferably while walking. This forces you to really notice what is written, helps sustain your attention (when you're walking and talking, there's not much cognitive slack for drifting off), will improve your memory (we tend to remember things better when we have spent a larger effort on them), and leads pretty naturally to reason aloud about what you have just read. Apparently, there used to be perambulatory monks that would follow a similar strategy, reading or reciting sacred texts while pacing around the courtyards of their monastery.
- JacobAldridge 8y agoInteresting. I remember in high school history we'd often get the exam essay question to prepare. As a boarder, I used to break into one of the school classrooms, re-arrange all the furniture so the chairs formed a giant circle, and I'd pace around it memorising what I'd prepared. I'm now wondering if the added chair-balance while walking enhanced the approach you're describing.
- jxy 8y agoIf they are so confident on the efficacy of their font, why don't they use the font for all the text on their website?
- tomcam 8y agoI think this approach is doomed to fail because Learning is already hard. Increasing the cognitive load at the very beginning of the learning process seems like a non-starter to me.
- anonytrary 8y agoRight when I saw the example text, I was immediately reminded of typographical rivers[0]. If you have a visual memory, I'm guessing rivers in paragraphs may also help you remember what you read, since the negative space creates branch-like structures in the paragraph, which adds an extra visual memory cue. After looking at a few examples of this font, it's clear that this font was designed to do that. You can see similar continuous structures in the text itself. Pretty neat. Looks like they also borrowed ideas from Daniel Kahneman, as well[1]. In his book, I believe one of the examples does a test on Princeton students to see how many riddles they can solve, and they did better when the font was harder to read. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
- Mefis 8y agoSurely you would get used to it and then it would stop being difficult to read.
- Eli_P 8y agoWhile some folks here are joking about mirroring text, there's a sane point behind that. There's an ancient Greeks' way to read text more effectively called Boustrophedon. The idea is that the text lines are interleaved with x-axis mirrored lines, so your eyes move not by Z-shape trajectory, but like meander. There're demo texts to learn to use it [1]. As for my experience, I can't say I'd been understanding or remembering more or less while reading boustro, especially when I'd begun to get used to it. [1] https://boustro.com/app/ https://boustro.com/app/
- KirinDave 8y agoI like Sans Forgetica. The idea that difficult reading and writing can help you remember something is very fresh and real to me because 𐑲 𐑿𐑟 ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑓𐑹 𐑨𐑤 𐑥𐑲 𐑯𐑴𐑑𐑟 𐑯 𐑑𐑨𐑕𐑒 𐑤𐑦𐑕𐑑𐑟 𐑑 𐑣𐑧𐑤𐑐 𐑥𐑰 𐑒𐑺𐑮𐑓𐑳𐑤𐑰 𐑕𐑧𐑤𐑧𐑒𐑑 𐑢𐑳𐑑 𐑑 𐑢𐑮𐑲𐑑 𐑯 𐑮𐑰𐑥𐑧𐑥𐑚𐑳𐑮. In both cases, I notice it's easier to memorize things in this fashion. Although I suppose with the ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 that effect will wear off if I obtain more reading & writing proficiency.
- rtkwe 8y agoWhat's that shorthand?
- KirinDave 8y agoIt's Shavian (·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯) which was linked here a little while ago. It's a phonetic english alphabet (so it's not shorthand, but often is shorter) with pretty good font support and a unicode allocation. The Shavian Reddit has links to a Linux keymap and more details if you'd like it. I used Memrise's Shavian course to memorize it in about a week, and I've been reading and writing ever since. It's delightful for task and note taking right now because the extra effort of writing to it helps me remember things.
- Bakary 8y agoWhat do you think of Quikscript?
- KirinDave 8y agoUh, I like it. I'm considering writing a unicode extension proposal for it. I actually do all my task journaling in Shavian and I find it a lot more tedious to write than Quickscript. Quickscript also has more useful loan-consonants (and we could extend the spec easily to grab a few more, since sounds like ñ are much more common in English than in Shaw's day). So I like it, but I use Shavian mostly because it's well supported. I'm in the camp that says physical writing is dead, so I wnat to get quick/read into Unicode formally.
- okonomiyaki3000 8y agoIf being hard to read makes something easier to remember, my Japanese would be a lot better by now.
- JohnL4 8y agoWRITING BY HAND. A font to help you remember your study notes.
- gnicholas 8y agoAn excellent point. I found that handwriting notes after I had typed them dramatically improved recall. I did this when studying for the CA Bar exam, which involves memorizing lots of rules. After taking typed notes during the day, I would rewrite the notes by hand. For me, I think part of the reason that I remember handwritten things better is that the formatting has to be done correctly the first time. For example, if I was writing down the three elements of a statute, one of which had two sub-elements, then I had to know very clearly how the statute was structured before committing pen to paper. When taking notes on a computer, it's easy to just pound out text and then go back later and put in the right formatting. For me, being forced to properly format the first time around seems to greatly increase recall.
- neves 8y agoI don't really believe in it before experimenting, but I'll give it a try with Anki spaced repetion software. Maybe I'll improve remembering.
- userbinator 8y agoIt looks like a pretty artistic stencil font, which is to say I don't believe it's all that much harder to read nor helps memory --- certainly I've seen a lot of text in stencil font in various places, but I don't really remember what that text was now. Looking at paragraphs of text in it, I feel like it actually encourages me to read faster because of the missing pieces; maybe it is harder to read but that triggers "skim mode" so I pay less attention to each word.
- skookumchuck 8y agoThe example text just gives me eyestrain. If I wanted eyestrain, I'd just borrow someone else's glasses, or switch to a low res monitor.
- mci 8y agoCompared to Donald Knuth's font [1], Sans Forgetica is for wussies. [1] Donald E. Knuth, N-Ciphered Texts: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3283&context=wordways https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
- whttmd 8y agoIs anyone familiar with OpenDyslexic? It does the same job but for normal people, I think.
- whttmd 8y agoHere's the link: https://www.opendyslexic.org/ https://www.opendyslexic.org/
- Rjevski 8y agoMaybe we should treat the root cause and not the symptom? If people don't remember stuff because they don't need it then maybe the tests should not depend on remembering useless stuff? At my job for some reason I never need to force myself to remember stuff; it comes naturally as I look up the same thing over and over again because I use it frequently.
- ubittibu 8y agoApparently I can memorize much better images than words, so I found helps me a lot replacing words or parts of words with icons. That’s my study “font”.