Month: February 2021

Sans Forgetica, a font developed by researchers at Melbourne’s RMIT University, claims to be a font that assists in the development of memories from reading. Below are some images of the typeface.

I chose Sans Forgetica as my topic because I have incredibly mixed feelings. Sans Forgetica is, in my opinion, an equally gigantic step in the positive and negative direction for accessibility of students and differentially abled individuals.

Supposedly, the function of this typeface is to utilize the psychological principle of Desired Difficulty — utilized through adding strikethroughs, adding slants, and missing elements to the typeface to make it more difficult to read — to increase the amount of the text that is remembered. As best put by the creators themselves, “Faced with an unfamiliar set of characters, the mind seeks to complete the shapes, which slows it down. By dwelling longer on each word, the brain has more time to engage in deeper cognitive processing, which enhances information retention.”

Through a case study performed at the university where this typeface was created, it was found that amongst all test subjects, an average of 7% increase in memory retention was generated by the use of the typeface.

This font, while not utilized anywhere or commonly known about, stands as a massive step towards accessibility for those with retention deficit disorders and other learning disabilities. Interestingly, however,

I think it is incredibly difficult to say who this font would be good for, and who it would be terrible for.

My first thought seeing this typeface is that it would obviously be terrible for those with dyslexia, off the bat that’s obvious. However, upon further inspection, were this font to become standardized, (I have no grounds to make this statement other than stipulation) it may hypothetically have a positive impact, as these strikethroughs make each character EVEN MORE distinct from one another compared to what is typically possible with most fully legible typefaces. Or, maybe it’s just outright awful like my gut feeling tells me. It’s really difficult to say without more data.

My second thought is that this may actually be an incredibly advantageous typeface for those — like me — that have ADHD. By demanding an additional level of processing, this typeface may actually satisfy some of the multitasking needs of brains like mine when it comes to extended reading sessions. OR, it may just be outright absolutely terrible, and cause brains like mine to simply become distracted by the process of deciphering the text rather than actually reading it.

Again, I feel that this typeface is incredibly controversial. There are some groups that it is obviously terrible for, some groups that it may be incredibly good for, and a WIDE RANGE of differential abilities that it’s impossible to say whether it would be great or awful.

Regardless of all of that, I think more testing into this subject of differential typography could produce wildly interesting and beneficial data regarding how fully legible fonts could be developed for everyone as well.

APA Style. Accessible Typography. American Psychological Association. Accessed Feb
23 2021. Link.

APA, the “author”, is the American Psychological Association responsible for the commonly used APA writing guidelines, in addition to many other contributions to the field of Psychology and English.

This source was surprisingly insightful regarding various misunderstandings that even I — someone who suffers from accessibility issues regarding my adhd and its negative interaction with various typefaces — believed. For instance, the myth that essentially created my motivation for this project — that serif fonts are inaccessible. That stated, however, the failing of this article in my opinion is that it primarily if not solely addresses typography from the reading perspective, not the writing perspective. For instance, it talks at length about the accessibility provided by screen readers, however — while this is a fantastic tool for many — this won’t assist me or many like me when attempting to write in a specific typeface for an assignment. That quarrel aside, there were many highly valuable notes about factors other than just typeface that are important for accessible typography design, “including size, color, justification, letter spacing, word spacing, line spacing, character thickness, screen resolution, print readiness, and other audience and media issues.”

Typography For Lawyers. A brief history of Times New Roman. Accessed Feb 22 2021.
Link.

Typography For Lawyers (2nd Edition) is a resource printed by Brian A. Garner (A Lawyer and Writer) and Matthew Butteric (An American Typographer). It was created to attempt to improve the state of typography within the legal system.

While this source is brief, I investigated this source in attempts to find out why Times New Roman (hereafter referred to as “TNR”) is such a universal standard for typography. It was an interesting read for sure, like learning the history of why the font is thinner than other fonts due to its daily newspaper conception. That said, I really wish this short article continued as it concluded abruptly right as it began to address my learning objective; ending on a paragraph about to NOT USE IT if you’re given the choice, then not explaining why. Oh well.

Williams, Gareth Ford. A Guide to Understanding What Makes a Typeface Accessible.
UX Collective. Aug 14. 2020. Accessed Feb 22 2021. Link.

Gareth Ford Williams is the head of UX design at the BBC, with a stated speciality and focus on User Accessibility and “Universality”.

This source was an incredibly useful read as — while I am familiar with many accessibility issues within typography — this covered a wide range of issues on a level deeper than simply “Serifs are bad” or “Serifs are good” — speaking to specific ways that various ability differences interpret various assets of a typeface. This source breaks down many of these factors through explanation of the development of one of their own typefaces, BBC Reith and Qalam, wherein they used neuroscientists and psychologists to vet the accessibility of the typeface at every step. 

Wood, Jennifer M. Times New Roman is Bad for your Career. MentalFloss. January 22
2016. Accessed Feb 24 2021. Link.

Jennifer M. Wood appears to be a bit informal of a source, but is a lead editor at MentalFloss, and has previously been a writer for WIRED, Rolling Stone, and more.

This article, while comparatively informal, was wildly interesting and brings up the longitude of the debate I hope to focus on: Is Times New Roman an innately poor choice to standardize? It references a variety of studies that show that a résumé written in Times New Roman is more likely to be ignored, in addition to general other typography styles that will get ignored or represent oneself poorly. While not entirely relevant to my topic ideal, the studies it referenced may be.

“How does the inevitable intersection of design and politics make you feel?”

I think an important distinction to be made is the difference between politics and ethics, with the distinction being best put by a Quora answer I found while researching this topic:

“Ethics is concerned with the moral behavior of people.”

“Politics is concerned with the management of society and its compliance with the law including the legislation that has been based on ethics.”

Personally speaking, I believe that the intersection between politics, ethics, and design is not only inevitable but also important, as — logistically speaking — good design is the effective communication of ideas, and all ethics are ideas. Design being used to communicate ethics is inevitable. That said, as politics are rules-based upon these things, for politics to also be involved in design is an important part of the political process.

A political world without the involvement of design is a world created with inaccessibility in mind. The primary function of design in politics, aside from persuasion, is typically accessibility and communication, so for that to be removed would be to remove people from their own political process. I believe that designers have an ethical responsibility to remain vigilant in acknowledgment of their role and responsibility in the political climates they work in and contribute to.

The classic example, of course, is the danger of being hired as a designer for an ecologically irresponsible oil company, tasked with communicating a new eco-friendly face for the company. While this isn’t necessarily “politics”, it is ethical in nature, which — in my opinion — should be treated as one and the same by any designer.

It is important to stand up for what you believe in as a core right of being human. I, for example, have very opinionated ethical beliefs that I stand by firmly in both my speech and my design. Being a passionate debater myself, it wouldn’t be possible to remove that part of myself from my design, nor would I want to!