campusreview.com.au
Font of new
knowledge
A look at the typeface that ‘helps students study’.
By Dallas Bastian
T
hat’s according to the RMIT University researchers who
designed it.
The typeface is believed to be the first in the world
specifically designed to help people retain information and
remember study notes.
Called Sans Forgetica, it’s a back-slanted, gapped typeface based
on another, called Albion, and was a collaboration between a
typographic design specialist and psychologists.
So what sets Sans Forgetica apart?
Dr Janneke Blijlevens, founding member of the RMIT Behavioural
Business Lab, said standard fonts are too familiar.
“Readers often glance over them and no memory trace is
created,” Blijlevens said. On the flip side, fonts that are too different
would be difficult to process and wouldn’t help with recall.
Blijlevens said Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just
enough obstruction has been added to retain information.
Stephen Banham, a lecturer in typography, said it subverts the
typical conventions of a typeface.
“Normally when you design a typeface, you design it for clarity
and easy recognition,” Banham explained. “This was the complete
reverse of that. We had to build in elements that actually slowed
news
down people’s reading of the typeface and demanded them to
notice it a bit more and want to complete the forms.”
In this way, the font asks something of the reader, he added.
“Whereas, if we’re reading that same information in Ariel or
Helvetica or Times, we’re so comfortable with those forms that we
just race across them. This one slows you down.”
To find a typeface that achieved that aim, the researchers first
developed three new typefaces, each based on Albion but with
varying levels of added difficulty: one with gaps; one with gaps and
a back slant; and one with gaps, a back slant and asymmetry.
They then recruited 100 Australian university students to look
at word pairs written in the three typefaces to find out which led
to the best memory retention. Participants were able to recall
more with the Albion typeface with gaps and a back slant – which
became Sans Forgetica – than the other two.
The team later carried out an online experiment involving
a multiple choice exam with 303 students. Participants
remembered 57 per cent of the text when a section was typed in
Sans Forgetica compared to 50 per cent of the surrounding text
that was written in a plain Arial font.
Banham said the disruptive typographic feature of back slanting
was chosen because it’s extremely unusual – one typically only
used by cartographers when marking the names of river systems –
while gaps were chosen because the mind will “immediately want
to complete those shapes”.
“It begins to work out where that shape starts and finishes, and it
begins to become more engaged with that shape and that’s where
the memory gets triggered and that helps the students recall the
information better,” he said.
To get the most out of Sans Forgetica, Banham stressed that it
should only be used as a highlight font.
“It’s only meant for very small [sections of] text. It could be a
small quotation or a particular line of text that a student wants
to remember,” he explained. “The more sparingly you use it, the
greater the power it will continue to have.”
Banham added that the impact of the typeface is tested but not
proven, and said he’s interested to see how it’s used and what life it
has after it’s released to students. ■
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