Sans Forgetica

Sans Forgetica. That’s the name of the font in the picture. Yep, that’s a real font name. I’m not making it up.

It’s not the prettiest of fonts with its slight backward slant and breaks in the letters. The backward slant reminds me of how I used to sign my name in junior high. Don’t know why I decided to do that. The trend only lasted a few years until I went back to my more normal forward slant.

I’m not sure I want to read something that’s printed in Sans Forgetica. But maybe I should because supposedly that odd backward slant and letter breaks make the brain work just a little harder, hard enough you remember more about what you read.

Or so the researchers say.

I found out about this font from an article my local newspaper picked up from the Washington Post.

It’s an interesting idea. I sure would like to remember more of what I read. Sometimes I zone out while I’m reading a page, not really remembering much about it later. That’s usually when I’m tired or distracted. If I had to pay a tiny bit more attention to the words, I could see myself remembering more.

The font was developed by researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. It was created by a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioral scientists. This 45 second YouTube video tells you a little bit more:

If you want to find out even more, including the science behind the font, go here: http://sansforgetica.rmit/

I downloaded it and changed the font in an old Word document to Sans Forgetica so I could try it out. It was a little difficult to read, but not all that hard. Looked very strange on the page, though.

Maybe one of these days Sans Forgetica will end up a font you can select on your Kindle. That could be interesting.

You can download it from http://sansforgetica.rmit and try it out yourself. There’s also a Chrome browser extension.