With the unlimited information and knowledge on the internet we sometimes tend to glance over words instead of reading the text properly, resulting in unable to memorising the content. A multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists from RMIT University has created a special font that helps boosting the memory when your are reading.
Aptly named ‘Sans Forgetica’, the font was developed based on a learning principle called ‘desirable difficulty’ in cognitive psychology. The font is slightly difficult to read, thus it prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing and the content is more memorable. “Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention”, said Janneke Blijlevens, RMIT Senior Marketing Lecturer and founding member of the Behavioural Business Lab.
RMIT’s School of Design lecturer and typographer Stephen Banham was responsible for creating and refining the typeface. The sans serif font is 8° backslant and each character has part of it removed. Apart from making readers to better remember the content, it is aesthetically pleasant, too. Sans Forgetica is available to download for free for both Mac and PC use and as a Google Chrome extension.
