Kermit: A typeface for kids
microsoft.design
microsoft.design
Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" shape of a lower case N. I do appreciate that their lower case "a" is more like a handwritten one, as is the lower case "g".
I've been going through the Teach Your Child to Read[0] book, and it introduces a "learner-friendly" font, which actually helps. It has special glyphs for "th", for example, and other font tricks like making silent letters smaller, and different variants for the vowels depending on their sound. Eventually, those tricks are minimized and the kid is reading a normal font, though.
In other words, I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, but this font doesn't seem to be concretely designed in that way, and I'm put off by the vague "friendly" type stuff it seems to be focusing on.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...
To bridge that, I actually built a font that keeps those phonics-aligned features and allowed us to use stories from things like Project Gutenberg. It’s based on the open-source TeX Gyre Schola, ( kind of like what is used in the Spot books) with OpenType features that auto-connect common digraphs (like “th”, “sh”, “ch”)— but in a way that can gradually phase out. Just put it up on GitHub if you're curious: Reading Guide Font. Open for any feedback or criticism!
This honestly very cool and I’m going to pass along to some of the literacy teachers in our district. Thank you!
trouble / about: the 'u' should be marked, at least for 'trouble' to make it silent (or probably in both cases but differently, not sure about other similar words). But then there's 'o' in lemonade which is different from 'o' in 'trouble'. Also 'oo' in 'loot' seems strange (should be ⊚⊚ with the recommendation above). Or am I misunderstanding something in the point of the markings? Anyway, it hurts my eyes.
Also, to your struggles ... she's a fan of Handwriting Without Tears.
I stumbled across Andika[1] while looking for examples of high legibility typefaces. It's supposed to be all about making the problem characters more easily distinguishable for new readers.
As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).
In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.
But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
The typeface looks nice though.
E.g.: A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes.
From your single-paragraph anecdote I don’t know the full story, of course, but it’s plausible to me that it might be not solely a case of confusing correlation and causation, but at least partly because the described effect made sense to people making the decisions, based on their broad experience in education.
That's not just educational psychology. All of child psychology and child development is like that. People still talk as if Piaget might have been on to something.
Note that while the article doesn't really provide anything convincing, there is good reason to believe that indicating prosody makes it easier for children to understand written text.
The argument is just that, despite the writing system making absolutely no provision for any indication of prosody, native speakers keep spontaneously adding such indications to their writing. Look at this sidethread comment:
> A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody]
> Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody, and since that wasn't enough here, capitalization does too]
Or here's the New York Times in 1993:
> I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. "Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?" [question marks show prosody]
( https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like... )
If it's important enough that everyone feels the need to write it down even though they aren't supposed to, it's probably important to children too.
Curious if the claims have truth to them.
Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.
Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.
I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.
Edit: I'm poking at this and it seems like the only way to do the animation is via the font designer's library. I'll be a lot more excited when this is supported by more options.
I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.
A random animation of single letters, and 4 non-representative icons in the four corners.
https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf
Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where the lower halves were modified so as to indicate how a particular letter used in a particular word was pronounced, so that the "c" in "cat" had a different lower portion from the "c" in "cent".
That said, I'd really like it if they would publish the software used to make this font, ideally as opensource --- I have a type design project which stalled against the need to create variants for each size, working from an incompleat set of letterforms at each size (the only letters available in the compleat size range from the sample I had were "n" and "N", go figure) --- I believe this would let me finish up all the sizes of the design.
You can also look at the Geronimo Stilton book series, a lot of words appear in different colors / fonts to emphasise words. These books are often easier for children and those with dyslexia to read.
Note: I still feel like calling it a typeface that makes reading easier is inappropriate. No study has specifically been conducted on this typeface, and drawing conclusions from (limited, and arguably unrelated) studies and and anecdotes is dubious at best.
Looks like a terrible font.
There's also a view that all dyslexia doesn't have a single cause. If that is true, then there may be different things that are helpful depending on the exact cause.
Kermit seems like an impressively shoddy imitation in my opinion.
Kermit Sans is like an artist's imagining of Cthulhu gleaned from the rantings of a person driven insane from glimpsing its Eldrich form.
For example letters with very distinct shapes and different heights between lower and uppercase letters, like often found in serif fonts, are generally said to be easier to process for your eyes and brain.
Your brain learns to "read without reading" by scanning for known shapes and groups of shapes and just recognizing letters and words by that. You start to skip words, letters, whatever, once your brain has internalized that font.
That effect helps with reading faster and with less "stress" which is ideal for longer texts like in a book. Combine that with a good mixture of line length, font size and line height and you can create long texts that can be read very well.
Now take the same font, set it really tiny because you're working on an Encyclopaedia and don't want it to have 300 pages more and those font features that helped you before, actually make it more difficult to read.
Fine shapes might break away in the printing process or run up and your text will be harder to read. A sans-serif font might be better suited here. Straight crisp lines, that can be reproduced very well might actually make a better job here.
So... Fonts can have a positive impact on reading, depending on your definition of impact. ;-)
I did a super-brief search on the page but "download" didn't turn up any results. Does anyone else know where we can download this from?
Interestingly, it was listed in the font drop-down but there was an icon next to it to "download this font". That was quick and painless and the resulting text looks like the one shown in the article.
So it might not be free, but if you've got MS Word you can at least download and try it out.
But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.
It definitely seems too thick to me.
The CSS has { letter-spacing: -.04rem; } It's across the entire site - no exclusion for this page (or for their .kermit-font class). So it appears they've missed the fact that they're altering the look-and-feel of the very font they're presenting in this post.
I could see this current version (without the spacing hack) being the "easy-reader" version, and then make a "YA reader" variant that's lower weight and horizontallu narrower.
I don't know what the DPI of the Kindle display is. But since you called it out specifically, perhaps the issue you are having is more specific to that device. Contrast with how you perceive reading on a high-DPI laptop display perhaps.
I find that shorter ones break up and slow down my reading, while too-long lines make reading wearisome to the point where I actually bought the Kindle version of:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37858510-the-inklings-an...
to read rather than the print edition.
Obviously some placebo effect from the context but it felt fun.
My initial impression was I can't read it fast, and when I try to read it fast then I miss words and have to go back.
If anything, it forces you to slow down. Maybe that's good for people who are learning to read. But for experienced readers, that seems bad.
On the plus side, the feeling of reading this is nice. It is easy on the eyes.
This might be a good fit for educational material. But I would not use this for journalism or literature.
Personally I've always found Monospace fonts the easiest like Microsoft's Courier New or Consolas. It feels like you're time travelling back to the 1980s visually, but they're so comfortable to read because your brain can make assumptions which are accurate.
Regardless of the claimed merits of this font (I'm not dyslectic and this font just strains my eyes), I hold the opinion that any effort like this by a megacorp like Microsoft should be approached by them from a charitable angle. If this font isn't permissively licenced (I.e., Microsoft bought it and liberated it from creator Underware) and is just an Office exclusive, it is pointless, and possibly harmless (like that font which OpenDyslexic is based on).
"The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38 styles arriving in early May."
It's listed here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-of...
I didn't find an actual license. The typography faq presumably applies to the cloud fonts: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq
Is the company itself made to appeal to kids
giggles
Take Kermit, Inter, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Bookerly, and my personal favourite Lexend. They are all expertly designed, do great work at improving readability and legibility, though have very different target readers. Some look hand-drawn/modern/geometric, are bold/thin, single/double storey a, I with/without crossbars, t/l/q/y with/without flick, 3 with/without flat top, are slanted/upright by default, or have `font-variation-settings` to control all of the aforementioned.
Searching "easily readable fonts" brings up even more choice, some of which seem awesome and I'll have to look into. It's a shame that good scientific evidence on font readability/legibility is so difficult to find, as at best there's a case study showing that the font is beneficial to a small, select group of readers, and at worst (Sans Forgetica-style) it's the same but there's a follow-up study a few years later showing that the improvements are negligible or nonexistent.
It includes a great rundown of all the studies that have been done regarding font legibility and dyslexia. I remain completely unconvinced that any of these fonts offer a measurable improvement in readability over, say, Arial.
A big problem I see again and again is that the sizes compared are not fair - the author notes that spacing likely has a large effect on results and that different studies have tried to account for this in different ways. In her own study the author compares 16pt Arial with 15pt OpenDyslexic in an attempt to match the x-height. But in terms of how much space on a page a given text takes up, 15pt OpenDyslexic is actually equivalent to 25pt Arial! On page 154, a study participant even points out that it's clearer to read because it's bigger.
But overall I'm just glad funding is being directed to serious research on this topic.
[0] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173561/2/L.Broadbent...
Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.
In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.
Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.
Kermit will not survive.
You don't get away with just slapping out a statement like that unless you provide a scientific paper to back up your work.
That is a really interesting use for LLMs I would never have even considered. The example video with JFK's speech is pretty compelling.
Most of the arguments seem to be biased by "what an adult think is playful and fun", while my kid has a very different view of things.
Things like lower vs upper case are a struggle for him, it basically forces him to remember twice as many letters. Also the handwriting style just makes letters harder to recognize, especially for n and r, u and v, etc.
Devs: "It's because of your--"
Boss: "Other sites do it. Get on it."
Underlines with letters that go down (g, y, j, p, q ) don't keep the underline continuous.
Kerning on the emdash (—) is a little too tight
This is why I only use Google fonts. They're all permissively licensed so I don't have to worry about anything.
On a serious note, that doesn't appear to be a font named Kermit, so it's unlikely that there will be confusion with this if someone is talking about replacing their typeface.
> a way to set up microcomputers as terminals to our central mainframes and allow files to be transferred reliably back and forth so students could archive their files on floppy diskettes
The font is cool, I have no gripes with it. The things I can't stand is the absolute corporate BS coated with a heavy layer of weak "science" and "empowering kids".
If the work is good, just let it do the talking. No need for waterboarding us with waves of corporate slop.
Again, the font is fine. Congratulations to the people who worked on it.
Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...
> The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38 styles arriving in early May.
...from the last paragraph of the linked article.
Beta version of a custom font for Microsoft by Underware. Only for internal testing, not meant for any other kind of usage. Email info@underware.nl for more information
Seems to be a rushed release that they had a deadline to get to put a press release for.