Sans forgetica is a variation of a

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

, claimed to assist students in retaining the information which they read. Two years after its release and having received a great deal of publicity, the first peer-reviewed study demonstrated that Sans Forgetica was not effective for enhancing memory. Back-slanted and with gaps in the letter forms, the typeface is designed to reduce legibility; it adds

reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of Letter (alphabet), letters, symbols, etc., especially by Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process invo ...

complexity to learning tasks based on the psychological principle known as desirable difficulty. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Development

The Sans Forgetica font was developed by

RMIT University RMIT University, officially the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,, section 4(b) is a public research university in Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city ...

in Melbourne, Australia in 2018, and is claimed to be specifically designed by a multidisciplinary team of specialists to help people better recall material they have read. It has features of both

Geometric Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is ca ...

and Humanist typefaces, in the traditions of the

International Typographic Style The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style that emerged in Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1920s and was further developed by designers in Switzerland during the 1950s. The Internatio ...

and resembles an obscured and disjointed form of a typeface such as Futura. Readers are believed to scan traditional font without difficulty, using their

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

skills. Conversely text in an unfamiliar font that is very difficult to read may be counter productive, and so the designers claim to have found an ideal balance between these two extremes that has proved effective with (about 400) students who took part in the development process.

Availability

The font has been produced for the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

alphabet. Sans Forgetica is supplied free of charge as an

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...

font file and also available as an extension to the Chrome browser, which produces on-screen text which is intended to have optimal retrieval difficulty. The downloadable zip file includes an open type file (SansForgetica-Regular.otf) compatible with most

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s including

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

(via Font-viewer/install). There is also as a brief explanation of the development process (The story of Sans Forgetica.pdf).

Evidence

Sans Forgetica was spawned from a study of 96 Australian university students. An online experiment including 303 students followed. Research involving 882 people, published in the journal Memory and reported in May 2020, found no evidence that use of the font aided learning or memory, and on a paired-word learning task, actually impaired recall. Additional evidence that Sans Forgetica does not improve memory was published in Memory a few months later. Another study has also shown that the use of Sans Forgetica for proofreading impaired error detection.

References

Typography Typefaces Psychology of learning {{typ-stub