A hard-to-read new font said to aid recall has arrived just in time for this year's exam season.
Sans Forgetica, developed by a small team at RMIT University in Melbourne, is slightly harder to read than the font you're probably reading these words in.
By making the brain work a little bit harder, it's believed Sans Forgetica makes it more likely you're going to remember what you just read.
"It should be difficult enough, but not too difficult or too easy," contributor Janneke Blijlevens told the Sydney Morning Herald.
"There is an optimal level of difficulty to read which leads to the highest memory retention."
A study in 2012 found harder-to-read fonts aided memory recall. In that research, Comic Sans and Bodoni were the hard-to-read fonts, and Arial the easy.
"We've all skimmed through text, got to the end, and realised we didn't process the information very well," Princeton University professor Daniel Oppenheimer said at the time. "Making text harder to skim prevents that from happening."
Sans Forgetica was one of many tested at RMIT on 400 university students. Those who read text written in Sans Forgetica were able to recall 57 percent of it afterwards, compared to 50 percent for plain old' Arial.
Each letter has a portion missing, and the entire alphabet leans backwards.
"You would certainly never set an entire novel in it," said RMIT typography lecturer Stephen Banham. "I like to think of it as blue cheese - it works very well in small portions."
Mr Banham says he's looking forward to seeing if Sans Forgetica takes off.
Creating a font is a bit like having a child," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
"You create this thing and you don't know what is going to happen. There is no certainty about what is going to happen and that is exhilarating."
The font is available to download for installing on your own computer, or as a Google Chrome plugin so you'll never forget anything you read on the Newshub website ever again.
Newshub.
