As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids.
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.
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to standard text was a stretch.
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!
In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?
Just wanted to mention this, but actually it has more issues.
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.
I’m working on a workflow to automating font weight and sizing to cover silent letters and prosody which should cover a bit of that.
One of the key aspects though as a transitional learning tool is to teach children the diversity of sounds. So it’s intentional to not have a 1:1 mapping between phonemes and graphemes.
Stroke 6 of the "r" is weird in that it is making an upward stroke rather than a down stroke. I guess that this still grates after those years learning calligraphy with pens that would not work trying to draw up. All strokes were made with a downward/pulling motion. Pushing a pen like that just didn't work.
>I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, ...
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.
the "serif" on the "n" is called an "exit stroke". You often find lots of glyphs that get an exit stroke (the "l" and the "i" come to mind, but it is most glyphs that have a single vertical stem, or on the right most vertical stem) when you get the italic version of the typeface.
> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.
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.
As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, because the individual pieces of research can't be assembled into a coherent body of knowledge.
School administrators sometimes implement the stupidest policies based on correlations of various strengths. But even a strong correlation might have nothing to do with causation.
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.
Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.
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.
The point is that they're teaching algebra without ensuring that the students are proficient in the prerequisites, so those students who are behind are not actually learning anything. You might as well teach it in first grade for all the good it's doing.
> I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was [un]motivated
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]
Actually, I should point out that commas show prosody and are often covered as doing so in formal instruction, though formal instruction is at least as likely to take the viewpoint that commas occur for no particular reason and you just have to memorize when it is or isn't appropriate to use them.
As a dyslexic font nerd, I have a question for you. Does Comic Sans actually help? Lots of people claim it's the easiest for dyslexics to read. I'm not dyslexic, but I set all my chat windows to Comic Sans because I've found that it helps me read it.
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.
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.
I did some more thinking on this. Font technology like this could be useful for a better stylo + touch-screen interface where the handwriting is translated to real characters while still having the same visual quality of the handwriting. You'll need lots more styles though, and very complicated user interaction in the background.
When Windows forces me to sign in to install it, I can't help but feel it's subsidizing this entire design silo. In the next episode, now lets make everyone (including dyslexic people) jump through even more hoops to install Windows to subsidize the creation of a font that even if it did help dyslexic people that I would not be able to use since it was at the expense of everyone else. YMMV.
For all their talk about how they think this will help kids read, I didn't see any evidence that they actually did any studies on whether or not this font has any affect at all.
I don't know about kids or reading disabilities, but it looks nice and does feel "friendly" to read. Having the ability to vary and animate a lot of parameters will certainly enable some neat web designs.
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.
Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.
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.
yes, not only poorly implemented but also completely pointless
Like, I kind of get it when it's part of some parallax effect, I get asked to make them all the time (and only do when I lose the argument)… but this is effing dumb.
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.
As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.
I suspect that it was a personal project of some teacher at some school I was attending, or maybe it's something which I came across while studying typography which was never actually implemented.
Anyway, I think it's an idea which someone should give a try --- maybe I will some day in a future font design.
I really like this. Just some anecdata from someone without a reading disability but who doesn’t love reading, I feel like does make reading easier for me. Maybe it’s just because I like the way it looks more than most fonts, I’m not sure, but I’m happy this exists and research is being done in this area. I’ll be trying this out in my email client and other applications if the fonts are available for download.
There has been efficacy for people with dyslexia. Fonts like comic sans are closer to their own writing and therefore are easier to read.
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.
That heavily depends on your definition of "positive impact". In design/typesetting theory there are different "kinds of reading" and some fonts have positive effects, as in "works well with that kind of reading", while others are not very well suited for a specific task.
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. ;-)
There's certainly a large amount of anecdotal evidence that a decent percentage of dyslexic people benefit from using Comic Sans. I don't know if there has ever been a formal study though.
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.
I remember reading somewhere that reading a text with an unfamiliar font face you spend more time reading it, so you're using more cognitive load and are more likely to understand the text. Which might suggest it is just the novelty impacting the reading and not the font face itself.
I don’t think it’s anything we get to use. All it says is if you are interested in the font, you can contact the company that made it. It’s weird. Sometimes these announcements are more like, “We commissioned this cool thing and made it free,” like when Microsoft came out with their latest emojis.
There us no mentioned license, neither on the original post or the website. It is only mentioned that it will be added to M$ office indicating (to me) that it will be proprietary/part of the product.
They're using it on the page, which presumably means that your browser already downloaded it! You can probably dig around the page source/network tab to find it.
When new fonts are released, they always include what they tried to improve: readability, comprehension, etc. Just once I'd like to know what they sacrificed.
In this case they sacrificed a feeling of professionalism. Helvetica is "serious" and used by real publications. Kermit would probably not be used by a major publication (like NYT or WaPo) because people wouldn't take them seriously even if it's easier to read.
Variable font width, height, and kerning is more difficult and slower to read. It's fine if you're reading a short childrens book at out loud, but if you're reading an entire novel silently formatted like that, it would become exhausting quickly.
Maybe it's easy for kids to read, but I found the font too bold and the letters too close-together to read comfortably. I gave up before I could read all their justifications for those decisions.
But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for 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 assume that's to work around the high width of the font. Information density seems too low for paragraphs of text with that width.
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.
Double-storey a is based on handwritten A with an exaggerated right-hand downward stroke (before distinguished upper and lower case was a thing) and historically precedes single-storey ɑ. So teaching a different handwriting style closer to printed fonts would also work.
"Double storey a" refers to the lowercase "a" with a sort of bent-over bit at the top, distinct from the handwritten cursive "a". So you can say it relates to "typography," perhaps, but certainly not that it's limited to "computer" typography.
Early readers — anyone learning the letters for the purpose of reading — will need to recognize the double-storey "a" in order to read books, road signs, or even a smartphone's pop-up keyboard. And certainly to read "The Cat in the Hat" (which is set in Century Schoolbook, according to a quick google).
Sure, we don't (often?) write it like that in cursive, but we read it that way in almost all written material we encounter in our entire lives. You just don't notice because you're used to it — it's the "natural" way for an "a" to look in print.
...Now let's do looptail "g" versus opentail "g"! At least for that one you'll have the smartphone keyboard on the opentail side of the debate (and "The Cat in the Hat" on the correct, looptail side). ;)
I feel like the lowercase lacks risers, it's kerned too tightly to be legible quickly. It's ornamental but I don't feel easier, it's more difficult to read if anything.
It feels fatiguing to read; and I'm supposedly in one of their target demographics.
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.
Trying to find out how this font is licenced is painfully impossible on both the linked Microsoft website and the atrocious https://kermit-font.com/ homepage.
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."
+1 The first thing I did was search for the license. The license is what can make it or break it in this kind of project. The absence of clear and permissive licensing is a red flag for me.
This is anecdotal and I hope someone who has some research experience can say whether this is true or not generally, but I recently got a Kindle and found that if I use really large font sizes where there are fewer than 50 words on a page it's easier for me to stay engaged. Maybe this has something to do with cognitive load or chunking information. Some fonts look quite a bit better at these large sizes. So for me I don't think typography alone is sufficient. I think the interaction between a large font size and a typography that looks pleasing at a large font size helps with engagement.
I knew someone who would with an opaque ruler with a hole on one end. They would read the words through the hole and I guess it helped them stay focused on just the word or two they were reading. It sounds somewhat similar to what you are describing.
The normal standard for line length is 2--3 alphabets worth of text.
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:
At the same time, don't all fonts, typographically, look better larger?
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 thought the font was overall very pleasant easy to read… except for every variation of it beyond the standard weight. Every thin, bold, and italicized version of it I thought was actually quite difficult to read.
The wide (and growing, which is great) variety of fonts designed to be easily readable are so interesting to me because they all start with similar aims, use different metrics, and come up with wildly varying font designs.
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.
I've looked into the state of research on font legibility many times over the years, and this time I came across this thorough thesis from one Dr Liz Broadbent[0] (who sadly passed away recently).
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.
As a left handed person I learned to write everything differently.
I cross the t's going the opposite way that this font recommends, and I write some numbers (like 4 and 7) with some strokes going the "wrong" way.
Most of the world (writing included) isn't designed for lefties. But sometimes doing things the "wrong" way works better when you're in the minority. I'm not sure if this font helps or hurts.
The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.
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.
As someone teaching his kid to read, this font doesn't seem to help.
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.
I think the JFK video is actually not a great example. When the video turns the sound off, the audio clip is so well known that I think your brain fills in the inflection and JFKs way of speaking. I think a better example would be to take a relatively unknown speech and do the same thing to see if the subtitles can communicate the prosody of speech or not.
that website is also terrible - no scrolling issues because you cannot scroll at all - and no idea what to click because not a single labeled button/link on the entire page, only some vague unlabeled icons. even on hover you get nothing
It's a good-looking informal font, with a very flexible model, and an interesting way to animate it. Wonderful! I'm happy to see what have they achieved technically and aesthetically.
Any claims of pedagogical helpfulness should be made very cautiously though, before there are multiple independent studies of that.
yes! and the animation and flexibility is the point that's missed by most fellow commenters.
they enable a font to be parameterized in two dimensions: time and prosody, i.e. speech pattern.
so subtitles and learning materials can be animated to reflect the speech pattern (stressing words, rasing and falling pitch, volume overall, ...) and they can --- independently --- be animated to teach writing, by reading the example.
this is a curious novelty that allows experimenting with the representation of speech and I'm looking forward what will come out of it.
I remember asking a few dyslexics what they thought about "dyslexia friendly fonts" and all of them thought it was a gimmick. I've only skimmed the article, but I didn't find references to studies of how this font actually helped?
It feels like poor taste to force smooth scrolling on a page that is intended probably to be read by a target audience who is more likely to use assistive technologies than not.
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
This is a font by adults to adults: the ones in charge of the KPIs.
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.
It's a nice looking font but kind of hilarious that the official website [0] is entirely baffling! What do those icons mean? What is the license? And mainly: how the f can I GET the damn thing???
Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...
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.
> 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.
As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids.
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...
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to standard text was a stretch.
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!
https://github.com/dmboyd/Reading-Guide
Man, I thought I was putting in work by doing the lessons from the book (which is INCREDIBLE) with my 1st grader…way to go above and beyond!
This honestly very cool and I’m going to pass along to some of the literacy teachers in our district. Thank you!
In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?
Thanks for that. Working on automating that but currently relies on macrons being typed manually.
Just wanted to mention this, but actually it has more issues.
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.
I’m working on a workflow to automating font weight and sizing to cover silent letters and prosody which should cover a bit of that. One of the key aspects though as a transitional learning tool is to teach children the diversity of sounds. So it’s intentional to not have a 1:1 mapping between phonemes and graphemes.
My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. I showed her the Kermit page and she said "Whoever's doing this ... this is total bologna."
Also, to your struggles ... she's a fan of Handwriting Without Tears.
Stroke 6 of the "r" is weird in that it is making an upward stroke rather than a down stroke. I guess that this still grates after those years learning calligraphy with pens that would not work trying to draw up. All strokes were made with a downward/pulling motion. Pushing a pen like that just didn't work.
e m and t all have the same motion.
>I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, ...
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.
[1] https://software.sil.org/andika/
the "serif" on the "n" is called an "exit stroke". You often find lots of glyphs that get an exit stroke (the "l" and the "i" come to mind, but it is most glyphs that have a single vertical stem, or on the right most vertical stem) when you get the italic version of the typeface.
Open Dyslexic kind of looks like a kid-font while being easy to read: https://opendyslexic.org
At least the small letter "a" appears as it would when written by hand. All fonts that add the "hanger hook" on top of the small "a" irritate me.
> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.
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.
As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, because the individual pieces of research can't be assembled into a coherent body of knowledge.
The typeface looks nice though.
School administrators sometimes implement the stupidest policies based on correlations of various strengths. But even a strong correlation might have nothing to do with causation.
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.
Continuing with the logic of that school, most wildly successful people were bullied at school.....
And many of them lost a parent at an early age.
Both parents in an armed robbery is weakly correlated with successful outcomes.
Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.
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.
The point is that they're teaching algebra without ensuring that the students are proficient in the prerequisites, so those students who are behind are not actually learning anything. You might as well teach it in first grade for all the good it's doing.
honestly, teaching the concept of a variable in first grade might not be the worst idea in the world
Somewhere out there, an economist who has dedicated their life to causal inference is crying
> I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was [un]motivated
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.
Actually, I should point out that commas show prosody and are often covered as doing so in formal instruction, though formal instruction is at least as likely to take the viewpoint that commas occur for no particular reason and you just have to memorize when it is or isn't appropriate to use them.
Psychology is filled with bad science and bad scientists. It's not that good psychology research doesn't exist, it is just rare.
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As a dyslexic font nerd, I have a question for you. Does Comic Sans actually help? Lots of people claim it's the easiest for dyslexics to read. I'm not dyslexic, but I set all my chat windows to Comic Sans because I've found that it helps me read it.
Curious if the claims have truth to them.
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.
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.
I did some more thinking on this. Font technology like this could be useful for a better stylo + touch-screen interface where the handwriting is translated to real characters while still having the same visual quality of the handwriting. You'll need lots more styles though, and very complicated user interaction in the background.
When Windows forces me to sign in to install it, I can't help but feel it's subsidizing this entire design silo. In the next episode, now lets make everyone (including dyslexic people) jump through even more hoops to install Windows to subsidize the creation of a font that even if it did help dyslexic people that I would not be able to use since it was at the expense of everyone else. YMMV.
For all their talk about how they think this will help kids read, I didn't see any evidence that they actually did any studies on whether or not this font has any affect at all.
This is unfortunately the threshold of scrutiny that most online education apps operate along - "it looks good so kids must love it".
All I saw were the two references about representing prosody typographically.
Excellent point, thanks for raising this.
I don't know about kids or reading disabilities, but it looks nice and does feel "friendly" to read. Having the ability to vary and animate a lot of parameters will certainly enable some neat web designs.
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.
Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.
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.
It's super hard to read when you hijack scrolling (and do a poor job of it), regardless of the font used.
Here's one that doesn't. (yes it dives me mad, too)
https://kermit-font.com
Wow - for something that is supposed to be friendly, that site suuucks.
A random animation of single letters, and 4 non-representative icons in the four corners.
Very annoying. Designers, ui developers: please don't do this, it sucks.
Feels like a very smooth, "Is my machine swapping?" simulator.
Microsoft isn't known for their high-quality design, be it fonts or UIs.
yeah, I didn't make it past the first page of text because of this.
yes, not only poorly implemented but also completely pointless
Like, I kind of get it when it's part of some parallax effect, I get asked to make them all the time (and only do when I lose the argument)… but this is effing dumb.
Even then there's ways to do it that don't destroy the system-default scrolling behavior.
Please don't mess with scrolling, it's such a needless turn off. Didn't continue reading afterwards.
only microsoft, on their design blog no less
It is unfortunate that this sort of mathematics wasn't available to the students who were creating the Euler font.
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.
Initial Teaching Alphabet perhaps? - a bit more radical than what you are describing though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.
No, that's not it.
I suspect that it was a personal project of some teacher at some school I was attending, or maybe it's something which I came across while studying typography which was never actually implemented.
Anyway, I think it's an idea which someone should give a try --- maybe I will some day in a future font design.
I really like this. Just some anecdata from someone without a reading disability but who doesn’t love reading, I feel like does make reading easier for me. Maybe it’s just because I like the way it looks more than most fonts, I’m not sure, but I’m happy this exists and research is being done in this area. I’ll be trying this out in my email client and other applications if the fonts are available for download.
I like it too. It reminds me of the font they use on Tik Tok for some reason.
Is there any evidence that any font has a positive impact on reading (beyond obviously bad fonts being slow)? I'm very suspicious of this whole idea.
There has been efficacy for people with dyslexia. Fonts like comic sans are closer to their own writing and therefore are easier to read.
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.
Also, every letter has a very unique shape and the overall shape of words shifts entirely even for very similarly spelled words.
No - many of the claimed benefits of these various speciality fonts do not actually hold up in real research. For example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5934461/
It was claimed that OpenDyslexic could mitigate some of the common reading errors caused by dyslexia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDyslexic
...At great expense and eye fatigue to everyone who doesn't have dyslexia presumably?
Looks like a terrible font.
That heavily depends on your definition of "positive impact". In design/typesetting theory there are different "kinds of reading" and some fonts have positive effects, as in "works well with that kind of reading", while others are not very well suited for a specific task.
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. ;-)
There's certainly a large amount of anecdotal evidence that a decent percentage of dyslexic people benefit from using Comic Sans. I don't know if there has ever been a formal study though.
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.
Comic Sans is a great font.
Kermit seems like an impressively shoddy imitation in my opinion.
Eldrich horrors like Comic sans may be discovered, but never created.
Kermit Sans is like an artist's imagining of Cthulhu gleaned from the rantings of a person driven insane from glimpsing its Eldrich form.
As a neurotypical, Kermit Sans looks like it has the soul and intention of Comic Sans, but with the jankiness smoothed out. I quite like it.
I remember reading somewhere that reading a text with an unfamiliar font face you spend more time reading it, so you're using more cognitive load and are more likely to understand the text. Which might suggest it is just the novelty impacting the reading and not the font face itself.
Is this open / free / something we can download and try out?
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?
https://microsoft.design/wp-content/themes/wp-base-theme/dis...
https://microsoft.design/wp-content/themes/wp-base-theme/dis...
I don't know what the licence is, or the legality of using it, but the download urls for the fonts on the linked site are
- https://kermit-font.com/_css/KermitRoman-VF.otf
- https://kermit-font.com/_css/KermitItalic-VF.otf
I don’t think it’s anything we get to use. All it says is if you are interested in the font, you can contact the company that made it. It’s weird. Sometimes these announcements are more like, “We commissioned this cool thing and made it free,” like when Microsoft came out with their latest emojis.
There us no mentioned license, neither on the original post or the website. It is only mentioned that it will be added to M$ office indicating (to me) that it will be proprietary/part of the product.
They're using it on the page, which presumably means that your browser already downloaded it! You can probably dig around the page source/network tab to find it.
When new fonts are released, they always include what they tried to improve: readability, comprehension, etc. Just once I'd like to know what they sacrificed.
In this case they sacrificed a feeling of professionalism. Helvetica is "serious" and used by real publications. Kermit would probably not be used by a major publication (like NYT or WaPo) because people wouldn't take them seriously even if it's easier to read.
Variable font width, height, and kerning is more difficult and slower to read. It's fine if you're reading a short childrens book at out loud, but if you're reading an entire novel silently formatted like that, it would become exhausting quickly.
In this case its subpixel rendering on low-dpi displays.
Maybe it's easy for kids to read, but I found the font too bold and the letters too close-together to read comfortably. I gave up before I could read all their justifications for those decisions.
But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.
> letters too close-together
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.
Yeah, bad site. Scrolljacking, non-zero letter-spacing on all body text… both things you should never under any circumstances do.
I assume that's to work around the high width of the font. Information density seems too low for paragraphs of text with that width.
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.
This letter spacing was the case for the site prior to the Kermit font post.
Yeah, I found this a lot harder to read and more strain on my eyes than something simple like the font used in the comments here.
It definitely seems too thick to me.
Wow, the lag as I scroll the page makes me sea sick, I had to stop reading. Why reimplement scrolling??
I came to post the same thing. I can't stand when sites hijack document scrolling.
I wanted to read and enjoy this article, it looked so interesting. But same, the scroll hijacking makes it unreadable.
I don't understand how anyone focusing on design or UX can think this is a good idea.
I find the font very readable and somewhat unique.
I would have preferred a double-storey a instead of single-storey ɑ. I find it more readable and easier to distinguish against a o.
Though I can understand the need to be similar to handwriting. I'm guessing they had a long debate to decide between a and ɑ.
Using single storey a is the most fundamental thing a font for early readers needs to do. Double storey a only exists in computer typography
Double-storey a is based on handwritten A with an exaggerated right-hand downward stroke (before distinguished upper and lower case was a thing) and historically precedes single-storey ɑ. So teaching a different handwriting style closer to printed fonts would also work.
"Double storey a" refers to the lowercase "a" with a sort of bent-over bit at the top, distinct from the handwritten cursive "a". So you can say it relates to "typography," perhaps, but certainly not that it's limited to "computer" typography.
Early readers — anyone learning the letters for the purpose of reading — will need to recognize the double-storey "a" in order to read books, road signs, or even a smartphone's pop-up keyboard. And certainly to read "The Cat in the Hat" (which is set in Century Schoolbook, according to a quick google).
Sure, we don't (often?) write it like that in cursive, but we read it that way in almost all written material we encounter in our entire lives. You just don't notice because you're used to it — it's the "natural" way for an "a" to look in print.
...Now let's do looptail "g" versus opentail "g"! At least for that one you'll have the smartphone keyboard on the opentail side of the debate (and "The Cat in the Hat" on the correct, looptail side). ;)
Yikes, I gave up reading this after about 20 seconds, idk what it was but this font is unreadable.
Agreed, this is hard to read.
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.
I feel like the lowercase lacks risers, it's kerned too tightly to be legible quickly. It's ornamental but I don't feel easier, it's more difficult to read if anything.
It feels fatiguing to read; and I'm supposedly in one of their target demographics.
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.
I found it enjoyable to read.
Obviously some placebo effect from the context but it felt fun.
This is like a world-changing font for me, isn’t that funny :) I have acute BVD and it is significantly easier for me to read.
I remember this getting posted again, on a different domain, and with different messaging, with no mention of kids.
I'm also not buying the point that it's for kids any more than comic sans is.
Trying to find out how this font is licenced is painfully impossible on both the linked Microsoft website and the atrocious https://kermit-font.com/ homepage.
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).
I found the following at the end of https://microsoft.design/articles/introducing-kermit-a-typef...
"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
+1 The first thing I did was search for the license. The license is what can make it or break it in this kind of project. The absence of clear and permissive licensing is a red flag for me.
This is anecdotal and I hope someone who has some research experience can say whether this is true or not generally, but I recently got a Kindle and found that if I use really large font sizes where there are fewer than 50 words on a page it's easier for me to stay engaged. Maybe this has something to do with cognitive load or chunking information. Some fonts look quite a bit better at these large sizes. So for me I don't think typography alone is sufficient. I think the interaction between a large font size and a typography that looks pleasing at a large font size helps with engagement.
I knew someone who would with an opaque ruler with a hole on one end. They would read the words through the hole and I guess it helped them stay focused on just the word or two they were reading. It sounds somewhat similar to what you are describing.
The normal standard for line length is 2--3 alphabets worth of text.
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.
At the same time, don't all fonts, typographically, look better larger?
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.
When I've done that I feel like I'm reading a text message, not a book (fiction or non-fiction). Possibly not a universal experience.
I thought the font was overall very pleasant easy to read… except for every variation of it beyond the standard weight. Every thin, bold, and italicized version of it I thought was actually quite difficult to read.
The wide (and growing, which is great) variety of fonts designed to be easily readable are so interesting to me because they all start with similar aims, use different metrics, and come up with wildly varying font designs.
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.
I've looked into the state of research on font legibility many times over the years, and this time I came across this thorough thesis from one Dr Liz Broadbent[0] (who sadly passed away recently).
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...
How does this compare in dyslexic readability to OpenDyslexic?
As a left handed person I learned to write everything differently.
I cross the t's going the opposite way that this font recommends, and I write some numbers (like 4 and 7) with some strokes going the "wrong" way.
Most of the world (writing included) isn't designed for lefties. But sometimes doing things the "wrong" way works better when you're in the minority. I'm not sure if this font helps or hurts.
> created by the type design studio Underware
Is the company itself made to appeal to kids
giggles
> For Underware designers Bas Jacobs, Akiem Helmling..making Kermit fun and playful was a way to put kids in a good mood
I lol'ed everytime they were underware designers
It looks rather poor on low-DPI displays, very inconsistent stroke width.
> Combining science and design creativity can improve a child’s confidence in reading, changing their trajectory in life. Kermit is, therefore, ...
You don't get away with just slapping out a statement like that unless you provide a scientific paper to back up your work.
It's a very beautiful font. I'd love to use a monospace variant of the font for coding.
Jury is out for me on the style appeal but I too would like to try this in an IDE or terminal that supports tbe animation.
The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.
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.
As someone teaching his kid to read, this font doesn't seem to help.
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.
Anecdotally, this is amazing. I don’t have dyslexia but I do have analogous reading issues due to BVD.
It’s like I’m wearing my prism lenses. I wonder if a less cartoony font could capture these qualities.
The interesting idea to me was the idea of notating captions with stressing / emphasis.
It would be really neat to have automatic transcription that could annotate the result accordingly.
> While we haven’t implemented automatic prosody yet
That is a really interesting use for LLMs I would never have even considered. The example video with JFK's speech is pretty compelling.
I think the JFK video is actually not a great example. When the video turns the sound off, the audio clip is so well known that I think your brain fills in the inflection and JFKs way of speaking. I think a better example would be to take a relatively unknown speech and do the same thing to see if the subtitles can communicate the prosody of speech or not.
I get: "Site is unreachable"
This site is blocked by Telstra in Australia for supposedly having malicious content!
Its very slow to load for me. Baffling that Microsoft may very well be hugged to death by HN
My DNS blocks it as a tracking domain.
NextDNS blocks it under their Threat Intelligence Feeds list for me.
If you want to read it on a site that doesn't mess with scrolling, try here :
https://kermit-font.com
that website is also terrible - no scrolling issues because you cannot scroll at all - and no idea what to click because not a single labeled button/link on the entire page, only some vague unlabeled icons. even on hover you get nothing
Probably best to just view the PDF https://kermit-font.com/_assets/Kermit.pdf
It's a good-looking informal font, with a very flexible model, and an interesting way to animate it. Wonderful! I'm happy to see what have they achieved technically and aesthetically.
Any claims of pedagogical helpfulness should be made very cautiously though, before there are multiple independent studies of that.
yes! and the animation and flexibility is the point that's missed by most fellow commenters.
they enable a font to be parameterized in two dimensions: time and prosody, i.e. speech pattern.
so subtitles and learning materials can be animated to reflect the speech pattern (stressing words, rasing and falling pitch, volume overall, ...) and they can --- independently --- be animated to teach writing, by reading the example.
this is a curious novelty that allows experimenting with the representation of speech and I'm looking forward what will come out of it.
Anyone remember Microsoft's McZee font from Creative Writer/Fine Artist?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/mczee
This was my go-to many years ago!
Scroll hijacking on this website is atrocious. Ironic for a site that is focused on good design.
Came here to say this. I don't get why this is necessary at all - it's literaly just bog-standard scrolling content?
Boss on Windows with a click-wheel mouse: "Make the scrolling smoother"
Devs: "It's because of your--"
Boss: "Other sites do it. Get on it."
I'm convinced most "designers" in big tech are just trolling at this point.
It’s akin to fashion designers sending models out in burlap sacks.
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I remember asking a few dyslexics what they thought about "dyslexia friendly fonts" and all of them thought it was a gimmick. I've only skimmed the article, but I didn't find references to studies of how this font actually helped?
It's like someone told AI we need a font that looks like a mashup of Comic Sans and Papyrus.
I'd be happy to try it out in Kindle, to combat focus problems. Open dyslexia was somehow helping for some time, but I reverted it back eventually.
It feels like poor taste to force smooth scrolling on a page that is intended probably to be read by a target audience who is more likely to use assistive technologies than not.
Is there any information on the licensing of this?
It's going to be included with MSWord, sure, but what if I want to use it as a webfont?
I fail to see why would the arguments be only valid for kids
Hmm, it looks like someone took comic sans and tried to make it more like arial. My first thought was that they made a boring version of comic sans.
Dont they already have comic sans? also nice timing over easter to stimulate the normies and thier kids.
Looks like a much more pleasant alternative to something like comic sans. Friendly without being completely unserious.
nice extra features, though the speech' subtitles has all the words jumping up and down - wouldn't that make it harder to read?
Nit Picks:
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 might be a good successor to comic sans. Readable but still fun to look at.
For some strange reason this font appeals also to me - 41 y.o. adult
What’s more strange is that we’ve generally decided that adults aren’t “allowed”, or supposed to enjoy fun things.
A Kermit text for my new Kermit95 terminals?
Not sure about the educational component as I have no knowledge, but the font is sleek and feature rich. Comic Sans just got good.
Cool font bro, but what's the license? I can "use" it in Microsoft Office? That raises more questions than it answers.
This is why I only use Google fonts. They're all permissively licensed so I don't have to worry about anything.
Name already taken: https://www.columbia.edu/kermit
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_the_Frog
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
I like it better than Comic Sans.
This is a font by adults to adults: the ones in charge of the KPIs.
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.
Kermit Sans
Comic Sans Pro for Kids 2025 Edition
laughs in comic sans
It's a nice looking font but kind of hilarious that the official website [0] is entirely baffling! What do those icons mean? What is the license? And mainly: how the f can I GET the damn thing???
Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...
[0] https://kermit-font.com/
In the fonts used on the website; https://kermit-font.com/_css/KermitRoman-VF.otf, https://kermit-font.com/_css/KermitItalic-VF.otf, the license is:
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.
From the last paragraph of the article, it's availabile in Microsoft Office. It seems that they're not distributing it separately.
Apparently it's only available in MS Office:
> 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.
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