Posted by nmcfarl 4/16/2025
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.
I don't understand how anyone focusing on design or UX can think this is a good idea.
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 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.
It definitely seems too thick to me.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously some placebo effect from the context but it felt fun.
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.
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). ;)
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