> created by the type design studio Underware

Is the company itself made to appeal to kids

giggles

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.

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.

It looks rather poor on low-DPI displays, very inconsistent stroke width.

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.

> 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.

It's like someone told AI we need a font that looks like a mashup of Comic Sans and Papyrus.

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.