Top
Best
New

Posted by nmcfarl 4/16/2025

Kermit: A typeface for kids(microsoft.design)
360 points | 166 commentspage 4
hersko 4/16/2025|
I get: "Site is unreachable"
nevster 4/17/2025||
This site is blocked by Telstra in Australia for supposedly having malicious content!
internetter 4/16/2025|||
Its very slow to load for me. Baffling that Microsoft may very well be hugged to death by HN
williamscales 4/16/2025||
My DNS blocks it as a tracking domain.
sphars 4/16/2025||
NextDNS blocks it under their Threat Intelligence Feeds list for me.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4/16/2025||
> 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.

giarc 4/16/2025|
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.
hex4def6 4/16/2025||
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.

Galanwe 4/17/2025||
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.

sambeau 4/16/2025||
If you want to read it on a site that doesn't mess with scrolling, try here :

https://kermit-font.com

38 4/16/2025|
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
postalrat 4/16/2025||
Probably best to just view the PDF https://kermit-font.com/_assets/Kermit.pdf
whalesalad 4/16/2025||
Scroll hijacking on this website is atrocious. Ironic for a site that is focused on good design.
ratatoskrt 4/16/2025|||
Came here to say this. I don't get why this is necessary at all - it's literaly just bog-standard scrolling content?
rogual 4/17/2025|||
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."

Zanfa 4/16/2025|||
I'm convinced most "designers" in big tech are just trolling at this point.
bshacklett 4/16/2025||
It’s akin to fashion designers sending models out in burlap sacks.
38 4/16/2025||
[flagged]
nine_k 4/17/2025||
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.

froh 4/17/2025|
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.

wilhil 4/17/2025||
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!

internet_points 4/17/2025|
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?
More comments...