Tag Archives: scientific typography

Students! Need help with your memory? Try Sans Forgetica

Sans forgetica is a new, scientifically and aesthetically designed font to help students remember what they read.

An October 4, 2018 news article by Mark Wycislik-Wilson for Beta News announces the new font,

Researchers from Australia’s RMIT University have created a font which they say could help you to retain more data.

Sans Forgetica is the result of work involving typographic design specialists and psychologists, and it has been designed specifically to make it easier to remember written information. The font has purposefully been made slightly difficult to read, using a reverse slant and gaps in letters to exploit the “desirable difficulty” as a memory aid.

An October 3, 2018 RMIT University press release, which originated the news item, provides more details,

Sans Forgetica could help people remember more of what they read.

Researchers and academics from different disciplines came together to develop, design and test the font called Sans Forgetica.

The font is the world’s first typeface specifically designed to help people retain more information and remember more of typed study notes and it’s available for free.

It was developed in a collaboration between typographic design specialist and psychologists, combining psychological theory and design principles to improve retention of written information.

Stephen Banham, RMIT lecturer in typography and industry leader, said it was great working on a project that combined research from typography and psychology and the experts from RMIT’s Behavioural Business Lab.

“This cross pollination of thinking has led to the creation of a new font that is fundamentally different from all other font. It is also a clear application of theory into practice, something we strive for at RMIT,” he said.

Chair of the RMIT Behavioural Business Lab and behavioural economist, Dr Jo Peryman, said it was a terrific tool for students studying for exams.

“We believe this is the first time that specific principles of design theory have been combined with specific principles of psychology theory in order to create a font.”

Stephen Banham, RMIT lecturer in typography and industry leader, was part of the Sans Forgetica team.

The font was developed using a learning principle called ‘desirable difficulty’, where an obstruction is added to the learning process that requires us to put in just enough effort, leading to better memory retention to promote deeper cognitive processing.

Senior Marketing Lecturer (Experimental Methods and Design Thinking) and founding member of the RMIT Behavioural Business Lab Dr Janneke Blijlevens said typical fonts were very familiar.

“Readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,” Blijlevens said.

However, if a font is too different, the brain can’t process it and the information is not retained.

“Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention.”

Sans Forgetica has varying degrees of ‘distinctiveness’ built in that subvert many of the design principles normally associated with conventional typography.

These degrees of distinctiveness cause readers to dwell longer on each word, giving the brain more time to engage in deeper cognitive processing, to enhance information retention.

Roughly 400 Australian university students participated in a laboratory and an online experiment conducted by RMIT, where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention. Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention.

Dr Jo Peryman and Dr Janneke Blijlevens from the RMIT Behavioural Business Lab provided psychological theory and insights to help inform the development, design and testing of Sans Forgetica.

RMIT worked with strategy and creative agency Naked Communications to create the Sans Forgetica concept and font.

Sans Forgetica is available free to download as a font and Chrome browser extension at sansforgetica.rmit.

Thank you Australian typographic designers and psychologists!

Scientific A, B, Cs

Thanks to John Brownlee and his May 15, 2014 article on Fast Company about a fascinating project which marries typography/lettering  (the artist refers to her work as ‘lettering’) with scientific inventions (Note: A link has been removed),

If you’ve ever wondered how a Faraday circuit, a steam engine, or a cyclotron works, this is the typeface for you.

A glossary of the 26 inventions that have most changed the world have been turned into a literal ABCs, thanks to a new typeface by New Delhi design student Khyati Trehan.

Trehan has placed some of the material for her project, The Beauty of Scientific Diagrams on Behance (an online portfolio),

The project aims to explore scientific diagrams and take form integration to more complex territories. It looks at experimenting with typography, lettering and illustration, paying tribute to the history of science.

Since making the perfect match between the letter and the diagram was such a task, choosing the invention or the discovery was hardly up to me but dependent on what I could find (double coincidence of wants). I couldn’t find appropriate diagrams that looked like the letters they needed to be morphed into for P, X and Q.

Also, blogsfeaturing this project have been calling this a typeface for some reason but in no way is it a typeface. [emphasis mine] It’s lettering. Making a typeface is a completely different ball game and in my opinion, is much much harder.

Purchase prints at http://society6.com/KhyatiTrehan

Here’s one image from the sampling she offers in her online portfolio,

Downloaded from http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Beauty-of-Scientific-Diagrams/11833563

Downloaded from http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Beauty-of-Scientific-Diagrams/11833563

Trehan has also documented The Beauty of Scientific Diagrams project on the ISSUU digital publishing platform where you will find an 84 pp. report in English and links to supporting documentation in English and French.

The Beauty of Scientific Diagrams

A documentation of my 2nd elective done as a student of Graphic Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

The very curious can find more about India’s National Institute of Design here. From the institute’s Right to Information webpage,

The National Institute of Design (NID) is one of the foremost multi-disciplinary institutions in the field of design education, applied research, training, design consultancy services and outreach programmes. NID is a Society registered under the Societies Registration Act,1860 (21 of 1860) and also registered under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950 (29 of 1950) and established in 1961 as an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Industry (now known as the Ministry of Commerce and Industry).

I was quite interested to see that the institute hosted an Indo-French Design Conclave in October 2013,

Indo French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (CEFIPRA) is an autonomous body for bilateral scientific cooperation between India and France, promoting collaborative research in cutting edge science and technology fields.

CEFIPRA in partnership with NID (National institute of Design), Ahmedabad are holding a Design Conclave cutting across disciplines in the design and engineering, on 21st and 22nd October 2013in New Delhi.

This would be a preceding event for the international Technology Summit, New Delhi during 23-24th October 2013 with France as the partner country.

The goal of this conclave is to explore the possibility of Indo-French collaborations in the interface of engineering and design through:

a) Scientific research
b) Design and Technology collaborative Research
c) Student and Faculty mobility
c) Industrial (especially SMEs [small to medium enterprises]) …

This may help to explain the French reference materials informing Trehan’s project.

Getting the logos they deserve: 50 physicists and mathematicians

There are some 50 logos created by Dr. Prateek Lala of the University of Toronto (Canada) on behalf of various physicists and mathematicians. Before showing any of these clever logos, here’s a bit more about Dr. Lala’s logos in John Brownlee’s Feb. 5, 2014 article for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

The scientific typographics were created by Dr. Prateek Lala, a physician and amateur calligrapher from Toronto. Inspired by the type biographies of Indian graphic designer Kapil Bhagat, Lala designed his logos to make the lives and discoveries of various scientists more engaging and immediately relatable to students.

Kelly Oakes in a Feb. 3, 2014 post for BuzzFeed features 20 of the logos and I’ve downloaded two of them for here,

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) formulated the equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon – the electromagnetic field. He’s also the namesake of Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment in which a hypothetical demon violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) formulated the equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon – the electromagnetic field. He’s also the namesake of Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment in which a hypothetical demon violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

I particularly enjoy how Dr. Lala has introduced the ‘demon’ into the logo. And then, there’s this one,

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a biophysicist who used X-ray diffraction data to determine the structures of complex minerals and living tissues, including – famously – DNA. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a biophysicist who used X-ray diffraction data to determine the structures of complex minerals and living tissues, including – famously – DNA. Credit: Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

There is a bit of a controversy regarding Franklin as many believe she should have received more acknowledgement for her role in Crick and Watson’s ‘discovery of DNA’. I last mentioned Franklin in an August 19, 2013 posting (scroll down half-way) featuring a rap, Rosalind Franklin vs Watson & Crick, which was written and performed by children as part  of Tom McFadden’s Battle Rap Histories of Epic Science (Brahe’s Battles) school science project. The rap does a very good job of summarizing the discovery and the controversy and the performance is of a professional grade.

Getting back to Dr. Lala’s logos, there’s a slide show of 50 logos on this Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics webpage. I selected this one from the slideshow for inclusion here,

Aryabhatta (476-550) was a pioneer of mathematics and astronomy in India. He is believed to have devised the concept of zero and worked on the approximation of pi. Credit Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

Aryabhatta (476-550) was a pioneer of mathematics and astronomy in India. He is believed to have devised the concept of zero and worked on the approximation of pi. Credit Dr. Prateek Lala / Perimeter Institute

Dr. Lala has created some infographics of his logos which are can be seen here at visual.ly or you can see one featuring 60 of his logos in a July 26, 2013 posting by Carolina Brandão Zanelli on her Art for Scientists blog. As well, the Perimeter Institute is offering a poster of Dr. Lala’s logos in the Fall 2013 issue of their Inside the Perimeter magazine available here.

I was a little curious about Dr. Lala and was able to find this on academia.edu,

Prateek Lala
University of Toronto, Medicine, Post-Doc

Research Interests:
Medicine, Pharmacology, Drug metabolism, Pharmacoinformatics and Education

Enjoy!