Sans Forgetica

5th October 2018

Here at Sanders, we are always striving to create striking and memorable designs throughout product and brand design. But what happens when your design aims to help people literally remember information?

RMIT University

The behavioural business lab and design school at Melbourne’s RMIT University have partnered to produce a new typeface which they claim can “help people remember more of what they read,” with the intention being to aid students who need to retain huge chunks of information ahead of exams.

Sans Forgetica combines “psychological theory and design principles,” in order to “improve retention of written information.” To prove if if actually works, a series of tests were conducted on 400 students. 57% of text written in Sans Forgetica was remembered — compared with 50% in plain Arial — by utilising an unusual combination of a backwards slant and gaps in the letterforms themselves.

RMIT University

Sans Forgetica was developed using a learning principle called ‘desirable difficulty’. This is 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.

The font is available to download here, so why not give it a try and see if it helps you to remember the words!