Sans Forgetica

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Research Background Memory retention of written information has been studied within the field of psychology, where the principle of ‘desirable difficulty’ has recently emerged. The role of font design in achieving this principle provides a new interdisciplinary approach to a long-standing problem. Research Contribution. Sans Forgetica is believed to be the world’s first typeface created using psychological and design theories in order to help memory retention. It is a collaborative project between Stephen Banham at the School of Design, who designed the font and the Behavioural Business Lab at RMIT. The research question was centred around how to design a typeface that increases memory retention, utilising the psychological principle 'desirably difficulty'. This typeface is difficult enough to read to engage the reader in better memory, but not too difficult to read, which would obstruct a memory trace being created. The research was tested with over 400 students in experiments by the Behavioural Business Lab, RMIT University. Significance. The innovation of Sans Forgetica is that it is the first typeface to be designed on psychological principles to achieve increased rates of information retention. Within two weeks of launch we reached 193,943 font downloads, 25,619 Chrome extension installs, and 524,425 Website visitors and currently sit at 88,900 Google search results. Sans Forgetica was reviewed in numerous TV, radio, and written media outlets worldwide, attracting over 200 million views through various channels. The font has won multiple awards including the highly prestigious Patron's Australian Design Award and the Best in Class Accolade in Communication Design at the Good Design Awards.