A New Font, Sans Forgetica, Helps You Remember What You Read

Remember all those classics you devoured in comp-lit class? Research shows that we retain an embarrassingly small sliver of what we read. In an effort to help college students boost that percentage, a team made up of a designer, a psychologist, and a behavioral economist at Australia's RMIT University recently introduced a new typeface, Sans Forgetica, that uses clever tricks to lodge information in your brain. The font-makers drew on the psychological theory of "desirable difficulty"--that is, we learn better when we actively overcome an obstruction. Sans Forgetica is purposefully hard to decipher, forcing the reader to focus.