Researchers at Australia's Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have devised a new publicly accessible font to help readers remember what they read. Sans Forgetica was developed primarily to boost memory retention for students. Behavioral scientists and design specialists collaborated in forming a font that is pleasing to the eye while inducing retention improvement.

The learning principle of "desirable difficulty" was applied to the development of Sans Forgetica: an obstruction added to the learning process requires the input of just enough effort, resulting in improved memory retention and deeper cognitive processing.

The sans serif-based font slants in the opposite direction of italics in text, and sections of each letter are missing in a typographical style that causes readers to linger longer on each word, giving the brain more time to engage in deeper cognitive processing and enhance information retention.

Source: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology