Memory is something that can be worked on, but we are not all equal in our ability to remember everything. Some people manage to memorize long texts without any problem, others are more like goldfish and what goes into the brain comes out immediately. And the older we get and the less we practice, the more difficult it is. My children remember their poems so easily... it's frustrating!
But practice and exercise aren’t everything! To help people remember text, Melbourne-based Australian designers teamed up with behavioural scientists at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) to design a font that makes reading more difficult. That’s right, this font is designed to to make reading more difficult…but for a good reason!
Ironically called sans forgetica (to forget (meaning "forget" in English), this font is harder to read than most typefaces – and it was designed to be that way. The "desirable difficulty" you experience when reading information written in Sans Forgetica encourages your brain to make a deeper learning effort.
To make your brain work harder to retain information, the font is legible, but has breaks and distortions. Since chunks of letters are missing, your brain has to work harder to read. This doesn't really add to the reading time, and studies seem to show that it works.
In fact, a study of 400 students found a slight increase in memory retention when reading texts written with sans forgetica compared to texts written in Arial. Participants who read Sans Forgetica remembered 57% of the text compared to 50% with Arial.
While the font has promising statistics, it does have limitations according to Sans Forgetica speaker and co-creator Stephen Banham. He says the font is best suited for short texts. And he adds, “You wouldn’t want novels printed in this font, it would probably cause headaches!”
It's unlikely you'll want to use it as part of your daily reading, but Sans Forgetica can be a handy tool for stressed-out students. You can download this free font here.
Article updated on September 15, 2025 by Byothe
