Kermit: A typeface for kids
179 comments
·April 16, 2025losvedir
dmboyd
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to standard text was a stretch.
To bridge that, I actually built a font that keeps those phonics-aligned features and allowed us to use stories from things like Project Gutenberg. It’s based on the open-source TeX Gyre Schola, ( kind of like what is used in the Spot books) with OpenType features that auto-connect common digraphs (like “th”, “sh”, “ch”)— but in a way that can gradually phase out. Just put it up on GitHub if you're curious: Reading Guide Font. Open for any feedback or criticism!
mwachs
Man, I thought I was putting in work by doing the lessons from the book (which is INCREDIBLE) with my 1st grader…way to go above and beyond!
This honestly very cool and I’m going to pass along to some of the literacy teachers in our district. Thank you!
yorwba
In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?
dmboyd
Thanks for that. Working on automating that but currently relies on macrons being typed manually.
pajko
Just wanted to mention this, but actually it has more issues.
trouble / about: the 'u' should be marked, at least for 'trouble' to make it silent (or probably in both cases but differently, not sure about other similar words). But then there's 'o' in lemonade which is different from 'o' in 'trouble'. Also 'oo' in 'loot' seems strange (should be ⊚⊚ with the recommendation above). Or am I misunderstanding something in the point of the markings? Anyway, it hurts my eyes.
0xWTF
My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. I showed her the Kermit page and she said "Whoever's doing this ... this is total bologna."
Also, to your struggles ... she's a fan of Handwriting Without Tears.
dylan604
Stroke 6 of the "r" is weird in that it is making an upward stroke rather than a down stroke. I guess that this still grates after those years learning calligraphy with pens that would not work trying to draw up. All strokes were made with a downward/pulling motion. Pushing a pen like that just didn't work.
kgwxd
e m and t all have the same motion.
upofadown
>I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, ...
I stumbled across Andika[1] while looking for examples of high legibility typefaces. It's supposed to be all about making the problem characters more easily distinguishable for new readers.
viggity
the "serif" on the "n" is called an "exit stroke". You often find lots of glyphs that get an exit stroke (the "l" and the "i" come to mind, but it is most glyphs that have a single vertical stem, or on the right most vertical stem) when you get the italic version of the typeface.
uberman
At least the small letter "a" appears as it would when written by hand. All fonts that add the "hanger hook" on top of the small "a" irritate me.
empressplay
Open Dyslexic kind of looks like a kid-font while being easy to read: https://opendyslexic.org
FjordWarden
> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.
As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).
In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.
But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
cjs_ac
As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, because the individual pieces of research can't be assembled into a coherent body of knowledge.
The typeface looks nice though.
taco_emoji
School administrators sometimes implement the stupidest policies based on correlations of various strengths. But even a strong correlation might have nothing to do with causation.
E.g.: A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes.
Fuzzwah
Continuing with the logic of that school, most wildly successful people were bullied at school.....
chrismorgan
Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.
From your single-paragraph anecdote I don’t know the full story, of course, but it’s plausible to me that it might be not solely a case of confusing correlation and causation, but at least partly because the described effect made sense to people making the decisions, based on their broad experience in education.
tomatovole
Somewhere out there, an economist who has dedicated their life to causal inference is crying
thaumasiotes
> I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was [un]motivated
That's not just educational psychology. All of child psychology and child development is like that. People still talk as if Piaget might have been on to something.
Note that while the article doesn't really provide anything convincing, there is good reason to believe that indicating prosody makes it easier for children to understand written text.
The argument is just that, despite the writing system making absolutely no provision for any indication of prosody, native speakers keep spontaneously adding such indications to their writing. Look at this sidethread comment:
> A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody]
> Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody, and since that wasn't enough here, capitalization does too]
Or here's the New York Times in 1993:
> I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. "Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?" [question marks show prosody]
( https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like... )
If it's important enough that everyone feels the need to write it down even though they aren't supposed to, it's probably important to children too.
thaumasiotes
Actually, I should point out that commas show prosody and are often covered as doing so in formal instruction, though formal instruction is at least as likely to take the viewpoint that commas occur for no particular reason and you just have to memorize when it is or isn't appropriate to use them.
colechristensen
Psychology is filled with bad science and bad scientists. It's not that good psychology research doesn't exist, it is just rare.
reaperducer
[flagged]
jedberg
As a dyslexic font nerd, I have a question for you. Does Comic Sans actually help? Lots of people claim it's the easiest for dyslexics to read. I'm not dyslexic, but I set all my chat windows to Comic Sans because I've found that it helps me read it.
Curious if the claims have truth to them.
FjordWarden
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.
Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.
Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.
I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.
FjordWarden
I did some more thinking on this. Font technology like this could be useful for a better stylo + touch-screen interface where the handwriting is translated to real characters while still having the same visual quality of the handwriting. You'll need lots more styles though, and very complicated user interaction in the background.
smittywerben
When Windows forces me to sign in to install it, I can't help but feel it's subsidizing this entire design silo. In the next episode, now lets make everyone (including dyslexic people) jump through even more hoops to install Windows to subsidize the creation of a font that even if it did help dyslexic people that I would not be able to use since it was at the expense of everyone else. YMMV.
A_Cunning_Plan
For all their talk about how they think this will help kids read, I didn't see any evidence that they actually did any studies on whether or not this font has any affect at all.
primitivesuave
This is unfortunately the threshold of scrutiny that most online education apps operate along - "it looks good so kids must love it".
Freak_NL
All I saw were the two references about representing prosody typographically.
7bit
Excellent point, thanks for raising this.
parsimo2010
I don't know about kids or reading disabilities, but it looks nice and does feel "friendly" to read. Having the ability to vary and animate a lot of parameters will certainly enable some neat web designs.
Edit: I'm poking at this and it seems like the only way to do the animation is via the font designer's library. I'll be a lot more excited when this is supported by more options.
sabslikesobs
Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.
I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.
seba_dos1
It's super hard to read when you hijack scrolling (and do a poor job of it), regardless of the font used.
sambeau
Here's one that doesn't. (yes it dives me mad, too)
legostormtroopr
Wow - for something that is supposed to be friendly, that site suuucks.
A random animation of single letters, and 4 non-representative icons in the four corners.
scelerat
Very annoying. Designers, ui developers: please don't do this, it sucks.
sitkack
Feels like a very smooth, "Is my machine swapping?" simulator.
GuinansEyebrows
Microsoft isn't known for their high-quality design, be it fonts or UIs.
dunham
yeah, I didn't make it past the first page of text because of this.
Eric_WVGG
yes, not only poorly implemented but also completely pointless
Like, I kind of get it when it's part of some parallax effect, I get asked to make them all the time (and only do when I lose the argument)… but this is effing dumb.
nielsbot
Even then there's ways to do it that don't destroy the system-default scrolling behavior.
Voultapher
Please don't mess with scrolling, it's such a needless turn off. Didn't continue reading afterwards.
kh_hk
only microsoft, on their design blog no less
WillAdams
It is unfortunate that this sort of mathematics wasn't available to the students who were creating the Euler font.
https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf
Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where the lower halves were modified so as to indicate how a particular letter used in a particular word was pronounced, so that the "c" in "cat" had a different lower portion from the "c" in "cent".
That said, I'd really like it if they would publish the software used to make this font, ideally as opensource --- I have a type design project which stalled against the need to create variants for each size, working from an incompleat set of letterforms at each size (the only letters available in the compleat size range from the sample I had were "n" and "N", go figure) --- I believe this would let me finish up all the sizes of the design.
2b3a51
Initial Teaching Alphabet perhaps? - a bit more radical than what you are describing though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.
WillAdams
No, that's not it.
I suspect that it was a personal project of some teacher at some school I was attending, or maybe it's something which I came across while studying typography which was never actually implemented.
Anyway, I think it's an idea which someone should give a try --- maybe I will some day in a future font design.
replwoacause
I really like this. Just some anecdata from someone without a reading disability but who doesn’t love reading, I feel like does make reading easier for me. Maybe it’s just because I like the way it looks more than most fonts, I’m not sure, but I’m happy this exists and research is being done in this area. I’ll be trying this out in my email client and other applications if the fonts are available for download.
hfgjbcgjbvg
I like it too. It reminds me of the font they use on Tik Tok for some reason.
iNic
Is there any evidence that any font has a positive impact on reading (beyond obviously bad fonts being slow)? I'm very suspicious of this whole idea.
miningape
There has been efficacy for people with dyslexia. Fonts like comic sans are closer to their own writing and therefore are easier to read.
You can also look at the Geronimo Stilton book series, a lot of words appear in different colors / fonts to emphasise words. These books are often easier for children and those with dyslexia to read.
Note: I still feel like calling it a typeface that makes reading easier is inappropriate. No study has specifically been conducted on this typeface, and drawing conclusions from (limited, and arguably unrelated) studies and and anecdotes is dubious at best.
WorldMaker
Also, every letter has a very unique shape and the overall shape of words shifts entirely even for very similarly spelled words.
levocardia
No - many of the claimed benefits of these various speciality fonts do not actually hold up in real research. For example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5934461/
maxloh
It was claimed that OpenDyslexic could mitigate some of the common reading errors caused by dyslexia.
antisthenes
...At great expense and eye fatigue to everyone who doesn't have dyslexia presumably?
Looks like a terrible font.
martin_a
That heavily depends on your definition of "positive impact". In design/typesetting theory there are different "kinds of reading" and some fonts have positive effects, as in "works well with that kind of reading", while others are not very well suited for a specific task.
For example letters with very distinct shapes and different heights between lower and uppercase letters, like often found in serif fonts, are generally said to be easier to process for your eyes and brain.
Your brain learns to "read without reading" by scanning for known shapes and groups of shapes and just recognizing letters and words by that. You start to skip words, letters, whatever, once your brain has internalized that font.
That effect helps with reading faster and with less "stress" which is ideal for longer texts like in a book. Combine that with a good mixture of line length, font size and line height and you can create long texts that can be read very well.
Now take the same font, set it really tiny because you're working on an Encyclopaedia and don't want it to have 300 pages more and those font features that helped you before, actually make it more difficult to read.
Fine shapes might break away in the printing process or run up and your text will be harder to read. A sans-serif font might be better suited here. Straight crisp lines, that can be reproduced very well might actually make a better job here.
So... Fonts can have a positive impact on reading, depending on your definition of impact. ;-)
hajile
There's certainly a large amount of anecdotal evidence that a decent percentage of dyslexic people benefit from using Comic Sans. I don't know if there has ever been a formal study though.
There's also a view that all dyslexia doesn't have a single cause. If that is true, then there may be different things that are helpful depending on the exact cause.
jennyholzer
Comic Sans is a great font.
Kermit seems like an impressively shoddy imitation in my opinion.
hajile
Eldrich horrors like Comic sans may be discovered, but never created.
Kermit Sans is like an artist's imagining of Cthulhu gleaned from the rantings of a person driven insane from glimpsing its Eldrich form.
mikepurvis
As a neurotypical, Kermit Sans looks like it has the soul and intention of Comic Sans, but with the jankiness smoothed out. I quite like it.
o_m
I remember reading somewhere that reading a text with an unfamiliar font face you spend more time reading it, so you're using more cognitive load and are more likely to understand the text. Which might suggest it is just the novelty impacting the reading and not the font face itself.
MikeTheGreat
Is this open / free / something we can download and try out?
I did a super-brief search on the page but "download" didn't turn up any results. Does anyone else know where we can download this from?
steeleduncan
I don't know what the licence is, or the legality of using it, but the download urls for the fonts on the linked site are
dgreensp
I don’t think it’s anything we get to use. All it says is if you are interested in the font, you can contact the company that made it. It’s weird. Sometimes these announcements are more like, “We commissioned this cool thing and made it free,” like when Microsoft came out with their latest emojis.
c0balt
There us no mentioned license, neither on the original post or the website. It is only mentioned that it will be added to M$ office indicating (to me) that it will be proprietary/part of the product.
idle_zealot
They're using it on the page, which presumably means that your browser already downloaded it! You can probably dig around the page source/network tab to find it.
cosmotic
When new fonts are released, they always include what they tried to improve: readability, comprehension, etc. Just once I'd like to know what they sacrificed.
parsimo2010
In this case they sacrificed a feeling of professionalism. Helvetica is "serious" and used by real publications. Kermit would probably not be used by a major publication (like NYT or WaPo) because people wouldn't take them seriously even if it's easier to read.
codexb
Variable font width, height, and kerning is more difficult and slower to read. It's fine if you're reading a short childrens book at out loud, but if you're reading an entire novel silently formatted like that, it would become exhausting quickly.
bjourne
In this case its subpixel rendering on low-dpi displays.
As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids.
Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" shape of a lower case N. I do appreciate that their lower case "a" is more like a handwritten one, as is the lower case "g".
I've been going through the Teach Your Child to Read[0] book, and it introduces a "learner-friendly" font, which actually helps. It has special glyphs for "th", for example, and other font tricks like making silent letters smaller, and different variants for the vowels depending on their sound. Eventually, those tricks are minimized and the kid is reading a normal font, though.
In other words, I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, but this font doesn't seem to be concretely designed in that way, and I'm put off by the vague "friendly" type stuff it seems to be focusing on.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...