Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Damn you Comic Sans!

"Better Learning through Comic Sans?

Toss out your elegant Helvetica flashcards and start typing those lecture notes and study guides in Mistral, Freestyle Script, and, yes, Comic Sans. Findings published this month in the journal Cognition suggest that people learn better when the information is written in fonts that are difficult to read. Researchers at Princeton asked volunteers to memorize novel information typed in either Arial or more challenging ('disfluent') fonts, Comic Sans MS or Bodini MT.
When later asked to recall the information, the group who had studied the 'funkier' fonts scored an average of 14 percent higher than those who had read the information in Arial.
Asecond study confirmed the results in a group of high school students (this time faced with Hattenschweiller, Monotype Corsiva, and Comic Sans Italicized). "If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance," conclude the authors, "one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered.""

From ScienceDirect via MediaBistro

That's the first time I've heard Comic Sans being described as funky! 'Disfluent' sounds more like it.

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