A study of 400 students proves new “Sans Forgetica” font may unlock your audience’s content retention puzzle, and it’s free!
Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne have developed an unconventional way to help you fill your audience’s memory gaps and maximize your marketing content retention. The team of typographers and behavioral psychologists released a new font called “Sans Forgetica,” proven to help audiences remember what they’ve read.
Digital marketing experts estimate that U.S. consumers are exposed to an overwhelming amount of marketing messages – studies estimate between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day. This tidal wave of images and information can result in short attention spans with the people you need to reach most. Even under less extreme circumstances, readers often struggle to remember important facts from an article or notes before a meeting.
How can this complex font help you create an unusual, yet effective content marketing campaign? The answer is in the puzzle. RMIT typography lecturer Stephen Banham, who helped develop Sans Forgetica, says the puzzling font stimulates the brain to engage more carefully in the text, creating more memorable content.
Sans Forgetica employs a learning technique called “desirable difficulty,” which uses an obstruction to promote deeper cognitive processing. According to developers, common fonts such as Arial or Times New Roman have become so familiar that readers have a greater tendency to glance over the words without creating a memory trace. On the other hand, a font that is too difficult to read may cause the same effect. Sans Forgetica falls in the sweet spot between these two extremes, breaking just enough of the perceptual rules to create a clear memory imprint.
While the font doesn’t achieve a flawless track record for content retention, it may help your audience remember the details that count. The font was tested with 400 students who remembered 57 percent of text written in San Forgetica, compared to 50 percent written in Arial. Researchers caution educators and marketers to use the font sparingly. Since the font is more difficult to read, it can result in content memory loss if readers are overexposed. Banham and his team suggest highlighting sections of text that are most important to remember, instead of attempting to use the font for an entire article or ad copy.
This content retention-boosting font is available as a free download on the Sans Forgetica site or as a Google Chrome extension.
