[HN Gopher] Kermit: A typeface for kids
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Kermit: A typeface for kids
Author : nmcfarl
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-04-16 12:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (microsoft.design)
(TXT) w3m dump (microsoft.design)
| yapyap wrote:
| Kermit Sans
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Comic Sans Pro for Kids 2025 Edition
| A_Cunning_Plan wrote:
| 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.
| 7bit wrote:
| Excellent point, thanks for raising this.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| All I saw were the two references about representing prosody
| typographically.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| This is unfortunately the threshold of scrutiny that most
| online education apps operate along - "it looks good so kids
| must love it".
| whalesalad wrote:
| Scroll hijacking on this website is atrocious. Ironic for a site
| that is focused on good design.
| ratatoskrt wrote:
| Came here to say this. I don't get why this is necessary at all
| - it's literaly just bog-standard scrolling content?
| Zanfa wrote:
| I'm convinced most "designers" in big tech are just trolling
| at this point.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| How does this compare in dyslexic readability to OpenDyslexic?
| iNic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Also, every letter has a very unique shape and the overall
| shape of words shifts entirely even for very similarly
| spelled words.
| maxloh wrote:
| It was claimed that OpenDyslexic could mitigate some of the
| common reading errors caused by dyslexia.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDyslexic
| antisthenes wrote:
| ...At great expense and eye fatigue to everyone who doesn't
| have dyslexia presumably?
|
| Looks like a terrible font.
| hajile wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Comic Sans is a great font.
|
| Kermit seems like an impressively shoddy imitation in my
| opinion.
| hajile wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| martin_a wrote:
| 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. ;-)
| Pxtl wrote:
| Maybe it's easy for kids to read, but I found the font too bold
| and the letters too close-together to read comfortably. I gave up
| before I could read all their justifications for those decisions.
|
| But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the
| page that ruined it for me.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Yeah, I found this a lot harder to read and more strain on my
| eyes than something simple like the font used in the comments
| here.
|
| It definitely seems too thick to me.
| abanana wrote:
| _> letters too close-together_
|
| The CSS has { letter-spacing: -.04rem; } It's across the entire
| site - no exclusion for this page (or for their .kermit-font
| class). So it appears they've missed the fact that they're
| altering the look-and-feel of the very font they're presenting
| in this post.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I assume that's to work around the high width of the font.
| Information density seems too low for paragraphs of text with
| that width.
|
| I could see this current version (without the spacing hack)
| being the "easy-reader" version, and then make a "YA reader"
| variant that's lower weight and horizontallu narrower.
| zamadatix wrote:
| This letter spacing was the case for the site prior to the
| Kermit font post.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Yeah, bad site. Scrolljacking, non-zero letter-spacing on all
| body text... both things you should never under _any_
| circumstances do.
| trustinmenowpls wrote:
| Yikes, I gave up reading this after about 20 seconds, idk what it
| was but this font is unreadable.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I found it enjoyable to read.
|
| Obviously some placebo effect from the context but it felt fun.
| tantalor wrote:
| Agreed, this is hard to read.
|
| My initial impression was I can't read it fast, and when I try
| to read it fast then I miss words and have to go back.
|
| If anything, it forces you to slow down. Maybe that's good for
| people who are learning to read. But for experienced readers,
| that seems bad.
|
| On the plus side, the _feeling_ of reading this is nice. It is
| easy on the eyes.
|
| This might be a good fit for educational material. But I would
| not use this for journalism or literature.
| dole wrote:
| I feel like the lowercase lacks risers, it's kerned too tightly
| to be legible quickly. It's ornamental but I don't feel easier,
| it's more difficult to read if anything.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| It feels fatiguing to read; and I'm supposedly in one of their
| target demographics.
|
| Personally I've always found Monospace fonts the easiest like
| Microsoft's Courier New or Consolas. It feels like you're time
| travelling back to the 1980s visually, but they're so
| comfortable to read because your brain can make assumptions
| which are accurate.
| hersko wrote:
| I get: "Site is unreachable"
| williamscales wrote:
| My DNS blocks it as a tracking domain.
| sphars wrote:
| NextDNS blocks it under their Threat Intelligence Feeds list
| for me.
| internetter wrote:
| Its very slow to load for me. Baffling that Microsoft may very
| well be hugged to death by HN
| dimitrisnl wrote:
| I remember this getting posted again, on a different domain, and
| with different messaging, with no mention of kids.
| ActionHank wrote:
| I'm also not buying the point that it's for kids any more than
| comic sans is.
| flusteredBias wrote:
| This is anecdotal and I hope someone who has some research
| experience can say whether this is true or not generally, but I
| recently got a Kindle and found that if I use really large font
| sizes where there are fewer than 50 words on a page it's easier
| for me to stay engaged. Maybe this has something to do with
| cognitive load or chunking information. Some fonts look quite a
| bit better at these large sizes. So for me I don't think
| typography alone is sufficient. I think the interaction between a
| large font size and a typography that looks pleasing at a large
| font size helps with engagement.
| hajile wrote:
| I knew someone who would with an opaque ruler with a hole on
| one end. They would read the words through the hole and I guess
| it helped them stay focused on just the word or two they were
| reading. It sounds somewhat similar to what you are describing.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| At the same time, don't all fonts, typographically, look better
| larger?
|
| I don't know what the DPI of the Kindle display is. But since
| you called it out specifically, perhaps the issue you are
| having is more specific to that device. Contrast with how you
| perceive reading on a high-DPI laptop display perhaps.
| browningstreet wrote:
| When I've done that I feel like I'm reading a text message, not
| a book (fiction or non-fiction). Possibly not a universal
| experience.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The normal standard for line length is 2--3 alphabets worth of
| text.
|
| I find that shorter ones break up and slow down my reading,
| while too-long lines make reading wearisome to the point where
| I actually bought the Kindle version of:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37858510-the-inklings-an...
|
| to read rather than the print edition.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Trying to find out how this font is licenced is painfully
| impossible on both the linked Microsoft website and the atrocious
| https://kermit-font.com/ homepage.
|
| Regardless of the claimed merits of this font (I'm not dyslectic
| and this font just strains my eyes), I hold the opinion that any
| effort like this by a megacorp like Microsoft should be
| approached by them from a charitable angle. If this font isn't
| permissively licenced (I.e., Microsoft bought it and liberated it
| from creator Underware) and is just an Office exclusive, it is
| pointless, and possibly harmless (like that font which
| OpenDyslexic is based on).
| interloxia wrote:
| I found the following at the end of
| https://microsoft.design/articles/introducing-kermit-a-typef...
|
| "The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold
| Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38
| styles arriving in early May."
|
| It's listed here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-
| us/office/cloud-fonts-in-of...
|
| I didn't find an actual license. The typography faq presumably
| applies to the cloud fonts: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/typography/fonts/font-faq
| silveira wrote:
| +1 The first thing I did was search for the license. The
| license is what can make it or break it in this kind of
| project. The absence of clear and permissive licensing is a red
| flag for me.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| replwoacause wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I like it too. It reminds me of the font they use on Tik Tok
| for some reason.
| dmje wrote:
| It's a nice looking font but kind of hilarious that the official
| website [0] is entirely baffling! What do those icons mean? What
| is the license? And mainly: how the f can I GET the damn thing???
|
| Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...
|
| [0] https://kermit-font.com/
| doodpants wrote:
| From the last paragraph of the article, it's availabile in
| Microsoft Office. It seems that they're not distributing it
| separately.
| cl3misch wrote:
| Apparently it's only available in MS Office:
|
| > The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold
| Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38
| styles arriving in early May.
|
| ...from the last paragraph of the linked article.
| shuggy999 wrote:
| In the fonts used on the website; https://kermit-
| font.com/_css/KermitRoman-VF.otf, https://kermit-
| font.com/_css/KermitItalic-VF.otf, the license is:
|
| Beta version of a custom font for Microsoft by Underware. Only
| for internal testing, not meant for any other kind of usage.
| Email info@underware.nl for more information
|
| Seems to be a rushed release that they had a deadline to get to
| put a press release for.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among
| the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.
|
| Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All
| of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives.
| Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar
| role in our culture.
|
| In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict
| geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each
| letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints
| are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a
| "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.
|
| Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this
| detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears
| exceptionally sloppy as a result.
|
| Kermit will not survive.
| layer8 wrote:
| It looks rather poor on low-DPI displays, very inconsistent
| stroke width.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I thought the font was overall very pleasant easy to read...
| except for every variation of it beyond the standard weight.
| Every thin, bold, and italicized version of it I thought was
| actually quite difficult to read.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| For some strange reason this font appeals also to me - 41 y.o.
| adult
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I like it better than Comic Sans.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| 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.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| This might be a good successor to comic sans. Readable but still
| fun to look at.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| 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.
| dole wrote:
| It's like someone told AI we need a font that looks like a mashup
| of Comic Sans and Papyrus.
| albert_e wrote:
| > created by the type design studio Underware
|
| Is the company itself made to appeal to kids
|
| _giggles_
| cosmotic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It's super hard to read when you hijack scrolling (and do a poor
| job of it), regardless of the font used.
| sambeau wrote:
| Here's one that doesn't. (yes it dives me mad, too)
|
| https://kermit-font.com
| scelerat wrote:
| Very annoying. Designers, ui developers: please don't do this,
| it sucks.
| eviks wrote:
| nice extra features, though the speech' subtitles has all the
| words jumping up and down - wouldn't that make it harder to read?
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Name already taken: https://www.columbia.edu/kermit
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_the_Frog
|
| On a serious note, that doesn't appear to be a font named
| Kermit, so it's unlikely that there will be confusion with this
| if someone is talking about replacing their typeface.
|
| > a way to set up microcomputers as terminals to our central
| mainframes and allow files to be transferred reliably back and
| forth so students could archive their files on floppy diskettes
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > While we haven't implemented automatic prosody yet
|
| That is a really interesting use for LLMs I would never have even
| considered. The example video with JFK's speech is pretty
| compelling.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Cool font bro, but what's the license? I can "use" it in
| Microsoft Office? That raises more questions than it answers.
|
| This is why I only use Google fonts. They're all permissively
| licensed so I don't have to worry about anything.
| theboywho wrote:
| I fail to see why would the arguments be only valid for kids
| sambeau wrote:
| If you want to read it on a site that doesn't mess with
| scrolling, try here :
|
| https://kermit-font.com
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| _laughs in comic sans_
| sabslikesobs wrote:
| 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.
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