In 1999, as an educational therapist, Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup, working with clients, began observing that reading issues masked the individual’s true capability and intelligence.

In 2000, Bonnie theorized that reading performance would improve through use of:

  • A sans-serif font to reduce cognitive noise -Expanded scaling to improve potential for character recognition -Hyper-expansion of character spacing, which creates a greater lag time and reduces potential crowding and masking effects

These changes led to the development of seven specially-designed fonts, which create an immediate improvement in reading performance.

This is where Lexend was formed.

[Github] https://github.com/googlefonts/lexend

[Website] https://www.lexend.com/

  • fakefunk
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    22 years ago

    A typeface designed to aid reading comprehension, but with a single-storey a and a straight lowercase L? I don’t get it.

    • TrollOPM
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      12 years ago

      A typeface designed to aid reading comprehension, but with a single-storey a and a straight lowercase L? I don’t get it.

      Lower case “L” is different from upper case “i”:

      It also seems that dyslexic people prefer round lowercase a… though you are right for some it can be confused with the “o”.

      • fakefunk
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        12 years ago

        Lower case “L” is different from upper case “i”:

        Next to each other they sure are different :) Didn’t know about the dyslexic people preference for round lc a… I just know it’s a no-no for legibility in general.