Imagine you are 11 years old. You have just started secondary school. You have spent the last two weeks trying to get used to a school that is very different to what you have been used to for the last seven years.
When you were in primary school, all the resources you were given were printed in a certain kind of font:
Your primary school probably subscribed to a certain handwriting scheme such as Letterjoin. Your SAT papers were in a font very similar to Sassoon. The resources on the walls around you were probably courtesy of Twinkl and their own font.
Then you got to secondary school and started to encounter materials in quite different fonts:
These appear to be the trendy fonts at the moment. I saw them first in American resources on sites such as Teachers Pay Teachers. But are they suitable for use in a time-poor classroom, where the students are faced with text in a foreign language? They are hit with the double whammy of having to decipher the font and then having to decipher the text itself. Surely it's in our best interest to create resources that students don't have to spend valuable time decoding before they can respond to them.
Amatic SC is all capitals. Capital letters are harder to read than lower case letters, as they comprise so many straight lines. Lower case letters have rounder, more easily recognisable shapes. HelloCasual is my own particular least favourite, as all the letters are the same size and this makes it difficult to read. I think also that a font should model good handwriting to students whose handwriting, let's face it, is still developing.
Imagine being faced with a text in one of these fonts, and think about how accessible that text would be to the average student:
These are my own personal opinions, of course. I prefer to use Sassoon for primary resources and Arial for secondary resources. I may dabble with a fancy font for a title. I am liking SFCartoonistHand more and more for certain resources.
What do you think?
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