At the Royal College of Art
Natascha Frensch / Communication Art and Design
Britain has two million severely dyslexic individuals, including some 375,000 schoolchildren, who struggle with reading and writing. Dyslexia can occur despite normal intellectual ability and teaching, and it is independent of socio-economic or language background. Many people with dyslexia suffer barriers in their daily lives.
There has been growing innovation to combat dyslexia, especially for children, in the form of computer software. But relatively little design research has been done in the area of typography and type design that might support dyslexics.
Natascha Frensch, a Dutch graphic designer and typographer who is herself dyslexic, has developed a new sans serif typeface designed specifically to help people with dyslexia to improve reading and writing. This sans serif typeface is called Read.
The project, which is supported by the Audi Design Foundation, began when Frensch was a student in the Department of Communication Art and Design at the RCA. She began to experiment with hand-drawn letterforms that are independent in character and can be easily distinguished from each other, while also forming a cohesive alphabet.
The conventional process in type design is to create an alphabet derived from just few characters. Frensch, however, chose a completely different approach, in order to prevent dyslexics confusing the b and the d, p and q, f and t, m and n, and so on.
Over a three-year period, she tested her new typeface against conventional ones with nearly 100 dyslexic people, children and adults, constantly amending and improving her design. Positive test results encouraged her to persevere with the project and consult leading European type designers for advice on how to integrate unique letterforms into a consistent sans serif typeface.
The Audi Design Foundation has spent more than half a million pounds on grants supporting design innovation in the UK over the past five years.
However, this project marks a first for the charity backed by Audi UK, as the Foundation's manager Michael Farmer explains: "This is the first time we have supported a project by a young graphic designer, but the emphasis on fitness for purpose expressed in the typeface is very much in keeping with the ideals of our awards."
The project has resulted in three typefaces in the Read family: Read Regular, Read Smallcaps and Read Space, a specially-spaced version for younger children. Frensch believes that the secret of her font is incorporating "a lot of tiny details" in the way the individual characters are formed, in order to achieve more clarity in the text.
She has written, designed and published a special limited edition book in English and Dutch that describes the rationale for the new typeface and details its development. A website (www.readregular.com) has also been produced to promote the project to an educational audience.
The Read typeface will also be used in a new book for dyslexic students produced by Information and Learning Services at the Royal College of Art. Says RCA dyslexia coordinator Qona Rankin, "It is now recognised that the incidence of dyslexia in art and design education is far higher than within other subject areas. Nearly a quarter of students at the RCA, for example, have some level of dyslexia."
Find out more at www.readregular.com
research partner: Audi Design Foundation