As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids.
Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" shape of a lower case N. I do appreciate that their lower case "a" is more like a handwritten one, as is the lower case "g".
I've been going through the Teach Your Child to Read[0] book, and it introduces a "learner-friendly" font, which actually helps. It has special glyphs for "th", for example, and other font tricks like making silent letters smaller, and different variants for the vowels depending on their sound. Eventually, those tricks are minimized and the kid is reading a normal font, though.
In other words, I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, but this font doesn't seem to be concretely designed in that way, and I'm put off by the vague "friendly" type stuff it seems to be focusing on.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to standard text was a stretch.
To bridge that, I actually built a font that keeps those phonics-aligned features and allowed us to use stories from things like Project Gutenberg. It’s based on the open-source TeX Gyre Schola, ( kind of like what is used in the Spot books) with OpenType features that auto-connect common digraphs (like “th”, “sh”, “ch”)— but in a way that can gradually phase out. Just put it up on GitHub if you're curious: Reading Guide Font. Open for any feedback or criticism!
https://github.com/dmboyd/Reading-Guide
Man, I thought I was putting in work by doing the lessons from the book (which is INCREDIBLE) with my 1st grader…way to go above and beyond!
This honestly very cool and I’m going to pass along to some of the literacy teachers in our district. Thank you!
In the example text, I think "hōt" and "joke" should be "hot" and "jōke" instead. Also, the vowel in "to" is different yet again, so maybe it needs its own glyph. ⊚?
Thanks for that. Working on automating that but currently relies on macrons being typed manually.
Just wanted to mention this, but actually it has more issues.
trouble / about: the 'u' should be marked, at least for 'trouble' to make it silent (or probably in both cases but differently, not sure about other similar words). But then there's 'o' in lemonade which is different from 'o' in 'trouble'. Also 'oo' in 'loot' seems strange (should be ⊚⊚ with the recommendation above). Or am I misunderstanding something in the point of the markings? Anyway, it hurts my eyes.
I’m working on a workflow to automating font weight and sizing to cover silent letters and prosody which should cover a bit of that. One of the key aspects though as a transitional learning tool is to teach children the diversity of sounds. So it’s intentional to not have a 1:1 mapping between phonemes and graphemes.
My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. I showed her the Kermit page and she said "Whoever's doing this ... this is total bologna."
Also, to your struggles ... she's a fan of Handwriting Without Tears.
Stroke 6 of the "r" is weird in that it is making an upward stroke rather than a down stroke. I guess that this still grates after those years learning calligraphy with pens that would not work trying to draw up. All strokes were made with a downward/pulling motion. Pushing a pen like that just didn't work.
e m and t all have the same motion.
>I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, ...
I stumbled across Andika[1] while looking for examples of high legibility typefaces. It's supposed to be all about making the problem characters more easily distinguishable for new readers.
[1] https://software.sil.org/andika/
the "serif" on the "n" is called an "exit stroke". You often find lots of glyphs that get an exit stroke (the "l" and the "i" come to mind, but it is most glyphs that have a single vertical stem, or on the right most vertical stem) when you get the italic version of the typeface.
Open Dyslexic kind of looks like a kid-font while being easy to read: https://opendyslexic.org
At least the small letter "a" appears as it would when written by hand. All fonts that add the "hanger hook" on top of the small "a" irritate me.