Category: staff

Microsoft’s 50th anniversary has a Reading touch

Kermit font

Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary with the launch of a new font, Kermit. The new font helps children to read more easily, improves comprehension, and helps dyslexic readers. It does this by making letter-formation visible in real time, and enabling prosody to be represented typographically. Designed by Underware,  Kermit uses innovative Higher Order Interpolation to represent the act of writing strokes in digital form. The typeface ships with Office in the four basic styles, but is a variable font, so can be experienced in multiple style instances. The new font is introduced in Microsoft Design,  and there is a demo site on Kermit Font.

The Department supported in its way the project: the program manager at Microsoft is MATD alumnus Rob McKaughan, Gerry Leonidas and alumna Irene Vlachou helped with the Greek complement, and Aaron Bell (also an MATD graduate) hinted the fonts. Gerry also wrote one of the accompanying texts on the demo site.

User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests: guidance and tools

Sue Walker and Josefina Bravo have produced guidance in the form of a toolkit and a dataset for the design of instructions to support home and community diagnostic testing. This derived from the AHRC-funded Covid Rapid Response project ‘Information Design for Diagnostics: Ensuring Confidence and Accuracy for Home Sampling and Home Testing’. The work was also support by funding from the University of Reading’s Rapid Response Policy Engagement funding from Research England, which enabled consultation with research users and implementors of the toolkit.

The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users.

User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests provides evidence-based guidance and tools for manufacturers of tests, service providers and content and design specialists who produce instructions to accompany diagnostic tests for home and community use.

The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users. A related data set includes templates and illustrations for download and use.

The resource includes templates and illustrations for download and use

An open-access account of the project is in Information Design Journal doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.22011.wal

Chinese publishing collaboration proceeds

Group photo of the speakers and organisers of the Creative Chinese Character Industry Symposium

The inaugural symposium of the Creative Chinese Character Industry took place at the Beijing Convention Center on 3 and 4 November. The symposium brought together speakers from different areas of research and professional practice relating to the Chinese script: linguistics, Sinology, typeface design, publishing, and calligraphy. The symposium concluded with the preparatory work for the founding of the Chinese Character League, an interdisciplinary body bringing together organisations and agencies, including the Chinese Character Museum in Anyang.

In addition to speaking at the Symposium and being invited to act as guide for the CCL, Gerry Leonidas had the opportunity to update plans for a project, supported by the University of Reading and ATypI, of publishing key typography texts in Chinese. The first title in the series, Jan Middendorp’s Shaping Text, is nearly out of print already; below, Gerry holds the proof edition of the second title, How to create typefaces by Cristobal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer, and José Scaglione. The series extends to twelve titles, with a schedule of publishing two titles per year.

Gerry Leonidas holds the proof copy of How to create typefaces