The typeface trying to make reading easier for dyslexics
"When they're reading, people with dyslexia often unconsciously switch, rotate and mirror letters in their minds" – Christian Boer
Some time ago, after a system update in my e-reader I discovered that a new typeface have been added. The typeface is called Dyslexie and I deemed it ugly, irregular and with an awful name. After all, to name a typeface after a mental disorder is at least bad taste. However, after searching more about it in google I began to think of it as the most important typeface of my e-reader.
Here enters the Dutch designer Christian Boer. Being dyslexic, he knows very well the hardships that come with reading and having this in mind he tried to create a typeface able to minimize the problems that dyslexics have while reading. As Dyslexia seems to be related to problems in the process of transforming the symbols we read in sounds and these sounds in words, the designer perceived that himself and many other person who suffer from dyslexia can mistake letters in more or less predictable manners:
"When they're reading, people with dyslexia often unconsciously switch, rotate and mirror letters in their minds"
This confusion happens more often with other typefaces because they have many lines and strokes in common. These similarities make the “n” and the “u” be the same symbol, only inverted. Other examples are the letters “p”, “b” and “d” that usually are the same symbol mirrored of inverted.
To tackle this problem, Boer used irregular strokes and tried to create unique letterforms, even with letters that resemble each other. The idea is that the singular aspect of each letter can make it harder for the brain to mistake one for the other.
"By changing the shape of the characters so that each is distinctly unique, the letters will no longer match one another when rotated, flipped or mirrored," Boer said. "Bolder capitals and punctuation will ensure that users don't accidentally read into the beginning of the next sentence."
The Dyslexie has letters with broader bottoms to avoid being turned upside down. The use of the semi-italics and variable gaps in the letters are attempts to make them unique. Still, the punctuation signs and the uppercase letters are bigger to make highlight the beginning and the end of sentences. In other words, what at first seemed to me a badly executed and ugly typeface is, in fact, an inventive effort with a bigger objective than being just beautiful.
Of course, this typeface doesn’t replace adequate medical advise, but any help is welcome. In this case, the efforts of a designer created the most important typeface in my e-reader, after all, it has even more opportunities to be helpful in interactive media. Beyond all the care in making it functional here’s also other controllable aspects like color, space and size. I talk so much about reading here that I had to post about this possibility of bringing even more people to this essential habit.
Read also about the Ontological Design. In this post I talk about how she tries to point a way for the Design studies and talks about the unsuspected importance it has in our lives.
Official website with free Dyslexie typeface for personal use: https://www.dyslexiefont.com
All the information used in this post can be found below:
https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/background-information/the-designer/
http://pediatrics.uchicago.edu/chiefs/DBP/documents/reading%20pdf/Dyslexia.Peterson.pdf
“You killed my son”: Report dissects Police action in Brazil
“There are agents of the state who have registered 19, 20 or 40 cases of ‘resistance followed by death”, and that sounds odd: so much resistance, so many killings linked to just one person.” – Interviewed public defensor
Yesterday (03/08/2015) Amnesty International published their newest report about deaths caused by police intervention. Titled “You killed my son” the document overviews extrajudicial deaths that occurred in Rio de Janeiro between 2014 and 2015, more specifically in the Acari favela. They crossed interviews, testimonies and statistics from many fonts that ended up showing an alarming but predictable picture about the way police officers work in Brazil.
The report begins detailing the humanitarian duties assumed by the Brazilian State and granted by the Constitution and International laws. The starting point is the right to life, considered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as essential, because without it all the other rights are compromised.
“On the one hand, the State has the obligation to take the necessary measures to not only prevent and penalize the deprivation of life as a consequence of criminal acts, but also to avoid extrajudicial executions committed by its own security forces.”
To stop these executions there are UN documents recommending some basic guidelines for the use of force by police forces, being them: Legitimate objective, necessity and proportionality. However what we see is that the war on drugs legitimate excesses and injustices, including the manifest support of almost half the civil population that, in survey, said to agree with the statement “a good is a dead crook”.
In previous attempt to lower the criminality rates and the use of force we saw the creation of the UPPs but the report point to a possible suffocation of these precarious initiatives due to a lack of broader politics to include these Unities in a bigger logic of poverty and police abuse reduction. As it’s showed by statistic, today’s Brazil is still hindered by it’s past: almost 80% of the people killed by police intervention in Brazil are black and poor.
Those who live in the favelas also are familiar with execution tactics. Cases where police officers invade homes without mandates to entrap the execution target are so common that there’s even a name for it: Troy.
“A large group of police officers, with various vehicles, enters the favela, making lots of noise, and then leaves. Except that a few officers stay behind in the favela, hiding in a house waiting for the traffickers to appear. It’s an execution tactic. No one wants to arrest anyone. It can’t even be called a tactic really, can it? But what’s the idea behind it? When the traffickers appear, the police officers who are hiding execute them.” – Interviewed police officer.
Impunity walks side by side with excess. The heavy weaponry and it’s indiscriminate use obviously generate collateral damage that are rarely assumed by the police. Even deaths of surrendered or hurt criminals are overseen due to lack of a proper judgement. With only 5% to 8% of the homicides in Brazil being elucidated it isn’t strange to see the rise of the mantra “shoot first, ask later” in the police forces.
“There are agents of the state who have registered 19, 20 or 40 cases of ‘resistance followed by death”, and that sounds odd: so much resistance, so many killings linked to just one person.” – Interviewed public defensor
Despite the individual judgements, the report also studies the responsible institutions and the justice spheres that allow the perpetuation of this scenario:
“In cases where police records indicate that the victim was linked to illegal drug selling, the investigation merely validates the police officers’ claim that the death occurred in self-defence. The investigation does not consider whether the police’s use of force was necessary and proportionate. On the contrary, the whole process seeks to give legitimacy to that homicide, supposedly carried out with just cause and necessity.”
In other words, there’s a inertia to be overcame before the proper changes can be made. But the victims of this police abuses are the ones who need the police and justice the most to grant their rights, however many of them feel threatened and are coerced not to go ahead with the complaints. The report shows that victims, witness and activists fear violence and threats because they’re a recurrent practice of the police officials.
In the end the Amnesty International lists their recommendations to many spheres of power with the intent of help to overcome this problems. Among them I highlight the recommendations to the National Congress asking for laws to make investigations easier in cases of violent death involving State agents and to incorporate in the Constitution the conduct principles recommended by the UN related to the use of force by connected with law enforcement.
The report “You killed my son” presents all these information with more details, the due fonts and na ideal format for digital reading. There’s also individual testimonies long the text that illustrate the data by showing the human suffering that can be underestimated when dealing only with numbers. In a subject like this it is indeed important to align intellectual efforts with the empathy towards the other.
You can find the full report here (In english). All graphics and charts used here were taken from the report.
How to navigate Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid world
“If we wish them to become truly familiar, apparently familiar things need first to be made strange.” – Zygmunt Bauman
Your newsfeed has more stuff than you want or can read, daily. Your Whatsapp receive a lot of messages while you use Tinder to find a new date. We can travel anywhere and you just have to download something like Uber to have a driver waiting at your front door to take you to the airport while you do the check-in from your smartphone. All of this is reality to some people, but it’s a recent truth and it may not last. It’s this fluidity of the modern life and the meltdown of relations that Zygmunt Bauman study to give us some understanding of it.
Bauman is a polish sociologist who studies modern society, ranging from politics, through consumism and art. In his book “44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World” he compiles texts written from 2008 to 2009 for the magazine La Repubblica delle Donne. In these letters he introduces themes of this liquid world that seem familiar to us and try to help us understand them beyond our daily lives. His transition to the study of post-modernity is marked by the appearance of the term modern liquid world:
“From the ‘liquid modern’ world: that means from the world you and I, the writer of forthcoming letters and their possible/ probable/hoped for readers, share. The world I call ‘liquid’ because, like all liquids, it cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything or almost everything in this world of ours keeps changing: fashions we follow and the objects of our attention (constantly shifting attention, today drawn away from things and events that attracted it yesterday, and to be drawn away tomorrow from things and events that excite us today), things we dream of and things we fear, things we desire and things we loathe, reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be apprehensive.”
The example I gave in the beginning is only the surface of the world as seen by Bauman, the changes occur in all areas and our anxieties tend to come even from the mere possibility of change:
“To cut a long story short: this world, our liquid modern world, keeps surprising us: what seems certain and proper today may well appear futile, fanciful or a regrettable mistake tomorrow. We suspect that this may happen, so we feel that – like the world that is our home – we, its residents, and intermittently its designers, actors, users and casualties, need to be constantly ready to change: we all need to be, as the currently fashionable word suggests, ‘flexible’. So we crave more information about what is going on and what is likely to happen. Fortunately, we now have what our parents could not even imagine: we have the internet and the world-wide web, we have ‘information highways’ connecting us promptly, ‘in real time’, to every nook and cranny of the planet, and all that inside these handy pocket-size mobile phones or iPods, within our reach day and night and moving wherever we do. Fortunately? Alas, perhaps not that fortunately after all, since the bane of insufficient information that made our parents suffer has been replaced by the yet more awesome bane of a flood of information which threatens to drown us and makes swimming or diving (as distinct from drifting or surfing) all but impossible. How to sift the news that counts and matters from the heaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How to derive meaningful messages from senseless noise? In the hubbub of contradictory opinions and suggestions we seem to lack a threshing machine that might help us separate the grains of truth and of the worthwhile from the chaff of lies, illusion, rubbish and waste . . .”
To understand or at least to have better tools to navigate this liquid world, Bauman seeks help from Walter Benjamin to propose two narrative forms. One of them is the narrative about bizarre actions and heroic deeds, those that are fabulous and have little to do with their listeners, the other one is the narrative of closer events, stories of the daily life that seem common, familiar. To Bauman even the more common and simpler stories can only be apparently familiar:
Zygmunt Bauman
“I said apparently familiar, since the impression of knowing such things thoroughly, inside out, and therefore expecting there to be nothing new to be learned from and about them, is also an illusion – in this case coming precisely from their being too close to the eye to see them clearly for what they are. Nothing escapes scrutiny so nimbly, resolutely and stubbornly as ‘things at hand’, things ‘always there’, ‘never changing’. They are, so to speak, ‘hiding in the light’ – the light of deceptive and misleading familiarity! Their ordinariness is a blind, discouraging all scrutiny. To make them into objects of interest and close examination they must first be cut off and torn away from that sense-blunting, cosy yet vicious cycle of routine quotidianity. They must first be set aside and kept at a distance before scanning them properly can become conceivable: the bluff of their alleged ‘ordinariness’ must be called at the start. And then the mysteries they hide, profuse and profound mysteries – those turning strange and puzzling once you start thinking about them – can be laid bare and explored.”
Bauman’s letters are a way to see while being inside the liquidity:
“Tales drawn from the most ordinary lives, but as a way to reveal and expose the extraordinariness we would otherwise overlook. If we wish them to become truly familiar, apparently familiar things need first to be made strange.”
When he defines the objective of his letters he also tell us what’s a possible objective to any intellectual endeavor, even if it demands a great effort to distinguish the signal from the noise. “44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World” is one of those rare books where the clarity don’t compromise the depth of the text.
Other recommended Reading that was already presented here is about how the world we create acts back on us and recreates us, the original article is written by Anne-Marie Willis.
Susan Sontag explores the primitive and the modern in photography
“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible." - Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was one of those restless minds that defy categories and limits. Born in 1933, she wrote about art, culture, politics and human rights with great resourcefulness. “The image-world” is an essay of her book “On photography”, which was originally published in 1977. Written during the 70's, these essays show a interconnected way of thinking the image, even considering their individuality.
In “The image-world”, Sontag uses her erudition to show the place of photography in the modern societies through comparisons with pre-industrial cultures or even pre-historic art. As we're going to see, photography and image, as proposed by her, are an extension as real as the original:
“Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."
This quote is enough to show the challenges of proposing real that which is usually regarded to be only a representation. But she don't avoid the debate. By refering to Plato she defies a whole thinking tradition:
“But this venerable naïve realism is somewhat beside the point in the era of photographic images, for its blunt contrast between the image (“copy”) and the thing depicted (the “original”)—which Plato repeatedly illustrates with the example of a painting—does not fit a photograph in so simple a way. Neither does the contrast help in understanding image-making at its origins, when it was a practical, magical activity, a means of appropriating or gaining power over something. The further back we go in history, as E. H. Gombrich has observed, the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things; in primitive societies, the thing and its image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct, manifestations of the same energy or spirit. Hence, the supposed efficacy of images in propitiating and gaining control over powerful presences. Those powers, those presences were present in them.”
“What defines the originality of photography is that, at the very moment in the long, increasingly secular history of painting when secularism is entirely triumphant, it revives—in wholly secular terms—something like the primitive status of images. Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.”
Giving this condition of reality to the photo, she then argues that there's a true inversion in the way we see the real, a return to the primitive ways of dealing with the image:
“But the true modern primitivism is not to regard the image as a real thing; photographic images are hardly that real. Instead, reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up—a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing—that “it seemed like a movie.” This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was."
“It is as if photographers, responding to an increasingly depleted sense of reality, were looking for a transfusion—traveling to new experiences, refreshing the old ones.”
“The urge to have new experiences is translated into the urge to take photographs: experience seeking a crisis-proof form.“
Being real, the mobility of the image can be a relief to those who can't experience that content, no matter if the reason is due to time or because of other kinds of constraints:
“As the taking of photographs seems almost obligatory to those who travel about, the passionate collecting of them has special appeal for those confined—either by choice, incapacity, or coercion—to indoor space. Photograph collections can be used to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images.”
“For stay-at-homes, prisoners, and the self-imprisoned, to live among the photographs of glamorous strangers is a sentimental response to isolation and an insolent challenge to it.”
“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images—as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.”
While the photo grants us the chance to keep contact with what's past and some of it's substance, there's also the need to deal with the transference of value that can happen between the “things” and their “images”, something that concerned Plato, even though he didn't saw this phenomenon as a competition between realities, but as the destruction of the only possible reality. Sontag don't accept this argument:
“The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment.”
“The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to shadows—transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real things which cast them. But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality—for turning it into a shadow. Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.”
“On photography” is an essential reading to thing the image in our society. The internet and social networks may have added another anxieties and needs to these already proposed by Susan Sontag, however, it's inevitable to read her writings in order to reach something more in this field.
If you want to understand better Plato's hesitation in regarding copies and imitations you can find here the Reading Notes about Plato's idea of expelling the poets from the ideial city. And to have an ideia about how it's possible to change the world through photos and videos read article about Ontological Design as seen by Anne-Marie Willis.