Every October, RMIT University and forty-two other Australian universities compete for the attention of teenagers studying for their final high school exams.

RMIT is a university grounded in technology, design and innovation. Based in Melbourne, but with a global footprint of extended campuses, RMIT needed to reinforce its credentials as a cutting-edge university to an increasingly globally-minded audience of prospective students. But with seemingly little differentiation between university offerings, how could RMIT stay top-of-mind and reinforce the reasons to study there?

Our task was to develop a campaign that would reach school leavers at the very time they were making the decisions about their choice of university – while revising for their final year exams.

Rather than using traditional advertising which distracts students from their study, we found a way to actually help them. Introducing Sans Forgetica: the world’s first typeface specifically designed and proven to help you remember more.

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Sans Forgetica is a product of design that challenges the core principles of design. Its uniqueness comes from two specific disruptions to normal font design principles: an unusual backslant (usually only found in cartography to denote rivers) and gapping within letters (that causes the brain to actively try to resolve the gaps). These disruptions cause cognitive disfluency: the principle whereby creating small obstructions to learning results in deeper cognitive processing, and subsequently better memory traces are created.

Through the project development process a range of fonts were created with different disruptions, and each went through laboratory and online testing with students to test their effectiveness at improving memory. Sans Forgetica was the font that was proven to improve memory (by over 7%) over other fonts tested and a control font.

It is available as a free download for Mac or PC, as well as a Chrome browser extension.