Vowels.me • Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not Writing

Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not Writing

Dotsies is a font/alphabet designed to help us read more efficiently. Its letters look like this:

As the Dotsies site says:

Since latin letters (a, b, c, etc.) are optimized to be written by hand, they take up a lot of unnecessary space. Your eyes have to move at a frantic pace from left to right to read. Use screen space more efficiently! Have a more relaxed reading experience!

So in other words, these letters are all narrower than the Latin letters we currently use. This means that more letters and words can fit on a line, meaning that we can read faster and not have to move our eyes as much.

To illustrate how much screen space this saves, here’s a comparison of a regular paragraph with its Dotsies equivalent below it:

The Dotsies site has a bookmarklet that lets you convert any regular text online to the Dotsies font.

The whole thing makes sense and sounds interesting. I don’t think it’ll ever catch on beyond a few geeks and early adopters, but it is still a neat idea. I’d love to see some people study this and then do tests to see how much faster/easier it really is to read this way.