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.
The Quick Brown Fox…
The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is well known because it uses every letter in the English alphabet. The sentence is often used to showcase fonts because it lets you see what every letter in that font looks like. It dates back to 1885.
Mainly I’m just talking about this because I found this gif:
