Many of the letters in Dyslexie also feature unusual serifs – the small lines added to the end of a stroke in a letter – that make them easier to distinguish. “The way we learn to write can often determine the shape of the letters and so it might be why our brains find them easier to distinguish.” “There is movement in it,” explains Boer. Many dyslexic people find reading handwritten text easier than when it is typed. “These shapes are based far more on handwriting than other fonts,” says Boer.

The shapes of the letters are also asymmetric, with the top of a “b” being narrower than the top of a “d”, making them easier to distinguish. Similarly, letters that look alike, such as “v”, “w” and “y”, vary in their height when they are typed. Instead of keeping the letters a uniform size, some have longer “sticks” that help to make them stand out more in words. Unlike many traditional typefaces, the Dyslexie font is strongly asymmetric. With the letters, if you turn them upside down, they look unnatural as the heavy side should be on the bottom.” “If you turn the wheel, the brick will always fall to the bottom. “It is like fixing a brick onto a bicycle wheel,” he explains. One key change was to make the letters bottom heavy, so they are bolder at the base than at the top. He set about finding ways that would make it easier to distinguish different letters from each other. Years later, while studying art at HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, Holland, he decided to do something about his problem: he designed his own typeface. Despite the extra help he received at school, he still struggled with long pages of typed text. “Then my mother heard this remedial teacher explaining to my dad about dyslexia and she asked her to test me.”īoer was six when he was diagnosed with dyslexia. “But when everyone else would be finished and I had only made my way through half a page, I began to doubt myself. “In class I would think of excuses about why I was struggling – I was tired or it just wasn’t my day,” says Boer. It was not until his mother overheard a conversation her husband was having with another teacher about dyslexia that she realised why her son might be having so much trouble. When confronted with a page of text, the letters would twist and jumble together into an incomprehensible mess. Christian Boer always struggled with reading.

Comic neue dyslexic