[nemo1618]

I've been experimenting with Anki recently. I loaded up a deck of popular fonts, with the goal being to memorize them to the point where I could recognize them in the real world. Each card contains the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," and you have to identify what font it's written in.

The first day was really tough; I missed cards over and over again. 20 new cards (the default) is probably too many for this type of study. But I kept at it, once per day, and today (a week later) I can recognize nearly every font in the deck, and the ones that I have trouble with are very similar to other fonts (which is a useful thing to know in its own right; you can start to group fonts into "families" with a common ancestor). Pretty cool!

There's just one problem: so far, this hasn't translated into any ability to recognize fonts in the real world. I can think of a few reasons why. First, there are a LOT of fonts out there; even the "most popular" ones don't show up all that frequently. This is especially true for business logos, which like to use unusual fonts to make themselves stand out. Secondly, I think studying by memorizing a single sentence has caused me to "overfit!"

For example, there's a font that I can instantly recognize (Minion Pro) by how the 'T' and 'h' look together at the start of the sentence. I don't pay attention to anything else about the font, because that single feature is enough to distinguish it from the rest of the deck. And this turns out to be true for most fonts: Today Sans has a funny-looking 'w', Syntax has a funny-looking 'x', etc. So if I see a logo written in Today Sans, but it doesn't contain a 'w', I can't recognize it! Similarly, because the cards only contain the one sentence, which is entirely lowercase except for the 'T', I can't identify any fonts from an uppercase writing sample. What I can do is say, "Hmm, I don't know what that font is, but it definitely has a lot in common with Myriad..." and then I look it up and find out that the actual font is Warnock, which was designed by the same guy (Robert Slimbach) who designed Myriad.

So yeah, Anki is pretty cool, but an unintended side effect is that it can give you a striking sense of how a classification algorithm "feels" from the inside. :)

[ChristianGeek]

Have you tried WhatTheFont?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8

[swaggyBoatswain]

I personally don't see the point of memorizing font types, but I like to use fontninja / chrome debugger to find out the font https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fontface-ninja/elj...

My personal favorite webfonts are proxima nova (for commercial) and roboto(for free google fonts) for modern web typesetting

[bjterry]

I would be careful with what you put in Anki. There is only so much stuff that you can memorize outside of stuff you'd learn from normal life, because the time you have to devote to flashcarding is kind of limited (except if it's something that excites you it creates more time). I think generally when you choose to make the investment to add cards to your Anki deck you should have a really concrete use case and I don't see how you'd save time over the course of an entire life for your font project.

There are a lot of fonts out there (~50,000 families according to random Quora people). Their distribution is probably power-law-like even if you discount the ones that are preinstalled on major platforms. It might make sense to recognize a few if you want to be able to really deeply discuss the difference in how they are used for design, but just recognizing them doesn't seem like the right way to gain that understanding. If you repeatedly perform a task where you have to recognize a font, learning only the top 100 won't help you much since it will eventually become pretty obvious. If you don't do that task, then why train for it instead of looking it up as necessary?

My thinking on "what's worth flashcarding" is that there are two major categories where it makes sense. First, if you need to remember a bunch of specific facts and you will need to recall them more quickly than they can be looked up. This is the case for things like tests, but there are also reasonable possibilities for this in real work (for example, if you are a programmer you may know you are going to need to look up the parameter ordering of a standard library method that you use only once a month, or you could memorize it).

The second is where you are using the flashcards as a scaffold, but the actual knowledge is something that references or brings together the facts that are contained in the flashcards. Recognizing fonts fits into this category, but I have a hard time imagining that actually recognizing them is the knowledge that is most efficient. Instead maybe you should be studying the major categories of fonts, features of fonts, or something that would help you make quicker decisions for whatever the real task is. I used to be able to recognize a lot of fonts and it's basically only useful as a parlor trick.

Although if you are new to design then learning the top 20 or whatever could be helpful to just have a basic fluency with Arial vs Times New Roman vs Comic Sans, so you have a shared vocabulary to discuss with others. "It's like Times New Roman but more suited for headlines and all caps" for example.

This is the weird confluence of work I've done at multiple companies (in one case I basically implemented a SRS like Anki with applications to finance exams, and in another I did a lot of work with fonts for a laser cutting design editor).

[nemo1618]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I agree that this isn't the best use of Anki; I did it more as a way of testing how effective spaced repetition is. And in that respect, the experiment was a success, so now I feel confident using this system to memorize other things I care about. The ML insight was just a nice surprise. :)