Want Something to Stand Out? Change the Font

If you weren't watching college football Saturday night, you missed one of the strangest endings of the young season—and, perhaps more importantly for purposes of this post, one of the strangest official statements explaining it.

No. 16 Michigan entered its home game against Western Michigan as a heavy favorite, but with only seconds remaining, the Wolverines found themselves trailing 12 to 7 and needing a touchdown. Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood launched what appeared to be the final play of the game, a Hail Mary toward the end zone. The pass fell incomplete, the clock showed 0:00, and Western Michigan's players began celebrating what would have been one of the biggest victories in their program's history.

Except the game wasn't over.

Officials reviewed the play and determined that a Western Michigan defender, who had established himself out of bounds, touched the football with one second remaining. That contact stopped the clock, so officials restored one second and gave Michigan another play. This time, Underwood's Hail Mary found JJ Buchanan in the end zone for a 47-yard touchdown. Instead of losing 12–7, Michigan won 13–12.

As you might imagine, people had questions. Later that night, the Big Ten released a statement explaining the replay decision and why one second had been restored to the clock.

There was plenty in the statement for college football fans to debate.

But the Internet quickly found something else.

The font.

The Big Ten did not present its explanation in the clean, conventional typeface you might expect from an official statement issued by a major athletic conference. Instead, the text appeared in an unusual, highly stylized retro font against a yellow-and-blue background.

To many people online, it looked like something from Stranger Things.

And I can see why. The elongated, dramatic lettering has the same sort of retro, slightly ominous quality associated with the title treatment and 1980s aesthetic of the Netflix series. It was certainly not what anyone expected an official Big Ten statement about a controversial replay decision to look like.

But here's the thing: We noticed it.

And that actually provides a pretty good lesson for law students.

Different Gets Your Attention

Think about what happens when you're reading your outline, page after page, in which everything looks exactly the same. The same font. The same size. The same color. The same spacing. Eventually, your brain becomes accustomed to the pattern, and one rule can begin to blend into the next.

Change one of those things, however, and you create contrast. Your attention is naturally drawn toward the thing that looks different from everything surrounding it.

Psychologists have studied a related concept known as perceptual disfluency. Some early research suggested that presenting information in fonts that were somewhat more difficult to read could cause readers to slow down and process the information more carefully, potentially improving retention. Later studies have produced mixed results, however, and researchers have not consistently found that simply making something harder to read improves learning.

So I wouldn't recommend converting your entire Evidence outline into some nearly illegible Stranger Things font on the theory that struggling to decipher it will somehow produce an A on your final exam.

The more useful takeaway is much simpler: Visual distinctiveness can direct attention. When something looks different from the information surrounding it, you are more likely to notice it. And when you're building an outline containing dozens—or hundreds—of legal rules, exceptions, distinctions, and common traps, getting yourself to notice the right things can be incredibly valuable.

That's why I encourage students to vary the fonts in their outlines.

Your Outline Shouldn't All Look the Same

Suppose you're creating an Evidence outline. Most of the outline might appear in Arial, Aptos, Times New Roman, or whatever font you normally use. But then you reach an exception that you repeatedly forget or a distinction that has caused you to miss several multiple-choice questions.

Why should that rule look exactly like everything else?

Change the font. Make it larger. Change the color. Put it in a box. Maybe even use Comic Sans.

Yes, Comic Sans.

The goal isn't to make your outline look good. The goal is to make the important information noticeable.

This can be particularly useful for the kinds of legal distinctions that students routinely overlook. An exception to a general rule should perhaps look different from the general rule. A rule that you've missed on three practice questions might deserve different treatment from one you've consistently applied correctly. A common multiple-choice trap could have its own formatting. And a concept that your professor has emphasized repeatedly might deserve something more noticeable than another bullet point buried halfway down page 37.

Imagine, for example, several pages of ordinarily formatted Criminal Law rules followed by MALICE AFORETHOUGHT in a completely different font, size, or color. Your eyes are going there.

That's the point.

Make Your Outline Work for You

There is one caveat: Don't overdo it. If every sentence appears in a different font, every other word is highlighted, and you've used six colors on a single page, then nothing stands out because everything stands out. The goal is not to make your outline look chaotic. The goal is to use visual differences selectively so that the things you most need to notice actually get noticed.

Remember, too, that your outline is not a brief you're filing with a court or a memo you're submitting to a partner. It is a study tool, and its audience is you. Use whatever formatting helps you distinguish, organize, understand, and retrieve the law.

Which brings us back to the Big Ten.

I'm not sure its Saturday-night statement should become the new model for conference communications. But it did provide a memorable demonstration of how typography can change the way we experience information. Amid an entire weekend of scores, highlights, graphics, and social-media posts, that statement looked different.

And people noticed.

Your outline should do the same thing when it matters. Make important rules stand out. Make troublesome exceptions hard to overlook. Give your brain visual cues that help separate one concept from another.

And every once in a while, if a rule really needs your attention, don't be afraid to make it look like it came straight from the Upside Down.