Shantell Sans → A font for you

The Story of Shantell Sans Shantell Sans mixes variable axes for Weight, Italic, Informality, and Bounce to deliver a wide array of font styles, from friendly, readable, everyday typographic workhorses to striking, high-energy, experimental styles meant especially for animation. This is the story behind its inspiration and creation. Why make a new font? Shantell Martin, Artist

Shantell Martin, Photo credit Michelle Mosqueda One of my first relationships with words was back in elementary school. We did spelling tests every week. Since I never passed them, I had to sit in detention. Despite being scared of the spelling tests, I loved words. I wrote and drew a lot. I knew that words helped me to express my feelings and feel better. Since I was writing for myself, I didn’t have to care about spelling. When I was 20 or 21, I found out that I was dyslexic. When I started my art degree at Central Saint Martins in London, I was in an environment where it felt like the majority of people were dyslexic. I was instantly part of a cool group of creative people. However, I was disappointed about the amount of teachers who had never spotted my reading challenges. Instead of supporting me to learn to read and write, they punished me. Creating my own font was a way to empower people to read and write, despite their relationship to words. What if I take my words, or my handwriting or the letters that I’ve created, and make a font that is fun and playful, but also professional and usable? I wanted to make a font that feels accessible and open to remind people, including myself, that words are drawings and that words can exist on our own terms. I was inspired by the Comic Sans typeface. Since I was a kid, I have liked how playful and easy it was to read text in Comic Sans, especially for me as a dyslexic. I think we have an emotional response to fonts. A font might feel easier to read, or it feels more welcoming. Or it feels like something I want to look at or pick up. I definitely like fonts that have a little bit more space, because they feel more approachable. If you have a really tiny, fancy font, I don’t want to touch it. The usage of a font can make that font take on a certain personality.

If you’re very dyslexic, you’re likely not going to pick up a book printed in a tiny font with words very close together. It feels intimidating. Or if the font is very plain and boring, it doesn’t capture your attention enough to want to spend time with it. To start this project, Stephen Nixon sent me a template, with lines on it for me to handwrite all of the Latin alphabet, numbers, and symbols. He used my handwriting to create a digital font. Giving the font away To make the font as useful as possible, I am releasing Shantell Sans under an open font license. It’s my gift to the world. Having the font be available without charge means that a wide variety of people will have access to Shantell Sans. It also means that the font will be widely available through Google Fonts and other platforms. I wanted to create a typeface by a living artist, and perhaps inspire other living artists to create their own typography. I’m curious to see what people will do with it. I’m giving up control over something that is innately mine since Shantell Sans is based on my handwriting and is quite personal. I would really love to see children and young adults use Shantell Sans and learn about how it came about. I want to see it being used for personal projects, or even bigger design projects. I think with something like this, when you put it out into the wild, it’s going to be used in ways that you probably didn’t even think of. Early uses of Shantell Sans I have started to use Shantell Sans in some of my projects. I designed key tags with Shantell Sans type for the Whitney Museum shop in New York City.

Key tags for the Whitney Shop, by Various Keytags, featuring artwork by Shantell Martin and text in Shantell Sans Working with Cash App, a financial services platform, I helped create a cash card. The cash tag and the numbers and everything on the back of the card is in Shantell Sans.

Cash App used Shantell Sans to let users order a physical Cash Card, customized with their info. Beyond that, a few other brands have started to find creative uses for Shantell Sans. It’s been used by tldraw, a collaborative drawing app on the web, as the primary font for writing.

Shantell Sans has been made the primary font of tldraw It’s also been made into a web-building template by univer.se, an app that lets users build websites on their phone.

Shantell Sans was used for a web-building template by univer.se And now, Shantell Sans is available via Google Fonts, Google Docs, and as a download from its open repo on GitHub – so anyone can start creating with it. If you do make something with Shantell Sans and post it to social media, use the hashtag #shantellsans – I’d love to see what you create! Design Process Stephen Nixon, type designer & font developer (ArrowType) I felt both honored and keenly interested when Shantell first reached out to me asking for a custom font, saying that she was “looking to make a usable, visually pleasing, smart, creative typeface.” I first encountered Shantell’s work in the form of large-scale murals, which I love for their exploratory, semi-spontaneous, and playful line artwork, and I was so excited to learn about Shantell’s wider range of creative and technological work.

The initial project conversation, paraphrased. We chatted a bit about what that typeface might be, but what truly caught my attention were four words: Shantell said she wanted to make “a new Comic Sans.” Heck yes – that was a prompt I could get into. Few typefaces have reached the levels of cultural ubiquity as Comic Sans. Everyone has feelings about it – whether positive or negative. In my mind, a mark of a successful creative work is that it elicits an emotional response. If you love Comic Sans, you probably find it fun and approachable in a way that most stiff, ultra-serious typefaces can’t match. If you hate Comic Sans, maybe ask yourself why. Is it really objectively bad, or can a typeface be good in more ways than you may have considered? Like most successful typefaces, Comic Sans was actually made for a very specific purpose, before gaining adoption far beyond that initial use case. Comic Sans was designed by Vincent Connare in 1994 as a font for Microsoft Bob, which was software intended to provide a more-approachable user interface for Windows.

As described on Wikipedia: Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a “house,” with “rooms” that the user could go to containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications—for instance, a desk with pen and paper, a checkbook, and other items. In this case, clicking on the pen and paper would open the word processor. … A cartoon dog named Rover and other cartoon characters provided guidance using speech balloons. Microsoft Bob was released before Comic Sans could be completed, and Bob itself didn’t last long due to lukewarm reception by reviewers and users. However, Comic Sans went on to be pre-installed in both Windows and Mac operating systems, where its unique appearance has since endeared it to a vast amount of users, making it used in everything from the tags on Ty Beanie Babies (from the 5th generation on) to a 2012 CERN presentation on the Higgs Boson particle. To be clear, the Shantell Sans project was never really about making a new version of Comic Sans, or anything directly derived from it. Rather, we sought to identify what makes Comic Sans so popular, and apply a few of those lessons to a totally new font. Design Goals But what might “a new Comic Sans” really mean, today? And, how could that typeface extend naturally from Shantell Martin’s artistic universe? These questions led to the following design goals: The font should appeal to everyday computer users – not just to typography enthusiasts. The font should be easy to use in a wide variety of communication. The font should be usable and available to a wide range of people. The font should be legible and easy to read. The font should do something new, rather than simply rehash old territory. 1. Everyday Appeal For the font to have an everyday appeal, it should be based on felt-tip marker handwriting, similar to Comic Sans. For this, Shantell’s handwriting was a perfect place to start from. We worked to keep some of the quirks of that writing, while also simplifying the overall look into something true to a digital form. 2. Easy to Use For the font to be easy to use in a wide variety of communication, it should align to typical expectations of proportions and styles for a modern font.

To accomplish this, we set the font metrics of Shantell Sans (like cap-height, x-height, and default line height) to be close to those of commonly used fonts, such as Roboto. To keep things easily readable and to keep visually consistent with Shantell’s writing, we used slightly wider-than-average glyph widths and spacing. These decisions help make Shantell Sans easy to use in everyday scenarios like websites, apps, presentations, and more. It has enough personality to be striking in large sizes, but is carefully made to work well in smaller text.

A comparison of the relative sizing between fonts Shantell Sans and Roboto 3. Usable and Available For the font to be usable by a wide range of people, it should support a wide range of languages. Shantell Sans follows (and slightly exceeds) the Google Fonts glyphsets Latin Plus and Cyrillic Plus, so it supports 380+ languages using Latin & Cyrillic scripts, throughout Europe, the Americas, and central Asia.

Text in some of the languages supported by Shantell Sans To make the font available to the widest range of people possible, we decided to release it as a free to use, open-source font. Releasing under an OFL license, with support from Google Fonts, helped make this possible. 4. Easy to Read To make sure the font met Shantell’s goals of making an easy-to-read font, I made sure that the characters could be distinguished from one another. Shantell naturally writes letters like b, d, p, q and n and u that are clearly differentiated from one another through a contrast of simple shapes and well-placed exit strokes. Shantell sometimes writes the uppercase I and numeral 1 as only straight lines. To keep these letters distinct, I added serifs to the uppercase I and a flag to 1” The lowercase n and u are differentiated because the n has a typical, “zig-zag” form, while the u has a simplified form without a tail or exit stroke.