Shantell Sans (2023) (opens in new tab)

the formality slider (play with it at the google fonts page linked in the article[0]) is genuinely one of the coolest uses of a variable font axis i've seen in recent memory. it feels like we're witnessing the slow and steady vindication of metafont.

[0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Shantell+Sans

Is it weird that I want a mono version if this? Looks really great, really well designed.

The font is great. What I miss is a step forward in technology: variable glyphs. The feeling of reading a handwritten text is lost when the letters have always the same shape. If it were possible to add 5-6 little variations for each letter and alternate them randomly, it would be awesome.

Dyslexic daughter gave a big thumbs up, she definitely prefers this to Roboto in the example.

Do you think a corporate brand would get away with using this font site-wide?

In an increasingly sterile and AI world, is a human centric approach a good thing albeit possibly unprofessional by current standards?

Somewhere in the middle of the article, I stumbled upon a multilanguage sample and noticed that this font has wonderful Cyrillic glyphs. In my previous experience with new fonts Cyrillic usually is not as great as the latin part of the font. The exception being fonts done by foundries based in cyrillic speaking countries, like ParaType fonts [1]. Well, the last third of the article goes into the details on how they achieved it.

[1] https://www.paratype.com/fonts/pt/yefimov-sans?tab=gallery

Wow somehow I've never come across this font, and I've done a lot with comic-sans-adjacent fonts.

This font, however, is by far the most beautiful one I've encountered yet.

The parallels to comic sans are so obvious that first thing I did in the article is Ctrl-F "comic", because my first thought was: how much further has this taken the concept.

The distribution of mentions of Comic Sans in the article is revealing: there are a bunch of mentions at around the 30% mark (in which they acknowledge the obvious heritage), and then barely after that. This font really does go further. Beautiful!

Amazing work! I am using this for a project immediately, it has so much joyful charm while still being readable. I reworked my personal website to use it too :) The bounce and informal options are just what I was looking for for years. https://www.lukaskrepel.nl

First time seeing it and this is already my favourite hand-written font. Great work!

gorgeous piece of human-computer engineering art.

superb.

totally usable in contexts where comic sans might be seen as kind of mocking.

I like it! Somehow balances playfulness and readability. Thanks for sharing.

Wow, this is so ugly that it's hard to even describe how ugly it is.

A beautiful font, and a beautiful gift from the creators. Very nice!

wow just what i was looking for

tldraw uses this font. It’s a great fit for emulating hand-written notes on a whiteboard; feels human.