Shantell Sans

Shantell Sans → ArrowType

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<br>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<br>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.<br>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<br>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<br>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!

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