Shantell Sans (2023)

355 points by aleda145 19 hours ago on hackernews | 43 comments

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.

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

I am not dyslexic, but the roboto example also highlighted a very stark difference in readability for me! Especially after having gotten used to shantell sans reading up to that point, the roboto felt nigh-unreadable.

: albert_e | 2 hours ago
I also love this font -- it seems very readable and could be a good go-to in many places.
Having said that -- the speciifc image showing difference between this font and Roboto -- uses a lower contrast for Roboto -- which surely has an effect on its readability?
I wish they showed a more direct comparison without changing the contrast to introduce an extra element.

glerk | 15 hours ago

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

0x69420 | 15 hours ago

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

dostick | 13 hours ago

That’s the coolest thing!And “bounce” slider. What a time to be alive… I wonder if there are more fonts like that with special adjustments. Still waiting for technology to allow handwritten font with true randomness.

tasuki | 8 hours ago

One of my favourite fonts is Recursive[0]. It has even more variable axes than Shantell Sans: apart from the usual weight and slant it also has a "Casual" axis as well as "Monospace" (which is continuous from fully proportional to fully monospace). I use Recursive as my terminal font, and in many other places. You can also play with it on Google Fonts[1].

[0]: https://www.recursive.design/

[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Recursive

merlindru | 8 hours ago

Recursive is terrifically legible, especially with Casual all the way on.

I couldn't tell you why, but reading code feels much, much more natural with it than with most other fonts.

Perhaps it's the high degree of separation because every character looks meaningfully different?

The "kerning" (or whatever the visual space between letters is called in monospace fonts) is also among the best.

: tasuki | 24 minutes ago
> especially with Casual all the way on
Ah, thanks for that. I wasn't brave enough! I was using the Duotone version (normal version is Linear, while italics and bold are Casual). Indeed I'm happier with everything being Casual.

jxf | 6 hours ago

I'm not familiar with Metafont -- is this what you're referencing? https://ctan.org/pkg/metafont?lang=en

: delta_p_delta_x | 5 hours ago
Not the OP, but probably (please correct me if I'm wrong...) Knuth's claim was that a font's metrics could be described as geometric transformations and equations. I believe most of the TeX typefaces were described with Metafont.
: WillAdams | 4 hours ago
Yes, that is METAFONT.
You'll find it more accessible via METAPOST, and there have been font designs made using it. Better starting link is:
https://davidcarlisle.github.io/uk-tex-faq/FAQ-mfptutorials....
: svat | 3 hours ago
See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf

bradrn | 5 hours ago

Typotheque’s Dash has a very similar variable axis, though they call it ‘Speed’: https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/dash-casual. (For some reason you need to click on the ‘Variable’ box in order to see the full variable range.)

: GuB-42 | 17 minutes ago
The highest speed setting should definitely be called "doctor"!

amelius | 5 hours ago

Wait, does more informality mean that individual glyphs for the same character can be different even within the same sentence?

WillAdams | 4 hours ago

Unfortunately not, that would require a random axis, or a contextual swapping based on adjacent letterforms.

Prof. Hermann Zapf's eponymous Zapfino has the latter --- I even included an animation of it in my paper on it:

http://ftp.tug.org/TUGboat/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

tasuki | 2 hours ago

Whoa, opulent!

: WillAdams | 39 minutes ago
Thanks!
It was a fun paper to write, but came a bit too late to have any influence --- at the same conference Jonathan Kew presented XeTeX and shortly thereafter luatex was developed, so it ceased to be necessary to stitch together hundreds of .eps files to make a possibly several GB PostScript file which then had to be distilled to a PDF using the commercial Adobe Acrobat.

jgord | 15 hours ago

gorgeous piece of human-computer engineering art.

superb.

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

watchful_moose | 15 hours ago

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!

jhack | 15 hours ago

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

mplanchard | 14 hours ago

I was also really hoping for a mino version. I have used comic-sans-inspired monospaced fonts for some time for coding, because I think they are extremely readable. This font is so beautiful, I’d really love to see it in my terminal

: mplanchard | 4 hours ago
whoops “mono” obviously, but past the edit window now

replwoacause | 13 hours ago

I use and love this. Not quite the same, and not free, but I think it's beautifully made.

https://tosche.net/fonts/codelia

: merlindru | 8 hours ago
Tosche also has a very well made "Comic Code" font with ligatures
: InsideOutSanta | 6 hours ago
That's very pretty and readable, thanks for the recommendation! Just switched to it.

Hasnep | 9 hours ago

I recently came across Annotation Mono which has less of the informality of Shantell Sans, but still has a handwritten feel.

https://qwerasd205.github.io/AnnotationMono/

zimpenfish | 9 hours ago

I'm a (currently, at least) big fan of Recursive Mono Casual[0] which I believe I downloaded from Google Fonts[1].

[0] https://www.recursive.design

[1] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Recursive?preview.script=L...

jamwise | 14 hours ago

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

aetherspawn | 13 hours ago

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?

: Fnoord | 13 hours ago
A website could offer accessibility features, such as dark mode or dyslexia font. These could be subtle, or very obvious, depending on your target group. Large amounts of texts (e.g. a testimonial) could be a valid example. If you go for site-wide, you got consistency. If you'd apply it on h1-3 you'd put emphasis on the titles.
It'd be great if say Mozilla Firefox included this font natively (for the app itself). Then again, the default is currently Times New Roman...
: WillAdams | 4 hours ago
The local grocery store chain to me, Giant Foods uses a handwriting oriented sans serif font, Robert Slimbach's Cronos Pro (which was a favourite of mine until that rebranding....)

mbostock | 13 hours ago

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

replwoacause | 13 hours ago

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

mercacona | 8 hours ago

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.

bentley | 8 hours ago

It’s a monospace font not a handwriting font, but TT2020 uses an interesting technique to do this. https://copypaste.wtf/TT2020/docs/moreinfo.html https://copypaste.wtf/TT2020/docs/moreinfo2.html

: mercacona | 7 hours ago
I had read the story. So cool! Maybe once we will see a new specification allowing the code solution.

joelthelion | 7 hours ago

Or even sample from a distribution of variations for infinite possibilities ?

xixixao | 2 hours ago

You could sample the informality variable for this font, it might work out.

chokolad | 2 hours ago

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

aboardRat4 | 2 hours ago

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