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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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].
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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....)
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...
[1] https://www.paratype.com/fonts/pt/yefimov-sans?tab=gallery
[0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Shantell+Sans
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....
[0]: https://www.recursive.design/
[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Recursive
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.
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
This font, however, is by far the most beautiful one I've encountered yet.
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!
[0] https://www.recursive.design
[1] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Recursive?preview.script=L...
https://tosche.net/fonts/codelia
https://qwerasd205.github.io/AnnotationMono/
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.
superb.
totally usable in contexts where comic sans might be seen as kind of mocking.
In an increasingly sterile and AI world, is a human centric approach a good thing albeit possibly unprofessional by current standards?
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...