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Questrial

Designed by Joe Prince, Laura Meseguer

About

Questrial is the perfect font for body text and headlines on a website. It's modern style, suited with past characteristics of great typefaces, make it highly readable in any context. The full-circle curves on many characters make Questrial a great font to blend seamlessly with other fonts while still maintaining it's uniqueness.

It is heavily influenced by Swiss design, similar to a grotesk style which is closely found in Helvetica. The numbers in Questrial are tabular figures so they can be used in tables and forms to enable maximum satisfaction.

Questrial language support includes African Latin and full coverage of Vietnamese, additional to all Western, Central, and South-Eastern European languages.

To contribute see github.com/googlefonts/questrial


Giving African languages more Latin font choices

Questrial font provides pan-African Latin support

Due to the scarcity of open source fonts for African languages, Google has released Questrial, offering more font choices for digital Africa.

During colonial times, European colonial powers in Africa made their languages (English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and more) the official languages in government, educational, cultural, and other state institutions in African countries. In post-colonial times, African countries aiming to maintain their native (non-colonial) languages face a major roadblock: not enough fonts with Pan-African support that provide all of the letters and diacritics (or accent) marks for the proper spelling of their languages.

Proper spelling isn’t just for school tests and national spelling competitions, it’s vital for communication and for language survival. Educational institutions and users need fonts that can show the orthography (proper spelling) for each language, so that students can learn how to write correctly. Otherwise, if pupils see the same word written in different ways, with different kinds of punctuation marks replacing diacritics, they may never learn the proper way to spell. Without standard spelling, students could confuse words that may look similar but have different meanings.

These are some examples of words in African languages with similar spellings and different meanings:

  • fɔ (to say) and fo (to greet) in Bambara
  • motó (head) and mɔ́tɔ (fire) in Lingala
  • ọ̀tá (enemy) and ota (bullet) in Yoruba

To learn more, read:
Giving African languages more Latin font choices (English)
Offrir plus de choix de polices latines pour les langues africaines (French)

Designers

Laura is a freelance graphic and type designer based in Barcelona. She is specialised in all sorts of projects involving custom lettering and type design for branding and publishing design.

Choosing type

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices. By setting some useful constraints to aid our type selection, we can also develop a critical eye for analyzing type along the way.

Questrial - Google Fonts