Shantell Sans - Google Fonts

About

British visual artist and philosopher Shantell Martin is famous for using words in her artwork in the Oculus at the World Trade Center, in New York City, and for her music and art collaboration with Kendrick Lamar at Art Basel in Miami. Her art has taken over the screens of New York’s Times Square and the Lincoln Center stage, home of the New York City Ballet.

Back in school, she was scared of spelling tests. However, outside of school, she felt that words were art and provided emotional relief. A discovery in her early 20s opened her eyes to why reading and writing were so difficult for her, and set in motion her desire to create the To inspire others to have fun with writing and words, she teamed up with Stephen Nixon of Arrow Type to create Shantell Sans.

Shantell Martin, Stephen Nixon, and Anya Danilova share their experiences of the making of Shantell Sans.

To learn more, visit The Story of Shantell Sans .

Designers

Shantell Martin

Shantell Martin is a public speaker, curator, philosopher, cultural facilitator, teacher, choreographer, performer, and more. From fashion and celebrity collaborations to positions at MIT Media Lab, NYU Tisch ITP, Columbia University’s Brown Institute, and choreographing a ballet at the Boston Ballet, Shantell’s drawn LINE constantly evolves. Creating new connections between fine art, education, design, philosophy, and technology, Shantell explores themes such as intersectionality, identity, and play.

shantellmartin.art | YouTube | Instagram | Twitter

Arrow Type

Arrow Type is a type foundry and studio practice based in Brooklyn, NY which specializes in custom type, type design, and font development, run by Stephen Nixon. Previously, Stephen worked in digital product design and brand experience design at IBM. In 2018, Stephen graduated with a Master’s degree in Type and Media from The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, Netherlands. In 2019, Google Fonts commissioned and published Arrow Type’s first release, Recursive. Today, Arrow Type has a focus on creating fonts that are beautiful, uniquely useful, and tell a story.

arrowtype.com | GitHub | YouTube | Instagram

Anya Danilova

Anya Danilova is a type designer based in The Hague, Netherlands. She studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, attending Alexander Tarbeev’s type design workshop. In 2019, she obtained her Master’s degree in Type and Media at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In 2020, she won a Gerard Unger scholarship with her MA graduation typeface Rezak. Apart from working with typefaces, she loves writing and talking about them. She has written articles about various sides of typography and type design.

anyadanilova.com | Instagram

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.