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.
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 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 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
[0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Shantell+Sans
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!
This font, however, is by far the most beautiful one I've encountered yet.
superb.
totally usable in contexts where comic sans might be seen as kind of mocking.