Shantell Sans: A Dyslexia-Friendly, Open-Source Answer to Comic Sans

Artist Shantell Martin and type designer Stephen Nixon (ArrowType) built Shantell Sans as a modern reinterpretation of what made Comic Sans culturally sticky: warmth, legibility, and an unintimidating felt-tip personality. The font is variable across four axes — Weight, Italic, Informality, and Bounce — letting it scale from a calm reading face to a high-energy display style suited for animation. Martin, who is dyslexic, framed the project around accessibility, drawing on her own handwriting to make a typeface that feels approachable to readers who find dense, formal type alienating.

Rather than cloning Comic Sans, the designers reverse-engineered why it resonates and applied those lessons to a new system grounded in Martin’s line work. Early adopters include the Whitney Museum shop, Cash App’s physical card, and the tldraw collaborative whiteboard, which uses it as a primary writing face. Released under the SIL Open Font License and distributed through Google Fonts and GitHub, Shantell Sans is positioned as a gift — a deliberate handover of a deeply personal artifact to anyone who wants to build with it.