Montserrat

Among the many sans-serif fonts (Sanserif* - but both spellings are accurate if you really want to know) that are pillars of typography, Montserrat is a real stand out for its geometretic design, legibility, and cultural roots. Interestingly, this font started out as a typography project to preserve the identity of a beautiful historic neighbourhood, and grew rapidly to become an icon in the graphic design world.

From websites to logoss and beyond, Montserrat quickly became a world class font. With that, very few individuals know about  the story behind it and that will be our key focus in this blog today.

Montserrat: The Origin Story - By Gavin Hood

Ok fine, this origin story is not written by Gavin Hood, creator of other famous origin stories (Xmen… cough cough), but rather, Montserrat was created by Julieta Ulanovsky, a designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was inspired by the typography found in street signs and posters from the Montserrat neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. 

Tenor Images

Julieta began her Montserrat project in 2010, due to her desire to preserve the unique lettering styles that were disappearing due to a modernizing world. She started to go through the process of  digitizing the letterforms from the signage styles she observed.

Image credits: https://cheargentinatravel.com/monserrat-neighbourhood-guide/

‍

The Role of Google Fonts in the Popularity of Montserrat

Montserrat's popularity grew immensely after it was added to the Google Fonts library. Google Fonts is a repository of open-source fonts that designers just like me can use to build cool features like font pickers (the one on our home page) and other cool things.

As a result, Montserrat became one of the most widely used fonts on the platform, used by millions of websites and embraced across numbers of graphic design explorations.

The Characteristics of Montserrat

Montserrat is a geometric sans-serif typeface — much like Futura, Avenir, or Gotham — but with its own unique style and pizzazz.

Here are some key differentiators:

• Clean, circular and consistent forms 
• Distinctive uppercase “Q”: 
• Double-story “a” and “g”: Adds a classic touch to a modern frame.

So… why Montserrat

Despite it’s young age, Montserrate already has quite the track record. It is inspired by a neighbourhood, it’s open source, it’s very legible and it is very widely used. Take time to to experiment with it’s unique forms when building a logo, or using it for it’s legibility (in blog posts just like this one), and get inspired. This font was created to preserve history and grew into a typography legend - look around you and decide how you can use your environment to your benefit,  just like Julieta.