Monsterrat
Type design

Faculty advisor
Nathan Young

Monsterrat is a “monsterized” remix of the free Google font Montserrat, designed by Julieta Olanovsky in 2011.

While the original Montserrat has been praised for its simplicity and legibility, it has fallen prey to the soullessly uniform design style of every Canva template and silicon-valley pitch deck since 2014. The typeface’s new association with exclusionary urban design and corporate interest is a reminder that our old modernist idea of “universal” design can never be truly universal.

Monsterrat asks: what if this so-called “universally accessible” typeface was made ultra-personal, sacrificing legibility for a charming personality?

With its chaotic ligatures and elaborate design, Monsterrat rebuts the impossible standard of “universal” design and celebrates a nonwestern approach to type. It is purposefully ugly, yet out of this “ugliness” emerges something beautiful. As an Asian-American woman who had to pave her own path to self-acceptance, Monsterrat is something of a personal testimony. Even if something is ugly according to a colonial worldview, it still holds beauty when seen outside of the Western lens. 

Monsterrat is, as Steven Heller writes, “key to an indigenous language representing alternative ideas and cultures” – something he refutes as “ugly,” but Monsterrat chooses to embrace. Alternative ideas and cultures are a permanent fixture in civilization and deserve to be celebrated if we want a pluralistic society. The erroneously “universal” standard of Modern design is temporary. This monster is forever.