Since 2001, Mexican calligrapher and type designer Gabriel Martinez Meave has been commissioned to develop typefaces for handwriting education by several major publishing companies in Mexico, such as Pearson Education, Editorial Santillana, and SM. According to Meave, all the designs he has developed as a result follow the approach of the Palmer Method.
Sample pages from La fiesta de las letras: libro de lecturas and La fiesta de las letras: libro de ejercicios. Santillana, 2020.
In most of these projects, letterforms were modelled after handwriting samples created by teachers, and reviewed by editors and experts in education. For Santillana Script, created for Editorial Santillana, the design process was iterative, and a number of changes were introduced in the design, which resulted in some letter shapes departing from the models being used as reference.
Santillana Script is a continuous cursive design that features a marked slant, narrow ascender loops, and knots that are used to change stroke direction. One recognisable detail, which sets the design apart from other popularly used Mexican models, is the lack of a loop in the descender of the letter p, which was removed during one of the rounds of correction that happened during the design stage.
