Playpen Sans Hebrew

Somewhere in the character set of Playpen Sans Hebrew there is a small dinosaur, and near it a unicorn, a medal, a tick and a cross. TypeTogether calls them reward icons, emoji drawn to match the weights of the letters, and they give away where the family grew up, in more than 2 years of research into how children are taught to write, published as Primarium.

The Hebrew is an informal hand with irregular curves, built to sit in the Playpen Sans superfamily beside the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic of the main family and the separate Arabic, Devanagari and Thai versions. Tom Grace and Laura Meseguer are credited on it with Veronika Burian and José Scaglione.

What makes it pass for handwriting is a shuffler. Every character has alternates, and as you type, contextual alternates swap them around so 2 neighboring copies of a letter rarely come out the same. Switch that feature off in your layout app and the text goes stiff again.

You get 8 static weights, Thin to Extra Bold. The Hebrew covers 4 languages written in that script, and the Latin over 332, with fractions and 2 stylistic sets thrown in.

For children’s reading we would stay between Regular and Semi Bold. The Thin is a curious thing for a handwriting face, pretty on a big card, hard on a 6 year old.