Playwrite ES Deco

The capital X ties a double knot through its middle, and the T wears a decorative crossbar. Those 2 letters tell you which of Spain’s school hands you are looking at.

Spanish primary schools teach an upright cursive, joined in its structure but with no slant, and they teach it in 2 ways. The hybrid way joins the lowercase and leaves the capitals as plain, unjoined print; that is what the big textbook publishers print, Cuadernos Rubio, Santillana Educación, Editorial Barcanova and Tekman Education among them. The other way is cursive all through, with ornate capitals of an older, more decorative kind. Deco is that second model, and a plainer sibling covers the first.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione drew it for TypeTogether’s Playwrite series. The model leans on French tradition, so there are loops on medium-length ascenders and descenders, curved entry strokes on many of the lowercase letters, a knot here and there, and a z drawn in an italic manner that looks a little foreign in an upright hand.

4 weights run from Thin to Regular, and a Guides version adds the ruled lines for classroom use. On a cafe menu board we would go for Light or Regular, since Thin tends to vanish against a chalkboard texture.