Playwrite MX

Look at the f and the q first. Both have loops on their descenders, mirrored, and the b and the w tie little knots where the stroke turns back on itself. Playwrite MX is a slanted, continuous cursive, slow and complex to write, and it closely follows North American penmanship models such as Palmer and Zaner-Bloser.

Why would Mexico’s school font look North American? Since the 1992 educational reform, the primary curriculum gives no details on handwriting and names no writing model, and teachers are free to choose their own methods for the first stages of reading and writing. In practice nearly all private schools and most public ones teach cursive, alongside print or after it, from materials bought from publishers or made by the teachers. Local type designers have been commissioned to match the styles teachers know, and those usually resemble North American penmanship, most likely by way of the 1960s workbooks of the National Commission of Free Textbooks.

The capitals are cursive too, and some are elaborate, the F and the G above all. Extenders are of medium length.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione drew it at TypeTogether for Playwrite, the school-font project built on Primarium’s record of handwriting models around the world. The variable font runs from Thin at 100 to Regular at 400, and the download includes static files for all 4. Over 150 Latin-based languages are supported. A companion, Playwrite MX Guides, adds writing lines for children.