Playwrite NZ Basic
Designed By
TypeTogether, Veronika Burian, José Scaglione
4 Styles Handwriting
A little note,
before you go.
Playwrite NZ Basic · Regular
Try a short note, a name or a line of your own to compare the strokes and spacing.
4 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Playwrite NZ Basic ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
My cat sleeps on the mat
A Note On The Page
Playwrite NZ Basic · Regular
A short letter, set in the family.
Thursday afternoon
Dear Alex,
I left the book by the window. There is a note on page twenty-three that I thought you would like. Bring it along on Thursday; we can finish the conversation over coffee.
See you there.
4 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Thin100
My cat sleeps on the mat
Extra Light200
My cat sleeps on the mat
Light300
My cat sleeps on the mat
Regular400
My cat sleeps on the mat
The f stops at the baseline, with no tail below it, and the t has no exit stroke. The capital G is open, without a crossbar, the I wears serifs and the Y has a slanted stem. These are the letters New Zealand children learn to print first, and Playwrite NZ Basic reproduces them as a font.
The model is the one in Teaching Handwriting, the Ministry of Education’s booklet from 1985, written because teachers asked which style they should teach in primary school. Its latest edition appeared in 2025, and the same year the Ministry gave TypeTogether its requirements for this font. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s studio drew the alphabet as a simplified print script, slanted a moderate amount, with plain capitals and lowercase letters that stay unjoined. The lowercase is fast and angular, built the way modern italic based cursives are.
Children move on from this stage to semi-joined cursive, and that later alphabet is a separate font, Playwrite NZ. There is also Playwrite NZ Basic Guides, a single weight sibling with guides drawn in as a visual aid for young writers.
The 4 weights stop at Regular: Thin, Extra Light, Light, Regular. A teacher might give the Thin to letters that children trace over. Behind the whole Playwrite series sits Primarium, a project that documents the history and current practice of handwriting models taught in primary schools around the world.
Characters & Figures
486 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Playwrite NZ Basic
4 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 417 KB ↓- Version
- 1.004
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/playwrite-nz-basic/playwrite-nz-basic.css">
body {
font-family: 'Playwrite NZ Basic', cursive;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Playwrite NZ Basic Heading · Inter Body
Thursday, Half Past Four
I left the book by the window. There is a note on page twenty-three that I thought you would like. Bring it along on Thursday; we can finish the conversation over coffee.