Playwrite UK for OUP

The OUP team’s brief called for a typeface purpose-built to support early readers: letterforms adjusted to meet educational standards, a bold weight with integrated writing lines to guide pen practice, a dotted variant for tracing exercises, and a separate set of letterform guides with directional arrows to help teachers demonstrate letter formation. 

In applying OUP’s creative brief to the original Playwrite design, several extra requirements became apparent in order to fully address their needs, such as extra weights, adaptations in letterform shape, regional variants of certain letterforms, and the ability to quickly select letterform alternates when necessary.

Over the course of tests and discussions, the OUP Playwrite typeface had developed into three distinct  subfamilies from a single source design. A UK-specific non-connected handwriting style with outstrokes and flicks ('pre-cursive' style), a second UK-specific pre-cursive with minimal outstrokes and flicks, and a print-like US-specific style. Each subfamily is made up of five weights, as well as a font style with integrated writing lines to guide pen practice, and a dotted style for use in tracing exercises.

The result is in active use by teachers around the world as part of OUP's reading and writing programmes, with a large-scale writing curriculum rollout planned for 2027.