Playpen Sans has seven versions of each casual character, a built-in shuffler so no single shape is repeated in close proximity, and emojis. The result is text with spontaneous inconsistencies that feel fun and organic.
Taramasalata effervescence
Click to EditFreddie frog fancied feasting on fresh flies!
In his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”, British scientist Richard Dawkins defended his newly coined word meme, which he defined as “a unit of cultural transmission.” Having first considered, then rejected, mimeme, he wrote, “Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene.” The suitable Greek root was mim-, meaning “to mime” or “mimic”.
Like any good meme, meme caught on and evolved, eventually developing the meaning known to anyone who spends time online, where it’s most often used to refer to any one of those silly captioned photos that the Internet can’t seem to get enough of. The English suffix -eme indicates a distinctive unit of language structure, as in grapheme, lexeme, and phoneme.
Click to EditDigital excellence meets casual handwriting.
Some typefaces do more than one thing well, and others excel at one great thing. The Playpen Sans font family by Veronika Burian, Laura Meseguer, and José Scaglione, excels at imitating casual handwriting with a completely natural look — the aesthetic form of something made by hand and the digital function of a professional typeface.
The font world has a general tension between what’s organic and what’s digital. When scribbling a quick note, the letters have slight differences but all look similar because they come from the same person. Handwritten text is inconsistent, while digital typefaces are intended to be consistent — each character exactly the same every time it’s typed.
The goal of a typeface that is both casual in look and digital in nature is to appear authentically human within the bounds of digital reproduction. So a typeface with a set of characters that are “the same but different” has the authenticity everyone craves. The main problem with casual fonts is not having enough alternate characters to look real. And when a family has more than one alternate, another problem arises in controlling how and when a character gets replaced.
To solve these problems, we designed Playpen Sans with seven versions of each character. We also created a built-in shuffler so no single shape is repeated in close proximity. The result is text with spontaneous inconsistencies that feel fun and organic… all the benefits of a modern, pro typeface that looks natural.
Playpen Sans has eight weights, emoji stickers for breezy and encouraging uses, and supports over 150 Latin-based languages. Its straight and curved endings for ‘i, l, y’, the two-storey ‘a’, and optional shapes for ‘f, G, I, M’ are clarifying features. The family was made for non-designers and to shine within short, informal settings: greeting cards and invitations, casual signs and documents, and of course children’s books and educational materials, comic books, and graphic novels. It also comes in a variable font version for developers and designers who value ultimate control, data savings, and design superiority.
Playpen Sans is the extension of technological and aesthetic potential, showing the best of both worlds with its digital capabilities and casual, handmade look. Is it spontaneous? Is it authentic? Thankfully, yes and yes.
CREDITS
Lead design and concept
Veronika Burian
Laura Meseguer
José Scaglione
Assistant designers
Yorlmar Campos
Fernando Pujolá
Emoji designers
Luciana Sottini
Cecilia Brarda
Engineering
Joancarles Casasín
Quality assurance
Azza Alameddine
Kerning
Filip Blazek
Graphic design
Rabab Charafeddine
Felicia Priscillya
Elena Veguillas
Motion Design
Cecilia Brarda
Copywriting
Joshua Farmer
Social Media Manager
Douglas Arellanes
A flexible and personable world-ready sans font family, providing true multilingual font support.
7 weights plus italics and 12 condensed styles.
Latin script support for 100+ languages.
Multiple purpose font, works well in branding and editorial design alike.
Several sets of figures, small caps, full range of icons.
Setting modern and historical text with the serif equivalent of optical poetry.
Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold plus italics
100+ languages that use the Latin script
A contemporary, eclectic font family drawn from roots in Romanesque Europe.
6 styles plus matching italics.
Latin script support for 100+ languages.
Books, branding, and advertising.
Small caps, arbitrary fractions, 5 sets of figures, and stylistic alternates.
A jaunty, dynamic type family that stretches beyond one specific font category and use.
8 Text styles from Regular to Extrabold and two special Display styles, Black and Black Incised
Support for over 120 languages that use the Latin alphabet
Websites, headlines and large text, gaming, callouts, posters, and packaging
All caps, basic ligatures, case-sensitive forms, contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures, denominators & numerators, fractions, 4 sets of figures, localised forms, ordinals, ornaments, stylistic sets, superiors & inferiors, slashed zero, …
TypeTogether is an indie type foundry committed to excellence in type design with a focus on editorial use. Additionally, TypeTogether creates custom type design for corporate use. We invite you to browse our library of retail fonts or contact us to discuss custom type design projects.
