Playpen Sans Devanagari — a typeface family with the quirks of informal handwriting

Playpen Sans is an open source, multiscript font family imitating casual handwriting developed at TypeTogether. I designed the eight-weight Devanagari sub-family, with assistance from Gunjan Panchal.

Taking a cue from the Latin design, work on Playpen Sans Devanagari began with writing a basic Devanagari character set again and again by hand using a digital tool that mimicked a felt-tip pen. This exercise helped gather as many variations as possible in the construction and shape of letterforms within the parameters of the genre. From this pool of options, multiple versions of each letter were selected to be included in the typeface. Blemishes in headline connections, small overlaps, missed stroke connections, and shapes that deviate from typographic ideals and tend strongly towards the gestural were intentionally selected. Once the visual grammar of the typeface was formalised, the writing drill was repeated with a more directed approach to find natural shapes for half-forms, conjuncts, numerals, etc. Through a glyph shuffler devised by Joancarles Casasín, these different letter variations are displayed based on context, and no shape is repeated consecutively in text. The result is a Devanagari typeface that emulates everyday writing by capturing its imperfections and unpredictability.

Playpen Sans is available for free from Google Fonts.