Didactica Is a Typeface With Tools for Handwriting Instruction

Didactica is a new typeface designed by Sabrina Lopez, a Buenos Aires-based designer and founder of Typesenses. The typeface, developed in collaboration with The Type Founders, highlights Lopez’s background in calligraphy and UX/UI and her eye for highly detailed scripts— it is steeped in historical reference, with an appreciation and application of hand-lettering, and optimized for digital contexts. Though she says she didn’t set out to create a handwriting model, she wanted to design a typeface that would be familiar to children in their first years of literacy.

In its realization, Didactica provides valuable tools for handwriting instruction. As well it should! Lopez’s research about handwriting instruction around the globe, detailed below, is truly impressive. Didactica is available in six weights (from Light to Extra-Black), plus a variable font with an adjustable slant (0°–10°). It also includes educational versions accompanied by guidelines, directional arrows (Ductus), stroke paths (Move), and even left-handed variants via OpenType features. It’s an ideal font for parents, teachers, and educational publishers because it works seamlessly in Microsoft Word and Pages (Apple).

I was curious about her research and design process during her development of Didactica. My questions and her answers are below (lightly edited for length and clarity).

Handwriting is redefined any time that definitions of what it is to be human change. There is a huge value on the human gesture, no matter what new technologies come through.

Sabrina Lopez, Typesenses

What were some of the things you learned researching handwriting instruction?

First of all, I consider it paramount to say that handwriting is a matter of huge interest today. The list of articles and books written is extensive. Educators, pedagogues, historians, neurocognition experts … and even typeface designers are concerned about this subject. Fortunately, foundries like Typotheque and TypeTogether got involved in the research and shared the results with the world. In early 2022, Typotheque launched a database that captures the writing of over 550 contemporary users of the Latin script. Around the same time, TypeTogether introduced Primarium, an impressive effort to document handwriting education around the world.

Thanks to all this material and accompanying references, I found books and links—a complete universe of my personal and professional interests. I enjoyed the long hours of reading, writing, inquiring, and reading again. I interviewed teachers, I analyzed educational books, I LEARNED A LOT! This is what I love the most about my work.

I was surprised when I saw such vast handwriting resources in Australia. State-mandated educational material is organized per territory, compromiseing handwriting models and fantastic teaching aids that include: verbalization of the movements made to build the letterforms, common mistakes that children may have and how to solve them, information regarding posture, penhold and paper position for right and left handers, suggested exercises, line size of the ruled paper per age, and the like. Detailed and completed handbooks offering pedagogical and technical valuable information. They also explain the cognitive benefits of writing by hand and even the relationship between handwriting and self-esteem for a child. The Australian School Fonts website offers free resources as well as paid fonts that meet the requirements of each regional style. I was impressed to see such a level of precision, study, and documentation in this area.

The Teaching of Handwriting: A Handbook. Department of Education, Queensland, 1984, Australia.

Handwriting samples in the South Australia Curriculum, second edition.

Among this material, I found the book The Ladybird Book of Handwriting by Tom Gourdie, whose method enlightened my design process.

I was also delighted with what I found for the UK. As Primarium points out, “England has been the incubator for several prominent handwriting styles that still influence teaching around the world.” In his essay, “A History of Learning to Write,” expert Ewan Clayton explains handwriting practices that I briefly highlight here:

The English Roundhand dominated handwriting education in Europe and in the US in the nineteenth century. Vertical cursive models emerged in England, inspired by concepts of “hygiene” and spread to Latin European and Latin American countries, where it is still used.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Print Script was seen as a simplified method for teaching handwriting. It is still firmly established worldwide and used either as an exclusive model or as a first training step before learning to write a slanted or vertical continuous cursive.

In the 1960s, a movement in the UK promoted the use of italic handwriting in the country. The works of Christopher Jarman and Tom Gourdie championed the simple modern style, a progressive and semi-joined cursive model.

Impressively, I counted more than twenty handwriting schemes available in the UK, according to “Choosing a Handwriting Scheme,” a resource published by the National Handwriting Association in 2013 (pictured below). They have a national association! They recognize “the importance of handwriting and keyboarding as vital components of literacy,” and they “promote good practice in the teaching of handwriting.”

“Choosing a Handwriting Scheme,” National Handwriting Association, UK, 2013.

In Europe, I found modern approaches well-created by typeface designers. As self-initiatives or commissioned, or later adopted, by governments as handwriting models, mostly rooted in local traditions, fonts like Skolske (Slovakia), Comenia Script (Czech Republic), Prima (Austria), and Scrittura Corsiva (Italy) deserve to be mentioned as examples of current interest in handwriting, adapted to the latest font technologies.

The United States presents a wide range of handwriting approaches, which vary from traditional ones, rooted in Palmer’s method, to modern ones, based on italic. The only vertical cursive writing method that has gained acceptance is Handwriting Without Tears. The US has a strong tradition in Palmer’s method — and its successor Zaner – which influenced its neighbors in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia, where these letterforms are still used in classrooms.

One link leads to another, and the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers, and Teachers of Handwriting (IAMPETH) catches my attention. I became a member to see the collection of rare books, archive specimens, and the like.

South America imported the vertical cursive style from Latin European countries — Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France — as well as ideas of constructivism in the learning process. Because issues pertaining to writing production and handwriting models are not fundamental in a constructivist approach to teaching handwriting, they are not included in the goals of the curricular guidelines.

In the case of my country, Argentina started successive innovations in the education field during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Personalities like Marcos Sastre and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who contributed to the formation of the Escuelas Normales, and Sara Eccleston were part of a pedagogic revolution that shaped excellence in public education and teacher training. In 1919, Constancio C. Vigil created Billiken, the famous novelty magazine intended for children that has been edited for more than a hundred years. Unfortunately, now the situation is quite different. Since the educational reforms in 1993, teachers have received no training in handwriting during teacher development courses. They are left to their own devices when it comes to finding or preparing material for teaching handwriting in the classroom. Personal initiatives emerge in response. Towards the end of the 1990s, school teachers Sara Inés Gómez Carrillo and Sally Johnson started publishing their Grafimanía and Letramanía book series. These books featured a clear pedagogical method for handwriting education and samples of letters created by Carrillo herself, clearly based on the upright cursive styles traditionally taught in South American Normal schools.

Billiken Magazine, June 12, 1972

According to Primarium, the progressive approach is currently leading handwriting instruction in countries like Australia, New Zealand, England, Iceland, and Austria. It is also considered an alternative method in the US, Italy, and Brazil. The opposite approach, teaching formally unrelated print and cursive writing, is still common in many countries in Latin America, such as Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and in Europe, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

After long hours studying and researching, I focused on the contemporary highly developed instruction in Australia, England, and Iceland. I studied the bibliography that supports their modern teaching approaches. Then I took my pencil and, for my first sketches, I followed the methods proposed by Gourdie in The Ladybird of Handwriting and Gunnlaugur SE Briem in Cursive Italic News: The Barchowsky Report on Handwriting.

I was convinced to create an unjoined alphabet formally related to a cursive one (partially joined).

A selection of Lopez’s sketched letters.

Finally, I saw this quote: “To write is to be human.” Handwriting is redefined any time that definitions of what it is to be human change. There is a huge value on the human gesture, no matter what new technologies come through.

Recently, I was surprised to learn that Comic Sans, the typeface designers are socialized to hate, has been beloved by educators for some of the very reasons behind Didactica: distinct letterforms, open aperture, overall legibility, etc. Did you study other typefaces and find gaps that you tried to solve with Didactica?

What a good question. From my perspective, the bad fame of Comic Sans among typeface designers is not related to the letterforms or the font itself, but to the bad use of the font.

Grafimanía 2 by Sally Johnson and Sara Gomez Carillo, 2001.

I have seen different typefaces created for early-years education: all the handwriting models documented in Primarium, the historical references, and even old copybooks. During my design process, I focused on the methods behind. As a conclusion of my research, I kept words instead of images. Though I wrote the rules for my typeface according to what I studied, I took the pencil and set the parameters of my design by drawing the first letters.

During the sketching stage, my formation in chancery and English calligraphy helped me find a balance between the angular forms and triangular bowls, coming from Arrighi and Briem, and the rounder shapes characteristic of Copperplate. I sought wide letter body proportions, deep branches, generous counters, and spacing. I first drew upright letterforms, which I would slightly slant later. The light to regular weights will look monolinear. For the italics, the capitals were based on shapes and proportions of classical Roman inscriptions, instead of the ornate and cursive forms of the Copperplate styles. I considered a medium line space when setting the length of extenders, but made them long enough so that the ascenders and descenders are easily distinguishable.

Didactica typeface features

Right now, I am in a research phase again. I am designing the connections of Didactica Cursive, the next chapter in this story. The Didactica family is still in process, but fortunately, the ideas behind it are complete. We are planning to release the cursive as soon as it is ready. I say WE because, despite Didactica being my design, it is a collaborative effort with The Type Founders (TTF). Didactica (and its forthcoming cursive counterpart) was realized thanks to constructive criticism by incredible type people like Joana Correia and Jill Pichotta, the production made by the font engineers, and the support of the entire TTF team. I am lucky to do what I love in a really nice environment where ideas bloom. Didactica is just the beginning of my contribution to the educational field.

What were the most challenging aspects of creating Didactica for you as a designer? Did you have to break any rules of type design in order to make it function as an educational tool?

I designed Didactica as any other font in my catalogue. In my design process, I always start with calligraphy or hand lettering. All my typefaces, including the grotesque Honesta, have that handmade appeal. I am used to working with a style that involves manual skill. The long hours of reading helped me to shape the design in my mind before drawing. Additionally, my background in calligraphy contributed to the design decisions in making the letterforms, as well as the feedback and mentorship from TTF. Instead of changing any traditional type design rules, I’m using them in the context of educational use: OpenType features, Color Fonts, and Variable Fonts.

As a left-hander, I was glad to find among the teaching aids explanations for lefties. I also drew on my experience in writing and teaching calligraphy when designing the directions for lefties included in Didactica Ductus and Direction.

Can you explain some of the extra features you’ve put into Didactica?

Although my intention wasn’t to create a handwriting model but a typeface which looks familiar to kids in their first years of literacy, Didactica supplies useful tools for handwriting instruction. The options, called Guidelines and Ductus, are alternatives of Light with horizontal guides — at the height of baseline, body, and the extenders — and directional arrows. Didactica Direction is based on Bold, which displays the path of the movement to build it inside each stroke. Guidelines, Ductus, and Direction are color fonts that favor the display of arrows and horizontal guidelines in separate colors. They can be used to produce layouts at home as they work well in Microsoft and Apple word processor apps. The left-handed directional arrow change can be activated through Open Type features (Stylistic Sets 4,5, and 6).

Didactica Ductus color font showing how directional arrows change for lefties.

Typesenses is an Argentine foundry founded by Sabrina Lopez. Lopez’s fonts have strong, vibrant voices and personalities; their letterforms have enjoyed leading roles in branding, packaging, books, magazines, and advertising for renowned companies all over the globe. Lopez teaches locally as well as internationally, and travels as much as her typefaces do. Typesenses has been part of The Type Founders family since 2023.

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