Industry: Education

Custom Educational Typefaces for Worksheet Crafter

Cursive typefaces engineered for the classroom

Since 2018 TypeMates has served as design and technology partner for Worksheet Crafter, a tool that lets teachers build custom learning materials. The collaboration covers custom handwriting typeface development and ongoing technical consultation addressing cross-platform rendering issues with HarfBuzz, FreeType, Mac, and Windows environments. An early design-parameter system was established to keep all future typefaces stylistically consistent.

Set in VA Plus, Schwungschrift

Insights

A shared design-parameter framework was defined at the outset so that typefaces from different development cycles would remain stylistically coherent.
VA Plus is based on the Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift but incorporates didactic elements from other teaching scripts; contextual alternates were added to resolve hard-to-connect letter pairs.
The Schwungschrift's glyph system allows any combination of strokes to form coherent gestural sequences, requiring complex OpenType code as a core part of the design rather than an afterthought.
Cross-platform font metadata inconsistencies—affecting printers and rendering engines differently on Mac and Windows—are a standing focus of TypeMates' consultancy role.