From 2012 — 2014 we collaborated closely with Castledown Primary School, Hastings, UK. The project began as a custom typeface commission for the school but soon developed into an initiative to develop and unify typography within primary education. Headteacher, Mr. Small was frustrated with the disparate fonts utilised by schools to teach children letterform recognition whilst learning reading and handwriting.

By encapsulating all requirements into a singular font family, a common DNA was utilised throughout that enabled certain considerations to be input into the typeface. Readability and the differentiation of letters, such as a lowercase ‘l’ and uppercase ‘I’, were crucial, as well an understanding of how writing is taught within schools informed the overall design of Castledown. The type families accolades include a nomination for Design of the Year 2014, at the Design Museum and a Premier Award at the International Society of Typographic Designers in 2014.

Castledown is available in three core-weights — Regular, Bold and Heavy — all with corresponding Italic and Fun variants. These Fun variants are more expressive and act as softer counterparts (and a more refined variant of Comic Sans). As well as a stylistic dotted version of the Regular version, there also includes a script-variant in the form of the Cursive and three Instructional versions for writing practice.

Castledown is available to license in both Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’) versions. The latter contains multiple OpenType features and Stylistic Sets allowing for further versatility.

The Castledown family is also available in an educational version for schools, including instructional styles, please contact us for pricing and more information.

Castledown Instructional

Castledown Instructional Set allows for the teaching of letterforms via three styles.

The accompanying Instructional variants of the Castledown font family were envisaged to teach children the creation of letters, the letters guide the user through the construction of each letterform in three styles; the first style a guide, with both the letterform and instructions present; the second version swaps the solid letterform for a dotted version enabling tracing and practice; lastly the instructions are removed and the user can attempt to create the letterform without instruction.

Available for licensing in Standard, these fonts contain a redacted character set. We are also happy to offer a FREE set of Instructional Worksheets (A – Z + 0 – 9), that utilise all three sets of Instructional fonts.