Brimming with personality, The Northern Block’s Zabawa emulates the natural flow of handwriting

Unmistakably unique and vibrantly playful, Zabawa is a handwritten typeface designed by Joanna Angulska in collaboration with The Northern Block. The Newcastle-based type foundry reached out to Angulska, an independent designer and lettering artist, for her unrivaled ability to create authentic handwritten scripts. Drawing inspiration from the intimate spontaneity of personal handwriting, Zabawa encapsulates the raw essence of doodles on a napkin or hurried scribbles on a shopping list.

When it comes to a handwrought typeface, its unique details determine how it’s perceived. “Choosing and finding a good handwritten typeface is not easy,” Angulska notes. Because of this, she was eager to contribute to this niche. “At the heart of the project was the idea of demonstrating spontaneity and lightness in letters, while still delivering the integrity of a complete typeface system that is useful and accessible. Finding this sweet spot was a challenging task.” This isn’t achieved through one letter, but through the entire typeface, so the decision-making process required numerous tests. “Selecting the final versions for each letter sometimes came down to testing 20 different options, several of which were refined as stylistic sets.”

The typeface was designed with a pointed brush, a tool that has a lot of potential due to its flexibility. “I had already worked with a pointed brush on a lettering project during my studies, and I think this tool offers a lot of possibilities due to the flexibility of the brush,” Angulska tells us. “You can play with the degree of pressure on the paper and thus achieve completely different effects.”

Featuring light, rhythmic forms, Zabawa includes a whopping 936 characters, providing a dynamic and energetic vibe to any project. It includes a variety of features like alternate characters, ligatures, and stylistic sets, all working together to enhance its natural appearance and inject a dose of fun into any project. “They give an additional twist, introduce even more diversity and a human touch,” Angulska says, describing the ligatures. “Since the letters in Zabawa have no connections, ligatures are an exception, which adds another level of variety to the overall design.”

Another intriguing aspect of Zabawa is its three carefully selected stylistic sets. “Just like in handwriting, Zabawa has plenty of alternate characters, so not every repeating letter within a word looks the same,” Angulska adds. These sets provide variety as you type, making the typeface look more natural. Each lowercase letter has three alternative versions, and each uppercase letter has one alternative. Zabawa also includes a Contextual Alternates feature, which automatically substitutes multiple versions of the same character, celebrating the variability and natural imperfections found in human handwriting.

Download free trial fonts

Purchase Zabawa