Cairo Play

Try Cairo Play

Weights and styles

• ExtraLight 200Cairo Play ExtraLight
• Light 300Cairo Play Light
• Regular 400Cairo Play Regular
• Medium 500Cairo Play Medium
• SemiBold 600Cairo Play SemiBold
• Bold 700Cairo Play Bold
• ExtraBold 800Cairo Play ExtraBold
• Black 900Cairo Play Black

Cairo Play is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Cairo Play

Cairo Play is a sans serif colour font derived from Cairo. The official notes describe it as a version of Cairo featuring coloured marks, built with the COLRv0 and CPAL font tables, so the colours travel inside the font file itself. Structurally it follows its parent: an Arabic and Latin design in which the Latin letters, as the specimen shows, are slightly narrow with squared curves, flat terminals and low contrast. The single variable file exposes a weight axis running from 200 to 1000, with eight named instances from ExtraLight 200 to Black 900, and a slant axis from −11 to 11 in place of separate italic files. It holds 1,898 glyphs across the Arabic, Latin and Latin Extended subsets. Mohamed Gaber and Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino are credited, and the license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Cairo Play works

Arabic headlines with coloured marks

Marks are stored as colour layers, so a headline set with its marks gains a second colour without manual editing.

Teaching and reading material

Coloured marks stand apart from the base letters, which helps on pages where the marks themselves are being taught.

Bilingual brand graphics

Arabic and Latin share one design, and the weight axis reaches a heavy Black for short social media titles.

Motion and interactive titles

Weight from 200 to 1000 and slant from −11 to 11 can be animated from one variable file.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Arabic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: arabic, latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Cairo Play

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Cairo Play on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Cairo Play";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/CairoPlay-VariableFont_slnt%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 200 1000;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Cairo Play", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Cairo Play with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Cairo+Play:wght@200..1000&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Colour needs COLRv0 support

The colours live in COLR and CPAL tables. Software that does not read them shows the glyphs in one colour.

Slant axis instead of italics

There are no italic files. The slant axis leans the letters up to 11 degrees in either direction.

Axis goes beyond the named weights

The eight named instances stop at Black 900, while the weight axis itself extends to 1000.

FAQs

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All sans serif fonts