Play

Try Play

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Play Regular
• Bold 700Play Bold

About Play

Play is a sans serif typeface built on a single idea: the O is a rectangle with generously rounded corners, and the other letters take their curves from it. The result is a row of flat-sided bowls in b, d, p, q, c and e, with large open counters and a tall lowercase. Jonas Hecksher designed it while he was type director at the Playtype foundry, aiming for a tone that is corporate but friendly. The family is small, with Regular 400 and Bold 700 and no italics, and it is not a variable font. Language coverage is much wider than the weight range: 1,100 glyphs span Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese, and the name table credits Cyreal with the Cyrillic expansion. Play is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Play works

Software and device interfaces

Open counters and a tall lowercase keep labels legible, and the squared curves sit naturally beside rectangular buttons and panels.

Technology and gaming brands

Flat-sided round letters give a wordmark an engineered tone that still reads as friendly.

Dashboards in several scripts

Latin, Cyrillic and Greek share the same squared construction, so mixed-language screens look consistent.

Section headings and navigation

Bold 700 provides a clear step up from Regular for menus, tabs and titles.

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
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

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

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. 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 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 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: "Play";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Play-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Play";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Play-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves 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=Play:wght@400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

No italics

Play has two upright styles only. Emphasis within text has to use Bold or another device.

Two static weights

The package holds Play-Regular and Play-Bold as separate TTF files. There is no variable version.

Wide script coverage for a small family

1,100 glyphs cover the cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, latin, latin-ext and vietnamese subsets.

FAQs

Collections with Play

• Squared sans-serif fonts for tech and game interfaces

  Square-shouldered sans-serif families with two or more weights for HUDs, dashboards, esports graphics and hardware-flavored branding.

Similar fonts

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