Playfair

Try Playfair

Weights and styles

• Light 300Playfair Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Playfair Regular Italic
• Medium 500Playfair Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Playfair SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Playfair Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Playfair ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic
• Black 900Playfair Black Black Italic

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

About Playfair

Playfair is a serif typeface built as a variable font that changes in three dimensions. Its optical size axis is the widest in range, from 5 to 1200. At the small end, called Agate in the official notes, the letters are sturdy, widely spaced and almost without stroke contrast, with heavy flat serifs; this is the default setting and the one shown in the specimen. At the large end, called Needlepoint, contrast is pushed as far as practical and the thinnest strokes are a single font unit wide. A width axis from 87.5 to 112.5 and a weight axis from 300 to 900 complete the design space, with seven named weights from Light to Black in upright and italic. The fonts hold 2,318 glyphs covering Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. Playfair succeeded Playfair Display in 2023 and is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Playfair works

Body text in articles and books

Low optical size values thicken the hairlines and open the spacing, which the earlier display-only family could not do.

Very large headlines and covers

Towards the 1200 end of the optical size axis the contrast becomes extreme, for type set at poster scale.

One serif across a whole publication

Captions, text, subheads and titles can each take a different optical size from the same two files.

Narrow columns and tight headlines

The width axis goes down to 87.5, saving horizontal space without changing typeface.

Editions in Latin and Cyrillic

The 2,318 glyphs include the letters for Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian as well as Vietnamese.

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

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

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, 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 Playfair

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 Playfair 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: "Playfair";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Playfair-Italic-VariableFont_opsz%2Cwdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Playfair";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Playfair-VariableFont_opsz%2Cwdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Playfair", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Playfair 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=Playfair:ital,wght@0,300..900;1,300..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Defaults are small, wide and light

The files default to optical size 5, width 112.5 and weight 300. Without automatic optical sizing or manual settings, text renders in the low-contrast Agate form.

Optical size must be applied

Software that supports automatic optical sizing picks a value from the font size; elsewhere the opsz axis has to be set by hand, for example with font-variation-settings in CSS.

Two variable files

One file holds the upright styles and one the italics; each contains all three axes.

Width axis revised in 2023

The official notes record a June 2023 update that adjusted the width axis and made text appear narrower.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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