Playfair Display

Try Playfair Display

Weights and styles

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

Playfair Display 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 Display

Playfair Display is a transitional serif typeface designed for display sizes. Its stems are thick, its serifs and joining strokes are hairlines, and letters such as a, c, f, j, r and y end in ball terminals. The design looks to late eighteenth-century printing, when pointed steel pens replaced broad quills; the official notes name John Baskerville and Scotch Roman types as influences while stating that it is not a revival of any single face. The family is a variable font whose weight axis runs from 400 to 900, with six named weights from Regular to Black and an italic for each. The fonts hold 1,101 glyphs, including small capitals, common and discretionary ligatures and old-style numerals, and cover Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. First published in 2011 and substantially updated in 2017, it is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Playfair Display works

Magazine and blog headlines

Thick stems against hairline serifs produce strong contrast at the large sizes the design was made for.

Pull quotes and standfirsts

The italic, with its ball terminals, sets a quotation apart from the article around it.

Fashion, food and hospitality branding

Weights up to Black 900 let a wordmark go from refined to emphatic within one family.

Book covers and title pages

Built-in small capitals and discretionary ligatures give titles and author lines typographic detail without a second font.

Wedding and event stationery headings

Regular 400 at large sizes shows the fine hairlines on names and dates.

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, 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 Display

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 Display 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 Display";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/PlayfairDisplay-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Playfair Display";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/PlayfairDisplay-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

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

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Playfair Display 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+Display:ital,wght@0,400..900;1,400..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Weight starts at 400

The axis runs from 400 to 900. There is no Light or Thin; the lightest style is Regular.

Two variable files

The download holds one variable font for the upright styles and one for the italics, each covering the full weight range.

Made for large sizes

The notes describe a display design. In small body text the hairlines become very thin; the later Playfair family adds an optical size axis for that purpose.

Small caps are inside the fonts

A separate Playfair Display SC family exists, but the main fonts already contain a full set of small capitals as an OpenType feature.

FAQs

Collections with Playfair Display

• Bold fonts for posters and big headlines

  Heavy and condensed open-license display fonts that hold a sheet from across the room: gothics, slabs, fat faces and stencils.

• Fonts for logos and wordmarks

  Geometric, rounded, wide and classical open-license typefaces with enough character to carry a name on their own.

• Elegant serif fonts for wedding invitations

  Light, high-contrast and classical serif typefaces for invitation text, names in capitals and formal stationery.

• Fonts for restaurant and café menus

  Serifs, scripts and narrow display faces for menus: a heading face with character and a text face that stays readable in low light.

Similar fonts

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