Poly

Try Poly

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Poly Regular Italic

About Poly

Poly is a serif typeface with moderate contrast, short ascenders and a lowercase that stands nearly as tall as the capitals. The official notes explain that it was first drawn to set text in agglutinative languages, where single words run very long: the aim was a face that accepts tight tracking and puts more letters on a line. In the specimen the serifs are short wedges, the y ends in a heavy curved tail, and the default numerals are old-style figures. The family consists of a Regular and an Italic in one weight and is not a variable font. Each font has 541 glyphs for Latin and Latin Extended, and the notes single out Native South American language families among the Latin-script languages it serves. Nicolás Silva designed Poly, which is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 with Poly as a Reserved Font Name.

Where Poly works

Narrow text columns

The tall x-height and tolerance for tight tracking fit more characters per line in sidebars and mobile layouts.

Text in languages with long words

Poly was drawn for agglutinative languages, so long compound words break less often.

Small print and captions

Short ascenders and a large lowercase keep letters open at small sizes.

Headlines over body text

Wedge serifs and the heavy tail of the y show at display sizes; the italic supplies a second voice.

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

Character sets found in the files: 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 Poly

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

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

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

Things to know

Regular and Italic only

Poly has no bold, so strong emphasis needs another device.

Old-style numerals

Figures in the specimen have ascenders and descenders.

Designer's name appears in two forms

Google Fonts lists Nicolás Silva; the copyright notice gives the full name José Nicolás Silva Schwarzenberg.

FAQs

Similar fonts

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