Playfair is a transitional design. From the time of enlightenment in the late 18th century, the broad nib quills were replaced by pointed steel pens. This influenced typographical letterforms to become increasingly detached from the written ones. Developments in printing technology, ink and paper making, made it possible to print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines.
This design lends itself to this period, and while it is not a revival of any particular design, it takes influence from the designs of printer and typeface designer John Baskerville, the punchcutter William Martin’s typeface for the ‘Boydell Shakspeare’ (sic) edition, and from the ‘Scotch Roman’ designs that followed thereafter.
As the name indicates, Playfair Display is well suited for titling and headlines. It has an extra large x-height and short descenders. It can be set with no leading if space is tight, for instance in news headlines, or for stylistic effect in titles. Capitals are extra short, and only very slightly heavier than the lowercase characters. This helps achieve a more even typographical colour when typesetting proper nouns and initialisms. Languages, like German, where nouns are capitalized, particularly benefit from this lower contrast between lower and upper case glyphs. In German, with it’s many capitalized words, and other European languages that use many diacritical characters, it is advised to use more leading.
Being a transitional design, stylistically Playfair can accompany Georgia, where Georgia is used for body text.
Playfair includes a full set of small-caps, common ligatures, and discretionary ligatures. For Polish, a set of alternate diacritical characters designed with ‘kreska’s are included. All European languages using the latin script are supported. A set of eight arrow devices are also included.
Playfair Display also cover the cyrillic glyphs used in Bulgarian, Belarusian, Russian, Bosnian/Serbian (including Serbian morphology for б), and Ukrainian.
Playfair Display comes in three weights and two styles, including small-caps for all weights and styles – also for the cyrillic.
Go to Google Webfonts to use Playfair Display as a webfont. Special fonts containing small-cap glyphs in the place of the lowercase glyphs have also been put on Google Webfonts. Use these fonts for true small-caps in browsers without OpenType capabilities. You do not need to download these fonts as the small-caps are already in Playfair Display proper.
Playfair Display is published under the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1, granting you license to use the fonts free of charge, and enables you to extend & modify the family should you wish to. The complete source-files are available in this repository.
Playfair Display supports the following languages Afrikaans, Albanian, Asu, Basque, Belarusian, Bemba, Bena, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chiga, Congo Swahili, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Ganda, German, Gusii, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jola-Fonyi, Kabuverdianu, Kalaallisut, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luo, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Sena, Serbian, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Turkmen, Vunjo, Welsh, and Zulu.
Playfair Display is designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen in 2005–2015, and is published under the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1.