25

Playfair Display Black Italic, designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen, available from Google Fonts.

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.

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.