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Playfair

Playfair was designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen and released in 2020 as a revisiting of his earlier transitional-serif work, with a more developed variable font architecture. The design draws on the high-contrast transitional serifs of eighteenth-century punchcutters — wide proportions, sharp hairlines, dramatic thick-to-thin transitions — and repositions them at display scale where that contrast reads as intended. This version introduces an optical-size axis that adjusts detail and spacing across a range of large settings. Weight and italic counterparts are available. It is not suited to body text; the narrow hairlines and wide spacing are calibrated for large sizes.