Lora vs Playfair Display
Two serif faces, set live below in their own letters — then the honest take on which to pick and when.
The quick brown fox 0123456789
Claus Eggers Sørensen · 2011 · weights 400, 500, 600, 700
At a glance
- Role
- Body / text serif
- Display / headline serif
- Stroke contrast
- Moderate
- High, thin hairlines
- Reads well at length
- Yes
- No — for headlines
- Designer
- Olga Karpushina, 2011
- Claus Eggers Sørensen, 2011
LoraPlayfair Display
The honest take
Both are serifs from 2011, but they are built for opposite jobs. Playfair Display (Claus Eggers Sørensen) is a high-contrast, transitional display serif — thin hairlines against thick stems, tall and elegant — that looks stunning at large headline sizes and falls apart in a paragraph, where those hairlines vanish and the eye tires. Lora (Olga Karpushina) is a moderate-contrast, screen-friendly text serif with brushed, calligraphic roots: it was drawn to be read at length. The honest rule: use Playfair Display for the headline and Lora for the body, and they even pair beautifully together. If you must pick one face to carry both roles, choose Lora — it degrades gracefully into display sizes far better than Playfair scales down into text.
The x-ray
Same size, same baseline — Lora over Playfair Display. Where they agree the strokes merge; where they argue, fringes.
“Hamburgefonstiv” is the type designer's test word — it carries most of the shapes that give a face away.
Read more
More about each face: Lora · Playfair Display