Platypi

David Sargent will tell you himself that platypi is the wrong plural. It is pseudo-Latin, and the proper form is platypuses. He used it anyway, for a typeface that mixes parts you would not expect to find on the same animal, which is the point of the Australian platypus too.

The odd part is the serifs. They are sharp, heavy wedges of the kind usually kept for display faces, and Sargent fixed them to fairly conventional curves and proportions so that the whole thing still works as a text face, with a rhythm of its own. Further up the weights he pushes the tension harder, with more taper in the strokes and more contrast.

6 weights from Light to Extra Bold, each with an italic. It supports Indigenous Australian languages and Vietnamese, carrying Google’s full Latin Plus set, and Google added it in March 2024. The figures come tabular or proportional, there is a slashed zero, and discretionary ligatures wait to be switched on.

It sets wide, so a novel in it would lose words off every line. We’d give it feature intros and web headlines in Medium or Semi Bold, where those wedges have room to show.