Specimen No. 18

Ping is a fluid sans serif font with a geometric structure, but unlike other geometric typefaces, Ping doesn’t reject the influence of the human hand. Ping’s simplified letterforms are constructed with the least number of pen strokes; for example the lowercase letters ‘a’, ‘d’, ‘p’, ‘b’ and ‘g’ are drawn without lifting the pen at all. 

In this specimen, produced by the Netherlands-based type design company and world languages expert Typotheque in 2019, Ping was designed to be a versatile sans typefaces which could transcend national borders and aimed to be truly international. Ping supports  not only hundreds of Latin-based languages, but also Arabic, Armenian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Korean, Hebrew and Japanese. 

The proportions of the Latin shapes were adjusted to facilitate seamless integration with all the above-mentioned writing scripts; rather than merely giving other languages their version of a Latin-based design, Ping was constructed with a global perspective from the ground up, giving it a unique voice across different cultures and making it useful to designers worldwide. 

All text by Peter Biľak

Designed by Sascha Lobe, Pentagram

Published by Typotheque, 2019

Softcover, [32 pages], 2-color offset, 6.6 × 9.5 inches