Ping Round, an approachable typeface for international communication
Three years after the release of Ping — a whole-world typeface popular with cultural and commercial clients worldwide and which received the 🏆 Gold European Design Award — Ping Round has now arrived. Ping Round extends the idea of a fluid stroke construction by rounding its strokes, as well as widening the extent of languages covered, by supporting two additional writing scripts. 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.
At the time of the original release, we characterised Ping as ‘a not-so-geometric Sans’. The fully round terminals of Ping Round make the new typeface informal and cheeky-chummy, as a counterpoint to the soulless corporate communication that is the norm today. The large x-heigh and simplified letterforms ensure the usability and versatility of the font family even in small text sizes.
While the shapes of Ping Round are warm and unreserved, its language coverage makes the typefaces highly accessible as well. This initial release supports nine writing scripts (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Georgian, Armenian and Devanagari, which is coming shortly), these being the new internal Typotheque standard for our Multiscript fonts, with more font families planned to match the character set in the future. Ping Round is a truly international typeface, supporting hundreds of languages, with the proportions of the Latin shapes adjusted to facilitate seamless integration with all the above-mentioned writing scripts – useful to designers worldwide.
Ping Round was designed by Peter Biľak, who created the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian versions (with Khajag Apelian and Gor Jihanian as consultants), assisted by Nikola Djurek and Anya Danilova. Daniel Grumer designed the Hebrew version, Parimal Parmar designed the Devanagari, Kristyan Sarkis designed the Arabic, Akaki Razmadze designed the Georgian, and Ekaluck Peanpanawate created the Thai version. Elí Castellanos and Oscar Guerrero assisted in the font production, and Liang Hai worked on mastering and font engineering. Shiva Nallaperumal designed the illustrations on this page.
