Design Concept

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.

Ping is resolutely modern, rational but not faceless, full of respect for the past while exploring the possibilities of the present moment. Read the essay about the background and inspiration for designing Ping.

CJK Styles

While the Latin styles of Ping come in nine weights, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are currently available in six, respetically three weights.

A whole-world typeface

Following the example of versatile sans typefaces which transcend national borders, Ping also aims to be a truly international typeface, supporting 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.

Encodings

The Simplified Chinese fonts are available in the GB2312-80 encoding for Hairline and Thin and in GB18030 for the ExtraLIght, Regular, Medium and Bold styles. These fonts are intended for for Mainland China & Singapore. Separately, we have the Traditional Chinese fonts in GB12345-90 and BIG 5-2003 encoding for Taiwan & Hong Kong, and special KSX-1001 Hangul version for Korea, and JIS X 0208 character set for Japan.

Authors

Ping was designed by Peter Biľak, who created the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian versions, assisted by Nikola Djurek, who was of invaluable help with the production of the fonts. The Hebrew version (designed by Daniel Grumer), and Armenian version (designed in consultation with Khajag Apelian and Gor Jihanian) are available immediately, as is Arphic Technology’s UD Jing Xi Hei, a Chinese, Japanese and Korean typeface modified to match Ping’s proportions. Published in 2019. The Arabic version (designed by Kristyan Sarkis) and Devanagari version (designed by Parimal Parmar) will be released later in 2019. In 2019, Ping has received the Gold European Design Award.