Pangea

The typeface Pangea on a mobile phone in a headline, body text, a pull quote and the labels of a button and navigation

Sans-Serif

by Christoph Koeberlin on FontWerk

20 Styles

Pangea: Light to Bold
Pangea Text: Light to Bold
all with matching italics

Variable Font

5 axes (weights, ascenders, descenders, openness of shapes, spacing)

License for web and app usage

from € 50 per style (static font)
from € 150 (variable font)

Best for

Headings (display text)
Long reading text (body text)
User Interfaces (functional text)

Specialty

Super family with text and display styles and super versatile variable font. Just super.

Get Pangea

My thoughts on Pangea

I have to say it this bluntly – Pangea is the wet dream of a UI typographer (retweet me on that). Especially the variable font drives the possibilities to adjust and fine-tune your type to the max. But let’s start from my conversation with its designer, Christoph Koeberlin.

Pangea is a geometric sans-serif, you know, like Futura (but not really). And there are a lot of them out there, right? But not a lot as variable font, Christoph said. Not enough that go beyond Latin script and also provide Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew. Not enough that consider optical sizing (that it looks good in any size). All these were reasons for him to create this beauty. And not such a soulless dry geometric sans-serif, it’s still friendly and approachable.

On the left Pangea for display sizes (large sizes) on the right Pangea Text. Pangea has tighter spacing and more closed shapes (see the e), ascenders and descenders are lower which is beneficial for headings. In small sizes Pangea looks too tight and Pangea Text just right – that rimes!

You now might say: “Dude, what are you writing about? Why do I even need this stuff?” – Fair enough. If you have control over optical sizing you can adjust your text for a given application. This means to make it more readable for small sizes and better looking for larger sizes. The openness of shapes for body text and functional text is key, more about it here.

You’re already blown away, I know, but now imagine that you can micro adjust all these settings in the variable font. Boom! Check out this tweet by Christoph to grasp what possibilities Pangea Varbiable gives you. If that’s too exciting for you, you don’t need to use it, you still can just pick Pangea or Pangea Text and keep it simple, that’s the beauty.