Studio: Fontwerk

Typography for DuckDuckGo

Pangea shrinks 3% to match what users already knew

In Spring 2025, Fontwerk adapted its retail typeface Pangea into a semi-custom family called Duck Sans for DuckDuckGo's search engine, initially offered as a selectable alternative to the previous default, Proxima Nova. The project split into two sub-families: Duck Sans Display for headlines and Duck Sans Product for general use. Character-level modifications and aggressive file optimisation were central to the brief, given the platform's scale of 100 million daily queries.

Set in Pangea, Pangea Text, Duck Sans

Insights

All glyphs were scaled down approximately 3% and vertical metrics adjusted to preserve visual continuity with the outgoing Proxima Nova.
The font was split into three Unicode subsets—Basic Latin, Complete Latin, Cyrillic/Greek—plus a Supplement file for shared symbols, loaded conditionally via CSS font stack.
A combination of subsetting and manual hinting reduced the Basic Latin display woff2 from 136 kB (retail Pangea) to 15 kB, a ~90% reduction.
Variable fonts were used by DuckDuckGo's Brand Team to test weight, width, and optical-size parameters; static fonts were then generated from those results.