This month the spotlight falls on the Thai-ness of Thai fonts.
By PHILIP CORNWEL-SMITH
➜ To loop or not to loop? That is the question typographers face when making a new Thai font. It’s a design decision, but one that twangs a tension in Thai identity. Making Thai letters without loops opens up possibilities for new creativity, commerce and connections, but upsets defenders of Thai-ness. A font menu may seem as playful as the filters on Instagram, yet it’s a battlefront in the Thai culture wars.
Is Thai script being colonised and losing uniqueness to alien forms and standards? Are bilingual fonts a doormat for multinationals, or a sign of respect amid interest in non-Latin fonts? Does computing kill lettering craft or liberate Thai typographers? Are loopless fonts un-Thai?
“Everything in Thai typography is a big issue!” exclaims Anuthin Wongsunkakorn, creator of the type foundry Cadson Demak, which means “Great Selection.” “It’s an open landscape and needs a lot of landfill.”
Typography is certainly topical; it’s also one of our hippest jobs. “Thais don’t just want to be designers; they want to be typographers,” says Pracha Suveeranont, who made the landmark book and exhibition Gaeroi Dua Pim Thai (Tracing Thai Typefaces). “Typographers are the rock stars of graphic design.”
Anuthin is Thailand’s font-spotter superstar. Through Cadson Demak, he has pioneered custom typeface as a new industry, represents the design giants Monotype, Linotype and Font Shop, and made the legendary fonts Helvetica and Frutiger speak Thai. He has taught for 15 years, currently at Bangkok and Chulalongkorn universities, runs national campus tours, is making four books (three drawn from Anuthin.org) and organises the Bangkok International Typographic Symposium (BITS).
Font groupies will pause their kerning activities from November 14th to 16th and flock to the 4th annual BITS. Soon after Bangkok hosted Granshan, the international conference on non-Latin typefaces, BITS has expanded to a day of workshops at TCDC, plus 12 speakers over two days at the BACC, including the lauded Georg Seifert and Bruno Maag, plus a Type Walk guided tour of Bangkok signage. To coincide, TCDC will stage Thailand’s first exhibition by the Type Directors Club of New York.
Such world-class independent events – plus TCDC’s Creativities Unfold and last month’s Creative Bangkok symposium – reveal who’s nurturing eager Thai talent.
“Students learn more about typography on apps,” Pracha says. “Thai educators are far behind, just learning how to use type, not to build it.”
This year, Pairoj Teeraprapa (aka Roj Siamruay) won a Silpathorn Award for his retro lettering via his former brand SiamRuay. Five years ago a Silpathorn Award went to Parinya Rojanaarayanon from Thailand’s first digital type foundry, Dear Book (DB).
Typography didn’t always get extra-bold headlines. “A decade ago public awareness was zero,” Anuthin says. “We had typography, but the foundries weren’t connected or recognised internationally. We wanted to set up a standard for Thai typefaces to match with the rest of the world.”
Frankly, Thai typefaces often don’t match with each other, let alone with logos, translations or bilingual layouts. Much local advertising, print and especially website design jars the eye with discordant fonts. “Up till 2000, I thought Thai graphics were a disaster,” Anuthin says. “Everywhere the same look, very messy and bitty. So many clashing fonts.”
Layout has improved, yet most Thai magazines have an English name and Thai articles with headlines in English. “Thai designers look at English typography as a form, but they don’t look at Thai letters as a form; they look at Thai letters as words,” Anuthin observes. “They want to look international, look modern. It’s ironic that they actually deny what’s genuinely modern: a Thai typeface that can do that job.”
Typography may seem a subtle detail, but it has important practical and cultural roles. “The fundamental duty of a typeface is to communicate,” Pracha told the Bangkok Post. “Its presence must be silent, even if it has to carry a loud message.” Readers may notice type only when it goes wrong, if it confuses them, tires the eye, hides warnings in small print, or can’t be deciphered as you speed past a billboard.
Letters also make words visible, which is as basic to culture as it gets. Typography is part of literacy. Now that handwriting is rare, a font projects the voice and tone of the text, and projects an identity, whether of a blog, a brand or a country.
“Typography is important in representing national uniqueness,” emphasises Roj. “We have our own nation and our own letters. Thai fonts indicate Thai-ness.”
Then there is Thai taste. “We like glitzy, busy stuff. A lot of detail,” Anuthin says. “We have to make the impression that we put a lot of sweat into it.” And in Thai aesthetics a grace of line melds script into lai Thai patterns and sacred yantra diagrams.
“Everybody appreciates beauty,” Roj says. “Car plates got a lot of complaints until the government improved the design. When designers pay more attention to typography, then our society can fill with beauty rather than junk.”
Thai script is a beautiful thing, with its hooks, tails, swoops, zigzags, and marks above and below. But typographers often see quirks as problems that need to be solved. Loops fill up when made bold. Uprights can overlap vowels. Loops push the narrow script taller, forcing body text to be smaller yet on bigger leading than in other scripts. This wastes space, strains eyes and unbalances the texture in bilingual text. So does the lack of word gaps.
“I look at fonts as data,” Anuthin says. “So it’s our job to translate that code into a language readable to humans.” One aim in all this is to create “font families”: one style from extra-light to ultra-bold, plus italics, webfonts, or even dotted. Making fonts multi-weight is not only tricky, but used to be expensive, and a lack of font families is one reason layouts got messy. Designers had to pick different fonts for headline, subhead, body-text, caption, boxes. The choice was a serviceable match or a jarring clash, rarely an integrated whole. Designers grew up seeing that pick’n’mix workaround as the norm, but font families will enable more harmonious layouts.
Thai has very little choice – mostly display fonts with barely a dozen common body-text fonts – and half of all fonts are copies or tweaks. No copyright protection
for type led firms like DB to suffer from stealing and recycling. Though another foundry, PSL, successfully sued some pirates, copyright remains an issue. Those off-the-shelf retail foundries charge little upfront, but patrol the media to charge fees on prominent usage. Cadson Demak, which focuses on custom commissions, chose the international norm of a one-off fee.
Owning your own font is akin to a logo, a uniform, or any other mark of identity. It makes the voice of a brand authentic, consistent and recognisable. Thailand’s custom font revolution began when all three telecom firms – Worldphone, Orange and AIS – each had the same typeface. Only colour set them apart. AIS wanted its own voice and Pracha Suveeranont, then at its ad agency SC Matchbox, hired Anuthin to design SMB Advance, which remains in use.
During Thailand’s political strife, all three Thaksinite parties maintained their identity using custom typography. History might have been different if they’d chosen
a looped font, but keeping certain strokes identical proved how consistent letterforms spark instant recall.
By contrast, after the 2014 coup, the Free Siam organisation set up by exiles adopted a retro font to evoke the post-1932 era: SR FahTalaiJone. Its designer, Roj – who’d designed Fah Thai for the anti-Yingluck protests – demanded they stop using his font, which he had made freely available. Observers recalled Johnny Marr forbidding UK Prime Minister David Cameron from saying he was a fan of The Smiths. As well as proving the power of type, this contretemps shows a key difference between free fonts and custom fonts: control.
Some good fonts are free for altruistic reasons, but most are either hobbyist display fonts that lack delicacy and durability, or sample fonts to promote designers. Serious clients will pay for tailored, stress-tested font families that are multilingual. It’s already common to see Thai beside English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Arabic, while India and three quarters of ASEAN people use Latin scripts. “If a Thai brand wants to cover Southeast Asia, naturally they need the same voice in every country,” Anuthin says. “That requires the same typeface with different letterforms.”
One way is to fit Thai into common fonts like Frutiger. In an ingenious win-win solution, Neue Frutiger Thai comes in looped and loopless versions that preserve the original font’s feel. The other way is to make original Thai fonts work for multiple scripts, such as Cadson Demak’s Anuparp and Ut Sa Ha Gumm. At stake is whether Thai culture benefits more by separation or by projecting its voice. “How many people actually speak Thai?” Anuthin asks. “We are a minority. You can’t say the rest of world will have to follow our standard. It doesn’t happen that way.”
What makes a Thai font Thai?
Maybe the details: loops, thin monoline strokes, lai Thai swirls? Or the mode: official, craftsy, decorative? Does ethnicity of the designer matter? If a heritage style, then which? Type has constantly evolved, yet in the “golden age” view of history, innovation gets seen as decline.
“Many factors contribute to the creation, proliferation or stagnation of a typeface,” Pracha told the Bangkok Post about his 2002 book and exhibition. He explored ten key Thai fonts, from the first done by US missionary Dan Beach Bradley in 1841 to the three copyright-free “National Fonts” designated by NECTEC in 2001. “By tracing its history, we can understand a lot about the political or technological changes that influenced different eras… how missionaries, bureaucrats, merchants and job-printers play crucial roles, and that designer is only a recent occupation.”
Among the National Fonts, Kinnaree is actually a variant of DB Narai, which updated a 1913 schoolbook font by the missionary Assumption Press called Farang Ses. “Most Thai-style fonts are just an imitation of what job printers already did during the decorative type revival in the 1950s and the 1960s dry-transfer period,” Pracha adds. “It typifies the craze for Thai-ness since the 1990s.”
“We are still unclear on the definition of ‘Thai’ and who are ‘Thai people’,” says Roj. “We learnt that King Ramkhamhaeng invented the Thai alphabet, but this causes a problem in linking his alphabet to Thai – which are quite different.” From fragments we can tell that Sukhothai script was basically loopless. Between the 14th to 17th centuries, Thai script truncated redundant parts of letters into loops. So truncating loops into curls is part of a long trend.
Ultimately, the script itself derives from India via Mon, Khmer and other influences. Printing, typewriters, hot metal, transfers, photo-typesetting and desktop publishing, too, were all imports. As with most cultural hybrids, the Thai-ness likely comes in the process of adapting.
“As a Thai designer, I use fonts as a tool to represent Thai style as I interpret it,” Roj explains. “I initiated this to prove my hypothesis: whether the Thainess I cooked-up myself would suit the public taste.” The look caught on and Roj made movie titles for Naresuan and the films of Wisit Sasanatieng, famously SR FahTalaiJone. “It gives a classic Thai feeling, so it’s widely used in vintage markets.”
Roj has designed loopless fonts like BAY for Bank of Ayutthaya, but keeps lettering craft alive. Many of his fonts are hand-drawn, from the masculine JickhoArtDi (meaning BadBoy) to the casual SR Rogee.
“Some Thai designers work on Latin font design. Those can’t be counted as Thai fonts,” Roj declares. “I have no idea why Thai people like to brownnose Westerners even though we have good things at hand. This is a sad story of my nation.”
Those anxious of Thai being colonised point to ร (ror rua) being rendered like an ‘s,’ or ล ( lor ling) like an ‘a.’ “Tempting as it is to consider the loopless style as Latinised, isn’t it more important to relate it to local context and history?” asks font designer Ben
Mitchell on his website, The Fontpad. “Thai typographers equate the loops to serifs, since they seem to be a discretionary detail and are presumed to aid readability… [but] unlike serifs, the loops have semiotic significance.” Loops differentiate similar letters. He also notes how Thai looks closer to Latin than other Indic scripts, even Greek, so some lookalikes aren’t surprising when abstracting their form. Mitchell also notices that the brisk, economic strokes of handwriting omit loops and twiddly bits. “Effectively Thai can be seen to have branched into a style for reading (looped) and a style for writing (loopless).” So the propriety around loops may be partly that loopless looks too informal to be endorsed as Thai.
“What is Thai? Is what I do Thai enough? Does it reflect what people need or want?” Anuthin asks. “I always go back to the point that if you don’t recognise pop culture, then you just don’t have anything to represent yourself in the current world. Why do we have to wait 20 years to recognise what happened today? You don’t have to wait that long. Times have already changed and if you don’t integrate, then the only option is to leave yourself behind.”
Young typographers aren’t waiting; they’re creating. Innovative Thai fonts pop up in TCDC’s Ploy Saeng showcases, foundries like SuperstoreFont. com, and projects like “I am a Thai Graphic Designer.”
Just as Thais make Latin fonts, foreigners draw Thai fonts, too. Briton Ben Mitchell created the first trilingual Thai-Burmese-Latin face, Lumen, with loops, serifs and calligraphic strokes.
Typography embodies the Thainess debate between prescription and description. Cultural exceptionalists order topdown limits. Creatives interpret cultural flows from the bottom up, letting the genius loci emerge organically. The historical interplay of both strands has forged this hybrid culture. Now that design is programming, and anyone anywhere can make fonts, Thai type has the means to break out of this loop. The only limits to Thai typography are Thai cultural limits to expression.