Sahn: Reinterpretation of Thai Type Family

Written by Ratchanon Boongsrithong

Sahn at exhibit during Final Diploma Exhibition at ECAL, Lausanne, 2025.

What if...Thai italic?

Just like in Western Typography?

Starting Point

Sahn began with a simple question: what would happen if we use a flat-edge pen to write traditional Thai (not literally), and could that gesture produce something similar to Latin italics? In Thai typography, we do not have a secondary emphasis for text, we also don’t have an established typography style. When a Thai typographer needs emphasis, the options are a bolder weight, a different family, or a mechanical slant applied by software.. I was wondering if applying a similar family structure to Thai would work? A suggestion in mind just said ”why not”?

Hand sketches of the idea “What if we use a flat-edge pen to write traditional Thai loop?

Ductus comparison between ท (U+0E17) and Latin lowercase n

Thai is one of the most visually compatible non-Latin scripts when paired with Latin. Several stroke sequences are comparable in the order a hand executes them; the Thai ท (U+0E17) and the Latin lowercase n are drawn with similar gesture. The two share comparable x-height, stroke patterns, and letterform construction. But of course, if looked closely; the repertoire of shapes are essentially different such as the looped area which is an indication of a starting point where you write. Many Thais considered the loop to be similar in use to Latin’s serif. It is not a serif, it’s an indication to help with readability. This is where things started to shift with the Thai-Latin combination. These similarities invite designers to treat them as one (literally), sometimes it is accepted, and sometimes not. Designing multiscripts, in my opinion, requires more than just matching silhouettes. Each script carries its own cultural and historical weight, its own visual logic, and its own social context. What I wanted was to explore my own methodology in approaching multiscripts, a guiding principle for my own practice.

Hand sketches of the idea “What if we use a flat-edge pen to write traditional Thai loop?”

Top: Pong Mai. Middle: Pong Rong. Bottom: Pong Sae.

Pong family in use for newspaper headline

Farangses

Looking Back

Every typeface descends from something. For Sahn, I studied two typefaces in particular: Pong Family and Farangses. Pong is a display family that dominated Thai newspaper mastheads through the early twentieth century. Pong was used in headlines that ran across the front pages of Thai dailies for decades. Pong is extremely narrow. Its loops sit high on the letterform and close as half-circles rather than full ones, which is a calligraphic trait. That compression also has a functional payoff at headline size, since it strips white space out of the loop and keeps the letter denser.

A second, older reference point was Farangses, generally regarded as one of the earliest Thai printing types, used widely in schoolbooks and manuscripts. Farangses had a full loop, generally wider with more white space for long-form reading, and vertical-heavy texture with a slight contrast. Thai's writing ductus makes diagonal stress structurally awkward to manage, and virtually every Thai typeface with contrast since has followed the same convention. An entire reading public has been trained on it.

Weight exploration to test the design decision.

Early comparison of the loop shape. Top: Full-circle Looped. Bottom: Half-circle Looped.

Early Thai and Latin sketch side by side.

The Direction

Referencing both Pong and Farangses, I imagine something in between both could have a potential to develop further; calligraphic (but not too literal), narrow, high-contrast, and display size. The reasoning was less about which looked better, it was more about which falls into categories mentioned. In this case, it was a half-circle loop. It turned out to do more than save space. It carries a calligraphic residue that a full-circle loop erases, it keeps a trace of the hand in it, and that trace is what an accompanying italic needs to work from. If the upright already implies a pen moving, then an italic can simply suggest a faster movement. It pairs naturally with the idea of a disconnected, faster-moving italic companion — the sense that as writing speeds up, a loop might not fully close. For proportion and contrast, going too extreme risked being seen dated rather than being confidently contemporary. Sahn settles somewhere along the lines of extreme and neutral.

The development of its Latin counterpart did not follow with a straightforward methodology. I tried applying details like terminals and stroke order from Thai to Latin, but it doesn't work like that. A crucial detail that I missed early in the process was rhythm. The texture in Thai was heavily vertical, my early sketches were all a mix of rounded bowls and straight strokes. Thai is essentially heavily vertical, it was natural for Thai script. Shifting the attention to focus on the verticality was the way forward, it became the shared property. Everything after that was an adjustment.

Early sketch of Thai italic with an upright.

Top: Thai and Latin carries a different voice.
Bottom: More cohesive design decision.

Comparison of texture between Thai and Latin.

Thaitalics

I decided to start working with Thai italic first, because it was more alien to my native eyes, and also leaves more room for experimentation compared to Latin. Latin italic carries several hundred years of accumulated convention, and if I had started there I would have ended up applying those conventions to Thai rather than asking what Thai italic might independently be. The fundamental idea was motion and speed, the faster the simpler details; the loop opens up, narrower proportion, and straightens strokes.

A key discovery for this is about the use of the script itself. For Latin-based languages, the texture was way less complicated. The repetitive motion can be seen more frequently than the Thai. In Thai, we have no equivalent set of high-frequency repeating terminals, so its italic, even at speed, keeps varying. Placed alongside it, the Latin italic looked mechanical, and it drew far more attention than the Thai. After several rounds of adjustment, I’ve found a middle ground, for example, the bottom of certain Thai letters that I drew were redrawn and borrowed broken, angled bowl of lowercase b. Certain characters need more attention to it than I thought, a reminder to me that not every letter in a script needs to be pushed toward another script’s logic and lose its own sensibility.

Texture comparison later in the process, Latin italics was way too aggressive compare to Thai.

Later sketch (Black master).

Later sketch (Thin master).

Pinballing

A methodology that I adopted throughout the project is pinballing between two scripts. Neither Latin nor Thai take a major leading role in this. However, I have to be mindful about it being pastiche. Just by copying the details from one script to another does not make them compatible by nature; it only makes them look briefly related in a way that would fall apart under scrutiny, there needs to be logic to justify the decision. Every script carries its cultural context along with their shapes, the form that reads as neutral in one system can read as arbitrary in another.

The stroke terminals turned out to be one of the later focuses, it came from an observation on texture and rhythm rather than form alone. In Latin, the stroke terminals in lowercase a, c, r, and g appear so often in text that it helps set the texture and color for Latin. Thai does not emphasise color in the same manner since we already have loops inside, applying terminal details will result in Thai being extremely dark in color compared to Latin. In Thai, vowels and tone marks constantly appear in plenty of words. I transfer these details to the vowels and tone marks, this change propagates through the texture straight away. Through these small adjustments, the two scripts slowly look more like they had been drawn by the same hand, rather than two unrelated designs placed side by side.

Sahn Light, Regular, Medium, Bold.

Reflection

Thai typography style has no italic usage, what I’ve tried is not a historical form revived, but imagine what would it be if Thai applied typographic style like in Western typography. The first few sketches lack a strong stand point, and doesn’t feel like it belonged in the family. Referencing forms in Latin italic, adding speed and refining it to fit with everything was a challenge, though I enjoyed the whole process of it. Designing two scripts in parallel requires constant attention to tone of voice, texture and rhythm as unified property. By introducing new ideas into circulation, we have to deal with readers’ familiarity — a long journey ahead. I’ve learned to observe my own visual culture. In Thailand, Latin and Thai script are always paired together in everyday media, yet people rarely use that as an opportunity for a genuine cross-culture dialogue. Thai script was always treated as simply an accessory to Latin or as a stand-alone product.

I used this project as an opportunity to find my own way into the industry, attempting to treat both scripts like they were in a conversation. Sahn is my way of showing that adapting, borrowing shapes across scripts doesn’t always mean reducing either one’s identity. Type design, as a discipline, takes time to master; it is all a matter of curiosity about what came before and what comes next.Rather than serving as a finished product, Sahn represents a documented attempt to engage with a topic of multiscript.

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