Thai font · PAID

DB Narai

ดีบี นารายณ์

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · July 4, 2026

Information verified as of July 2026

What DB Narai is

DB Narai (ดีบี นารายณ์) is an old-style looped Thai typeface designed by Parinya Rojarayanond of DB Design, descending directly from Farang Ses, the typeface created in 1913 for the Assumption Catholic community’s press in Bangkok. It is the DB catalogue’s custodian of the oldest continuous lineage in Thai text typography.

The pedigree matters. Farang Ses — literally “French” — took its name from the French-made brass matrices used to cast it, and it defined what Thai typography now calls the old-style category: Thai letterforms shaped by the logic of old-style serif Latin typefaces, with contrasting thick and thin strokes. When DB Design digitized this tradition, co-founder Suraphol Vesaratchavej chose the name “Narai” to tie the typeface to the reign of King Narai, the era of French presence in Siam — an echo of the parent typeface’s name. He recounted the naming in the “A Font a Month” column of iDesign Magazine in November 2008.

Its designer’s credentials run just as deep. Parinya Rojarayanond co-founded DB Design (Dear Book), Thailand’s first digital type foundry, in the late 1980s, and drew many of the first Thai PostScript fonts in the desktop-publishing wave that followed the Macintosh’s arrival in Thailand in 1985. For the broader story of these categories, see our Thai typography guide and the serif Thai fonts category.

Character design and tone

DB Narai preserves the old-style tradition of contrasting thick and thin strokes that Farang Ses introduced to Thai type, giving it a formal, literary, and unmistakably traditional register. Its contrast follows the restrained old-style serif logic — the far more extreme Didone/Bodoni treatment, in which the front and back verticals of most consonants turn bold (with ง, ร, and ว as exceptions), is the signature of DB Design’s later display face DB NamSmai rather than of DB Narai.

This is not a reinvention. According to the DB Font account, DB Narai made only subtle refinements to Farang Ses, such as a curved connection on the serif of ก — the digital face is a preservation project as much as a design. The looped consonant heads remain fully intact, which keeps the face legible in extended Thai text and gives it the bookish authority that loopless display faces deliberately trade away.

The tone sits at the opposite pole from modernist Thai sans faces: where a geometric loopless sans says “startup,” DB Narai says “institution.” It carries the visual memory of a century of Thai book and press typography in its stroke contrast.

Weights and availability

DB Design offers DB Narai in Regular and Bold, and since a licensing deal with Japanese foundry Morisawa Inc. (reported as 2016) it is also distributed in four styles — Regular, Bold, Regular Italic, and Bold Italic — through Morisawa Fonts, MORISAWA PASSPORT, and TypeSquare. Morisawa presents it as a traditional looped Thai typeface for its international catalogue.

Within the Farang Ses lineage documented by Pracha Suveeranont on Thaifaces, the successor cut DB Narai X is listed in 2 weights and 4 styles. DB Narai is not available on Google Fonts or any free CDN; access runs through DB Fonts’ purchase channels or a Morisawa subscription.

Best use cases

DB Narai is the correct choice when a Thai project needs the authority of the old-style tradition: book typography, literary publishing, editorial design, and heritage or institutional branding. Strong briefs:

• Book interiors and long-form literary text where looped, high-contrast Thai letterforms carry the register
• Museum, university, and cultural-institution identity work that references Siamese history
• Editorial mastheads and feature openers in magazines with a classical voice
• Certificates, formal invitations, and commemorative print
• Heritage F&B and hospitality branding trading on age and provenance

Where it doesn’t fit: budget-free projects and modern UI. For an open-licensed old-style-flavoured serif character, reach for Taviraj or Trirong; for screen-first body text under an open licence, Sarabun remains the default.

Pairings

DB Narai pairs best with a quiet, open-licensed Thai sans that lets its stroke contrast own the page. Three pairings:

• Sarabun — the open-licensed Thai body sans; set DB Narai for display and Sarabun for UI, captions, and small print
• DB Helvethaica X — a loopless modern sans counterpoint when the whole system stays within commercial DB-family typography
• Noto Sans Thai — a neutral open-licensed workhorse for multilingual or documentation contexts around DB Narai headings

Licensing

DB Narai is a paid, proprietary typeface: purchase directly from DB Fonts via its how-to-purchase page, or access it internationally through Morisawa Fonts, MORISAWA PASSPORT, or TypeSquare subscriptions. Verify current terms with the foundry before web-font deployment or embedding — per-channel conditions differ.

If the budget doesn’t support a commercial licence, the open-licensed route to a similar register is Taviraj or Trirong for high-contrast looped serifs, with Sarabun as the companion body face. Browse the full Thai fonts library for more.

Information verified as of July 2026