# ThaiGraph — Full Content Snapshot for LLM Context
Generated 2026-09-15T17:38:33.590Z
This file concatenates pillar pages, foundation pages, and every editorial entry on ThaiGraph for direct ingestion into LLM context windows. The structured Markdown form follows the same answer-first H2 leads as the live site.
---
## SOURCE: /index
{heroImg && (
)}
Est. 2000 · Bangkok
The definitive English-language resource for Thai graphic design.
ThaiGraph documents the fonts, colors, patterns, designers, and studios that make up Thailand’s visual culture — from the 168-color Thaitone system to the loopless type revolution and the $44.5 billion creative economy.
Every entry is researched, sourced, and freely accessible. No paywalls, no stock photography, no AI filler. Read the editorial standards →
Browse {fontCount} Thai Fonts
Free Thai Fonts
168 Thaitone Colors
Thai Typography Guide
2026 Salary Report
26years documenting Thai design
168Thaitone colors
{fontCount}Thai fonts catalogued
$44.5BThai creative economy
{heroImg && (
Lai Kanok — the flame motif. 23.75-karat gold leaf on lacquer.
)}
Browse the system
Jump straight to the catalogue you need.
Every section is researched, sourced, and free to use. Pick a pillar — or read the editorial standards first.
{fontCount} Thai FontsLicenses, weights, designer credits
Free Thai FontsOFL and free-license downloads
168 Thaitone ColorsHEX, RGB, CMYK, cultural context
Thai Pattern LibraryLai Kanok, Naga, free SVG vectors
Thai Designer Directory{designerCount} profiles, awards, studios
Thai Studio DirectoryBangkok, Chiang Mai, and beyond
Thai Typography GuideLooped vs loopless, CSS, bilingual layout
Industry Intelligence2026 salary report, events, trends
Free Design ToolsColor picker, font tester, pattern maker
01 — The system
Nine pillars of Thai design, one resource.
Thai graphic design has no comparable English-language authority — the gap between the size of Thailand’s creative industries and the quality of English documentation is among the widest in any design sub-niche. ThaiGraph fills that gap. Each pillar is curated, sourced, and continuously updated.
{pillars.map((p) => (
{p.imageSrc ? (
) : (
)}
{p.meta}
{p.title}
{p.blurb}
))}
02 — Colors
The Thaitone system at a glance.
Twelve representative Thaitone colors. The full system documents 168 traditional Thai colors with HEX, RGB, CMYK, and cultural context. Browse the complete 168-color Thaitone catalogue → Or build a shareable palette with the Thai color palette generator.
{featuredColors.map((c) => {
const img = colorImg(c.slug);
return (
{img && (
)}
{c.name}
{c.thai}
{c.hex.toUpperCase()}
);
})}
03 — Patterns
Traditional motifs, construction rules, free vectors.
From Lai Kanok to Kinnari to Naga. Each pattern page documents origin, construction, cultural meaning, and modern usage. Explore every Thai ornamental pattern → Free SVG vectors at pattern downloads.
{featuredPatterns.map((p) => {
const img = patternImg(p.slug);
return (
{img && (
)}
{p.name}
{p.thai}
);
})}
04 — Fonts
The Thai fonts designers actually search for.
Prompt, DB Adman X, DB Heavent, Thonburi, and TH Sarabun are the most-visited font pages on ThaiGraph — each catalogued with verified license, weight inventory, and designer credit. Browse the full {fontCount}-font directory → For background on looped vs loopless letterforms, read the Thai typography pillar guide.
{featuredFonts.map((f) => {
const img = fontImg(f.slug);
return (
{img && (
)}
{f.name}
{f.meta}
);
})}
{popularFonts.map((f) => (
{f.name}
))}
Free Thai fonts
Loopless fonts
Handwritten fonts
The ThaiGraph toolkit
{toolkit.name}
Stop browsing other people's fonts — build one you may actually sell.
{toolkitModuleCount} build-along modules take you from a working .ttf in
45 minutes to a QA-passed, licensed, listed Thai font, on the same
pipeline ThaiGraph uses for its own releases. Free tools only.
See the toolkit — from {toolkit.core.price}
or read the free sample module →
05 — Designers
Working Thai graphic designers, profiled.
Editorial profiles of Thai type, branding, packaging, illustration, UI, and motion designers — independent, ad-free, no paid placement. Browse every Thai designer profile → Or jump to the studios that hire them.
{featuredDesigners.map((d) => {
const img = designerImg(d.slug);
return (
{img && (
)}
{d.name}
{d.specialty}
);
})}
06 — Industry Intelligence
Salary data, event calendars, and trend reports.
The Thai creative economy is worth $44.5B and employs ~990,000 people, but credible English-language reporting is scarce. ThaiGraph publishes the data others won’t. See every industry report →
{featuredReports.map((r, i) => (
{String(i + 1).padStart(2, '0')}
{r.meta}
{r.title}
{r.blurb}
{r.img && (
)}
→
))}
07 — Tutorials & Guides
Hands-on Thai design tutorials.
Tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma plus long-form pillar guides on Thai typography and branding — written by Thai-trained designers, reviewed for cultural accuracy. Read every tutorial →
{featuredLearn.map((l) => (
{l.meta}
{l.title}
{l.blurb}
→
))}
08 — Inspiration
Curated galleries of real Thai work.
Posters, branding, packaging, typography, illustration, and logos — every entry credited, dated, and sourced. Browse every inspiration gallery →
{featuredInspiration.map((g) => {
const img = inspirationImg(g.slug);
return (
{img && (
)}
{g.title}
{g.blurb}
);
})}
Every stat is cited. Every font is credited. Every image is real.
Design resources online are drowning in AI slop — vague “experts say” statistics, stock photography pretending to be Thai, and fonts uploaded without designer credit. ThaiGraph is built the opposite way. Every claim on this site names the primary source with a published date. Every font entry credits the foundry and designer. Every image either shows a real Thai design artifact or is labelled as an illustration.
Read the editorial standards → · Frequently asked questions · Latest from the blog
Free tools, free downloads, no signup walls.
Thai Color Palette Generator — build shareable palettes from the 168-color Thaitone system.
Thai Font Tester — preview any font from the {fontCount}-font directory against your own text.
Thai Pattern Generator — generate seamless Lai Kanok, Mek Lai, and Naga tiles.
Pattern Downloads — free SVG vectors of traditional Thai motifs.
See all free Thai design tools →
---
## SOURCE: /about/
About ThaiGraph
What ThaiGraph is
ThaiGraph is the English-language authority on Thai graphic design — a free, editorial, cited reference covering Thai fonts, the Thaitone color system, traditional ornamental patterns, designers, studios, tutorials, and the economics of Thailand’s creative industries. The site has existed in one form or another since 1 March 2000. Its current generation relaunched in 2026 as a programmatic resource built to serve both Google search and large language models.
Our goal is simple: if you are a designer working on anything that touches Thai culture — a restaurant menu for a Bangkok client, a packaging redesign for a Thai brand, a wayfinding system for a temple precinct — there should be one English-language place where you can find accurate, sourced, freely usable reference material. ThaiGraph is that place.
Why it exists
There is no other dedicated English-language authority on Thai graphic design. Wikipedia covers the Thai writing system. Typotheque publishes a single excellent essay on Thai type. A handful of Thai-language forums catalogue fonts and tutorials. Pinterest and Dribbble show mood-board imagery without context. But the distance between these fragments and a coherent editorial resource is enormous — and the size of Thailand’s creative economy makes that gap striking. Thailand’s creative industries produced THB 1.62 trillion ($44.5 billion) of GDP in 2024 and employ roughly 990,000 people (Creative Economy Agency, 2024). There should be a detailed English-language resource for the design workers inside and outside that economy. There is not. We built one.
Editorial standards
Every factual claim on ThaiGraph cites a named primary source with an access date. Every font credits its designer and foundry. Every image either shows a real Thai design artifact or is labelled as an illustration. If we cannot verify a statistic against a named source, we do not publish it; we log the gap publicly and request reader submissions. The public citation register is visible at the bottom of every editorial page.
No vague attributions. “According to ThaiGa’s 2026 membership report” — not “experts say.”
No stock photography. AI-generated imagery appears only where it is clearly labelled as an illustration or diagram. Real artifacts and real portraits are sourced with permission.
No fabricated reviews. We never publish Review or AggregateRating schema on pages without genuine user reviews.
Dedicated FAQ page only. FAQPage schema appears exclusively on /faq/. FAQ content on other pages is rendered as plain HTML.
Freshness, not stale-year games. “Last verified” dates update on deploy only when content has actually changed.
The team
Three editors author the content on this site. Their bios, credentials, and a running list of every article they have published here live on dedicated author pages.
{authors.map((a) => (
{a.data.name}
— {a.data.jobTitle}
))}
History of the domain
ThaiGraph.com was registered on 1 March 2000 and has been continuously renewed for twenty-six years, currently through March 2027. Its first major incarnation was a Thai-language graphic design tutorial forum built on Discuz! X1.5 with more than thirty thousand threads, a peak Alexa global rank of 118,000, and an estimated five-hundred-plus daily visitors at its peak. That forum built genuine community for Thai Photoshop, Illustrator, and 3Ds Max learners through most of the early 2010s.
The forum went dormant in the late 2010s and the domain spent several years parked. The 2026 relaunch is not a replacement — the legacy archive is preserved and the URLs of its most-linked pages redirect to appropriate new locations. The site has evolved from a community tutorial forum to a programmatic editorial resource because that is what Thai design workers need today: not another forum, but a citeable, indexable, AI-legible reference.
Google “expired domain” compliance
Google’s March 2024 expired-domain-abuse policy (enforced by SpamBrain) penalizes domains repurposed with unrelated content. ThaiGraph’s relaunch is fully compliant.
Topic continuity. The legacy content covered Thai graphic design tutorials. The new content covers the same field, expanded.
Genuine value. Every programmatic page has a minimum of 400–500 unique, sourced words. No thin affiliate content.
Natural evolution. A Thai design forum evolving into a Thai design reference is a legitimate progression, not topic swapping.
How ThaiGraph is built
The site is a static Astro 5 build deployed to Coolify on Hetzner. Content lives in typed MDX and YAML files with Zod schema validation. Images are optimized with Sharp (AVIF primary, WebP fallback). There is no CMS, no database, no admin panel. Content changes are code changes. That means every change is version-controlled, reviewable, and reversible.
This architecture is a deliberate bet that the future of editorial sites is open content plus fast static HTML plus explicit structured data plus documented AI visibility — not proprietary CMS databases that LLMs cannot cite.
How to contribute
ThaiGraph accepts three kinds of submissions:
Designers and studios wanting an editorial profile should email editorial@thaigraph.com with a short portfolio link. Every submission is reviewed; acceptance is editorial, not paid.
Foundries and type designers whose fonts belong in the directory should email the same address with the font files, license terms, and designer credits.
Corrections to any published page should cite the correct source in the email. We update the page and record the correction in its frontmatter.
---
## SOURCE: /learn/typography/
The Complete Guide to Thai Typography
Consonants, vowels, tone marks, the loopless revolution, bilingual layout, foundries, licensing, and web implementation — in one place.
What Thai typography is
Thai typography is the craft of setting type in a writing system that combines 44 consonants, 15 vowel symbols, four tone marks, and Thai numerals across four vertical tiers, with no spaces between words. A single Thai syllable can stack glyphs above, below, before, and after its base consonant simultaneously — which is why Thai typefaces need vertical space and kerning logic that Latin typefaces do not require. Understanding the structural peculiarities of the script is the difference between work that reads as authentic and work that reads as a Latin designer who pulled a free font from Google.
This guide covers the script, the history of Thai type, the contemporary loopless movement, classification, bilingual layout, the rules that visually distinguish good Thai typesetting from bad, and how to implement all of it in CSS. It is written for designers with no Thai-language experience who need to produce authentic work for Thai clients, as well as for Thai designers who want a consolidated English-language reference to link colleagues to. If you have come here wanting to draw a Thai typeface rather than set one, start instead with How to Make a Thai Font.
The Thai writing system for designers
The Thai alphabet, adapted from Old Khmer in the late thirteenth century, is an abugida: each consonant carries an inherent vowel unless a vowel symbol overrides it. The Royal Institute of Thailand’s 2011 dictionary edition documents 44 consonant letters (two obsolete, ฮอ rarely taught), 15 vowel symbols that combine into roughly 28 vowel shapes, and four tone marks. Words are written without interword spaces; line breaks occur between syllables, not arbitrary letter boundaries. For a typographer the implication is direct: Thai text wraps differently, justifies differently, and hyphenates differently from any Latin or CJK system.
Consonants (ก–ฮ)
Thai consonants are grouped into three classes — high, mid, low — which, combined with tone marks and syllable endings, determine one of five tones for each syllable. For typography you care about this only indirectly: what matters is that every consonant has a baseline-anchored primary shape with a loop or a modern “loopless” opening at its head. Consonants are the structural spine of every syllable; vowels and tone marks dance around them. In traditional type, the loops at the top of letters like ก and ข are the single most visually distinctive feature of Thai type. In modern type, those loops have often been removed (see the loopless section below).
Vowels — above, below, before, after, around
Thai vowels sit in four positions relative to their consonant: above, below, before, after, or a combination forming a circumfix. The vowel ี sits above; ุ below; เ before; า after. A single syllable like เกียว places a vowel before and above the consonant. In layout, the implication is that you cannot treat a Thai line as a single horizontal strip of glyphs at the baseline — the cap-height equivalent shifts constantly. Line-height needs to accommodate the tallest possible stack: consonant + vowel + tone mark.
Tone marks and the four vertical tiers
Thai type occupies four vertical tiers: below-baseline descenders, the consonant baseline tier, the above-consonant vowel tier, and the tone-mark tier that sits on top of above-vowels. A syllable with all four tiers active — descending vowel, consonant, above-vowel, tone mark — is rare in running text but common in proper nouns and headlines. Thai typefaces designed for body text compress the upper tiers so the overall line height stays comfortable; display faces stretch them for drama. As a designer the safe default is 10–15% more line-height than the equivalent Latin setting (Google Fonts Thai Typography Primer, 2024).
A brief history of Thai type
The Thai script was formalized by King Ramkhamhaeng on the Sukhothai inscription of 1283 CE; the first movable Thai type was cast by the American missionary Dan Beach Bradley for his Bangkok Recorder press in 1836. Between those poles sit six hundred years of handwritten and engraved forms — temple manuscripts on palm-leaf folios, stone inscriptions on pediments, and royal sua leather codices — that shape the visual expectations every Thai reader still carries. Early Thai type imitated the formal khmer-inflected scribal hand; it took until the reign of King Rama V and the establishment of the Royal Printing Office in 1885 for indigenous Thai type design to begin departing from scribal precedent.
The twentieth century brought two consequential developments. The first was the state-led standardization of educational fonts under the Ministry of Education in the 1950s, which produced the ubiquitous looped-serif style seen in every Thai textbook. The second was the 1990s shift from metal type and phototypesetting to digital type. The first widely distributed digital Thai fonts shipped with Microsoft Office 97 (Angsana, Cordia, Browallia), permanently fixing the looped serif as the digital default. Every Thai designer alive today learned to read on those fonts — which is why the loopless movement (below) had to fight so hard to establish itself as legitimate.
The loopless revolution
The loopless Thai type movement, pioneered by Bangkok foundry Cadson Demak starting in 2002, removes the traditional opening loops from consonants to produce forms that match Latin stroke conventions. The argument was practical: at small sizes on pre-retina screens, the loops of traditional Thai type turned into illegible blobs. Without the loops, consonants gain optical weight and hold up in body-text sizes. The aesthetic argument was that Thai and Latin type needed to speak the same modernist language — loopless Thai could pair with geometric Latin sans-serifs like a proper bilingual family, where looped Thai paired with geometric Latin always read as a mismatch.
The movement was controversial for two decades and is now mainstream. IBM Plex Thai, released in 2020, was the first globally distributed corporate font with a fully loopless Thai. Google’s Noto Sans Thai ships in both Looped and Looples variants and the loopless variant is the default choice for new digital products. Thai designers under thirty-five generally treat loopless as the neutral default and looped as a stylistic choice; designers over fifty-five generally treat looped as the neutral default and loopless as an avant-garde one. Neither is wrong. Choose based on audience.
See our deeper article The Loopless Revolution: Modern Thai Type for a visual walkthrough of the transition and the key foundries involved.
Thai font classification
Thai fonts fall into six practical classes: looped serif, looped sans-serif, loopless (modern), display, handwritten, and monospaced. The distinction between looped and loopless cuts across the other categories — a display face can be looped or loopless — and is usually the first decision a designer makes before narrowing by style. The table below summarises how each class behaves in layout and gives examples from the ThaiGraph font directory.
Browse each category in the font category index, or start with the full Thai font directory.
Thai + Latin: designing bilingual layouts
Bilingual Thai–Latin typesetting requires matched x-heights, compatible stroke contrast, and a Thai line-height 10–15% taller than the equivalent Latin line-height to accommodate Thai’s stacked glyphs (Google Fonts Thai Typography Primer, 2024). The failure mode of untrained bilingual work is obvious on sight: Thai text set at the same line-height as Latin, which causes tone marks to collide with descenders on the line above. The rule is rigid. If your Latin body is set at 1.4 line-height, your Thai body should be at 1.55 minimum.
Font pairing choices matter more in Thai–Latin work than in single-script work because the visual inconsistency between a geometric Latin and a humanist looped Thai will distract readers of both scripts. The current best-practice pairings are (a) loopless Thai with a matching Latin sans — IBM Plex Thai + IBM Plex Sans, Prompt + Inter, Kanit + Roboto; and (b) looped Thai with a humanist Latin serif — Sarabun + Source Serif, Cordia + Charter. Full pairing recommendations live on the Thai + Latin font pairings page.
The bilingual guide goes further: Thai + Latin: Bilingual Typography Guide.
Thai typographic rules that Latin typographers miss
Six rules distinguish professional Thai typesetting from the default output of Latin design tools. Applying these rules takes five minutes per project and is the single clearest way to signal competence to a Thai audience.
Line breaks at word boundaries, not character boundaries. Thai has no interword spaces but it does have word boundaries, and Thai readers parse them implicitly. Use a word-segmentation-aware line-break library (such as ICU BreakIterator or the Thai-specific libthai) or mark word boundaries explicitly with zero-width spaces (U+200B) in your source. Default Latin CSS breaks mid-word.
Line-height 1.55–1.8 for body text. The Latin norm of 1.4–1.5 collides tone marks with descenders.
No letter-spacing in body text. Positive letter-spacing on Thai breaks vowel-consonant binding and produces gibberish. Use it only on all-caps-equivalent (all-consonant) display settings.
Thai numerals (๐–๙) vs Arabic numerals (0–9). Formal or ceremonial contexts may require Thai numerals; commercial and technical contexts nearly always use Arabic. Check with the client.
Line endings never break compound vowels. Vowel clusters like เ…ีย must stay on the same line as their consonant. Most web browsers handle this correctly; some design tools do not.
Font size: add 5–10%. Thai glyphs are optically smaller than Latin at the same point size because of the above-and-below vowel tiers. Body text that sets at 16px in Latin usually wants 17–18px in Thai.
Where to find Thai fonts — foundries and archives
The three largest sources of Thai fonts are: the government-funded SIL-licensed National Font set (13 families, free), the commercial foundries Cadson Demak and Katatrad (paid, high-quality), and Google Fonts (growing Thai subset, free). Community sites f0nt.com and FreeThaiFont.com host hundreds of hobbyist and semi-professional fonts of variable quality and uncertain licensing. ThaiFonts.org is the open-source umbrella project most Thai foundries publish through. The ThaiGraph font directory consolidates entries from all of these sources with verified license information and designer credits.
Full directory entry: Guide to Thai Type Foundries.
If none of those sources carries what a project needs, the remaining option is to draw it. How to Make a Thai Font sets out the three honest routes — a handwriting app, real type design, or commissioning a designer — with the glyph counts and the OpenType tables each one actually requires.
Thai typography on the web
Implementing Thai type on the web requires three CSS considerations: font-family stack with an appropriate Latin fallback, line-height of at least 1.6 for body text, and word-break: normal with explicit word-boundary markers or a segmentation library for line breaking. Self-hosting is generally preferable to Google Fonts for performance on Thai body text because the Google Fonts Thai subset is 40–80KB per weight and benefits from aggressive preloading. A minimal production stack for a Thai-primary site looks like this:
{`@font-face {
font-family: 'Sarabun';
src: url('/fonts/Sarabun-Regular.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 400;
font-display: swap;
unicode-range: U+0E01-0E5B, U+200C-200D, U+25CC;
}
body {
font-family: 'Sarabun', 'Inter', system-ui, sans-serif;
font-size: 17px;
line-height: 1.65;
word-break: normal;
overflow-wrap: break-word;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
}
`}
Preload the Thai WOFF2 file in if Thai is the primary script. Do not rely on the browser’s unicode-range fallback logic for latency-sensitive pages.
Licensing: what designers need to know
Most “free” Thai fonts on community sites are licensed for personal use only; commercial use requires a paid license or an explicit OFL/SIL release. The three license categories you will encounter are: SIL Open Font License (fully free for commercial use, redistributable), free-for-personal-use (common on f0nt.com, requires foundry permission for commercial work), and commercial license (Cadson Demak, Katatrad, PSL Smart Font). Always verify the license on the foundry’s official page before shipping commercial work. The ThaiGraph font directory tags every font with its verified license; if a license cannot be verified we mark the font as “license unverified” and do not list a download link.
Full breakdown: Understanding Thai Font Licensing.
Twenty Thai fonts every designer should know
The working canon of Thai type in 2026 is roughly twenty families, split between the state-funded National Font set, the Google Fonts Thai subset, the loopless IBM Plex Thai / Noto Sans Thai lineage, and the commercial catalogues of Cadson Demak and Katatrad. Each entry in the list below links to its full page in the directory with weights, license, designer credit, and live preview.
Sarabun — National Font, looped sans, body text default.
Kanit — Cadson Demak, loopless geometric sans, branding default.
Prompt — Cadson Demak, loopless sans, UI default.
IBM Plex Sans Thai — Cadson Demak for IBM, loopless corporate sans.
Noto Sans Thai — Google, loopless/looped, ubiquitous web default.
Noto Serif Thai — Google, looped serif, editorial default.
Mitr — Cadson Demak, humanist loopless sans.
Athiti — Cadson Demak, display loopless sans.
Bai Jamjuree — Cadson Demak, display humanist.
Chakra Petch — Cadson Demak, display geometric.
Charm — Cadson Demak, display ornamental.
Charmonman — handwritten script.
Fahkwang — Cadson Demak, display humanist.
Itim — Cadson Demak, friendly display.
K2D — Cadson Demak, loopless sans.
Niramit — Cadson Demak, humanist serif.
Pattaya — Cadson Demak, brush script display.
Pridi — Cadson Demak, editorial serif.
Sriracha — Cadson Demak, casual script display.
Taviraj — Cadson Demak, looped serif.
Full catalogue: Thai Font Directory.
---
## SOURCE: /colors/thaitone/
Thai Traditional Colors: The Complete Thaitone System
168 colors documented from Thai textiles, temples, royal regalia, and nature — with full HEX, RGB, and CMYK values and the cultural context behind every one.
What the Thaitone system is
The Thaitone system is a 168-color reference palette documented by the late Dr. Pairoj Pittayamatee, drawn from Thai textiles, temple murals, royal regalia, ceremonial lacquerware, and natural dyes, and published with CMYK color specifications in his 1988 book Thai Colour (Amarin Printing, Bangkok). It is the closest thing Thailand has to an official traditional color palette. Every color in the system maps to a named cultural source: a specific temple pediment, a royal robe, a regional silk, a festival banner, a botanical specimen. This pillar page documents the full system, organizes the colors by cultural category, and provides modern HEX/RGB/HSL values alongside the original CMYK specifications.
The Thaitone system is not a brand palette. It is a cultural reference. Designers working for Thai audiences use it the way Japanese designers use irogami traditional colors — as an authoritative register to draw from, not a mandatory set to follow. The value of the system for the modern designer is threefold: (1) it provides culturally accurate color choices that signal authenticity to Thai audiences; (2) it gives a vocabulary for discussing Thai color with clients; and (3) it links contemporary work to six hundred years of Thai visual tradition.
ThaiGraph has full editorial pages for {documentedCount} of the 168 Thaitone colors so far; the remaining entries are being documented and will be published as each cultural source is verified.
How the colors were documented
Pittayamatee and his research team spent the 1980s sampling color directly from heritage artefacts: temple murals at Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Arun, royal textiles in the Grand Palace collection, ceremonial lacquerware in the Silpakorn University conservation archive, and natural-dye silk from weaving communities in Surin, Si Sa Ket, and Nakhon Si Thammarat. The measurements used a standardized light source and matched to CMYK process printing standards of the time. The research was funded by a grant from the Ministry of Culture and published as both a printed book and a set of Pantone-compatible chips.
The system has three known limitations. First, the CMYK values reflect 1980s process printing; modern designers typically translate to HEX/RGB, introducing roundtrip conversion losses of up to 3%. Second, the sampled artefacts spanned the Ayutthaya (1351–1767), Rattanakosin (1782–present), and late Lanna (northern Thai) periods; the system blends era-specific palettes. Third, the documentation pre-dates screen-based color management; sRGB display of these colors is an approximation. ThaiGraph’s individual color pages note the sampled artefact and era for every color where available.
The six cultural categories
The 168 Thaitone colors organize naturally into six cultural categories: Royal, Temple, Silk, Festival, Nature, and Everyday. The boundaries are practical rather than academic; a color can appear in multiple categories (lacquer black appears in both Temple and Everyday). For a designer, the category is usually the fastest way to pick from the system: the project brief tells you the register, the register tells you the category, the category narrows the 168 colors down to a manageable 25–30.
Each category has a dedicated palette page with curated combinations at /colors/palettes/.
What Thai colors mean in Thai culture
Thai color symbolism is anchored in the seven royal weekday colors — a planetary system codified during the reign of King Rama I (1782–1809) that assigns a specific color to each day of the week. Red is Sunday, yellow is Monday, pink is Tuesday, green is Wednesday, orange is Thursday, blue is Friday, and purple is Saturday. Thai readers often wear the color of the day corresponding to their birth weekday, and royal ceremonies sequence colors according to the weekday of the event. For branding work aimed at Thai audiences, respecting these associations is the difference between a design that feels Thai and one that feels generic.
Beyond the weekday system, three color codes carry specific weight. Gold (particularly 23.75-karat gold leaf) signals the sacred, the royal, and the luxurious in roughly that order; no Thai luxury brand ships without evaluating a gold treatment. Vermilion (แดงชาด) is associated with temple lacquer and Buddhist monastic robes; it carries religious weight that makes it a loaded choice for secular brands. White is associated with mourning and Buddhist asceticism; it is used sparingly in celebration contexts. Full breakdown: Color Psychology in Thai Culture for Designers.
The signature Thaitone colors
{signatureColors.length} colors represent the Thaitone system at a glance: the royal red, the temple gold, the lacquer black, the saffron, the indigo, the celadon, and the natural-dye silk family. Every color on the site links to its dedicated page with full HEX/RGB/CMYK/HSL values, cultural context, complementary colors, and downloadable swatches. Click any swatch below to open its page.
{signatureColors.map((c) => (
))}
{copyAllLabel}
Full Thaitone color index
Every documented Thaitone color, organized by its cultural category. Each entry links to a full editorial page with HEX, RGB, CMYK, and HSL values, the named cultural artefact it was sampled from, and design briefs for modern use. Colors that belong to more than one register appear in each relevant section.
{categoryDef.map((cat) => {
const colors = colorsInCategory(cat.id);
if (colors.length === 0) return null;
return (
{cat.label} ({cat.labelThai})
{cat.description}
{colors.map((c) => (
{c.data.colorName}
{c.data.colorNameThai && {c.data.colorNameThai}}
{c.data.transliteration && ({c.data.transliteration})}
{c.data.hex.toUpperCase()}
{culturalSnippet[c.slug] && — {culturalSnippet[c.slug]}}
))}
{copyAllLabel}
);
})}
Every Thaitone color, A–Z
A single alphabetical list of all {documentedCount} currently documented colors. Useful when you know the name but not the category.
{allColors.map((c) => (
{anchorLabel(c)}
))}
Using Thaitone colors in modern design
The three best practices for using Thaitone colors in modern design are: pick one dominant color that carries the cultural register, use 1–2 supporting colors from the same cultural category, and reserve gold as an accent rather than a primary. The failure mode of untrained Thai-inspired work is to pile up saturated signal colors — vermilion, gold, lacquer black, saffron — into a carnival palette that reads as pastiche. Heritage-aware Thai brands use one loud color against a large field of desaturated neutrals; contemporary brands often pick a single Thaitone color as their brand hero and pair it with international-language neutrals (warm grey, cream, off-black) instead of other Thaitone colors.
Practical rules
Start with context. Luxury hospitality reaches for c.slug === 'temple-gold')!)}>Temple Gold + c.slug === 'lacquer-black')!)}>Lacquer Black. Thai street food brands reach for c.slug === 'thai-vermilion')!)}>Vermilion + cream. Spa and wellness work reaches for c.slug === 'celadon')!)}>Celadon + c.slug === 'banana-leaf')!)}>Banana Leaf + c.slug === 'rice-paper')!)}>Rice Paper. Picking the category before the colors avoids the pastiche trap.
Respect the weekday system in ceremony contexts. If the brand or event has a specific date, match its weekday color in at least one supporting role.
Temper saturation for screens. Pittayamatee’s CMYK values for the saturated reds and blues clip outside sRGB gamut on most displays. The ThaiGraph color pages provide both the original and a gamut-safe variant.
Gold is an accent. More than ~8% gold surface area and the work reads as kitsch rather than ceremony. Modern Thai luxury brands keep gold under 5%.
Thaitone by industry — ready-to-use palettes
Six industry-specific palettes cover the most common briefs for Thai-market design work: restaurant, spa, hotel, fashion, packaging, and editorial. Each palette page lists the dominant, supporting, and accent colors with HEX values and Figma/ASE downloads. These palettes are constructed from the 168-color base rather than invented; they reflect the conventions of successful Thai brands in each category (based on analysis of 80 award-winning Thai brand identities, 2020–2025).
Restaurant palettes — from street-food vermilion to fine-dining lacquer.
Spa and wellness palettes — celadon, jasmine, banana leaf.
Hotel and hospitality palettes — temple gold, teak, lacquer.
Fashion palettes — silk natural dyes, festival pinks, royal weekday colors.
Packaging palettes — food, craft, and FMCG.
Editorial palettes — magazine, book, and long-form web.
Download Thaitone for Figma, Tailwind, ASE
The complete 168-color Thaitone system is available as Figma Library, Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase), Tailwind CSS config, CSS custom properties, and JSON — all free, CC BY 4.0 licensed. Import one file, get every Thaitone color named and organized by cultural category in your design tool.
Thaitone.fig — Figma library (140KB)
Thaitone.ase — Adobe Swatch Exchange (12KB)
thaitone.tailwind.config.js — Tailwind CSS config
thaitone.css — CSS custom properties
thaitone.json — structured JSON
Credit — any Thaitone file: “Thaitone palette via ThaiGraph.com, after Pittayamatee (1988), CC BY 4.0.”
{/* One shared runtime drives every copy button and every swatch format
cycler on this page, via the data-* contract documented in the
component. It renders no markup and only unhides controls the server
already sent, so the page is unchanged with scripting off. */}
---
## SOURCE: /patterns/
Thai Design Patterns: Lai Kanok, Lai Thai, and Beyond
The ornamental vocabulary of Thai visual culture — where each motif came from, how it is constructed, what it means, and how to use it in contemporary graphic design.
What Thai ornamental patterns are
Thai ornamental patterns are a family of stylized motifs — flame curls, cloud shapes, star-flowers, floral spirals, and mythological creatures — derived from Hindu-Buddhist cosmology and six hundred years of applied craft, and codified into a set of named, rule-constrained forms that appear on temples, royal regalia, ceremonial textiles, manuscripts, and everyday decoration. The patterns are not simply decorative. Each has iconographic meaning, each has construction rules, and each has conventions for where it may or may not be used. Understanding the patterns is the difference between culturally accurate Thai-inspired work and a superficial aesthetic overlay that Thai viewers recognise as pastiche.
This pillar page is the index of the full pattern library. Click any family below to open its dedicated page with history, geometry, cultural context, modern usage examples, and free vector downloads.
The pattern families
Lai Kanok (Kranok) — the flame motif
Lai Kanok (also written Kranok or Kranoke) is the single most iconic ornamental motif in Thai visual culture — a flame-shaped curvilinear form with a pointed tip curling inward, representing the sacred fire of purification in Hindu-Buddhist cosmology. The Fine Arts Department’s 2011 Temple Architecture Survey found the motif on more than ninety percent of surveyed Thai Buddhist temples. It originated during the Sukhothai period (1238–1438 CE) and is the foundational unit of most compound Thai ornamental compositions: pediment designs, border frames, textile repeats, and crown-jewel engravings are typically built from modular Lai Kanok arrays.
Traditional construction uses a base-to-height ratio of approximately 1:2.5 and a nineteen-point geometric grid taught at Silpakorn University’s Faculty of Decorative Arts. The motif is always rendered symmetrically when used standalone and can be chained into continuous border patterns (Lai Kanok Khrua). Traditional colors are gold leaf on red or black lacquer. Full construction walkthrough and vector download: /patterns/lai-kanok/.
Lai Thai — the general ornamental vocabulary
“Lai Thai” (ลายไทย) is the umbrella term for the entire traditional Thai ornamental vocabulary — Lai Kanok, Mek Lai, Pra Jum Yam, Lai Kra Jung, Lai Kan Kot, Lai Prajam Yam, and dozens of other named motifs that share a common geometric language. Every pattern in this library is a specific Lai Thai. When a designer says “Lai Thai” without qualification, they usually mean “a composition in the traditional Thai ornamental idiom,” not a specific motif. The distinction matters because clients who ask for “Lai Thai” are almost never asking for a specific flame curl — they are asking for cultural literacy and coherent composition in the Thai idiom. See the full Lai Thai overview.
Mek Lai — cloud patterns
Mek Lai (เมฆลาย) is the stylized cloud motif used on temple ceilings, royal robes, and manuscript borders — a rolling spiral form that derives from Chinese cloud ornament but has been adapted into a distinctly Thai vocabulary since the Ayutthaya period. The motif typically appears in long horizontal bands with three or five nested spirals per unit, colored in pale blue, grey, and gold leaf. Modern usage is common in luxury hospitality and packaging where the brief calls for “Thai but restrained”; the cloud form reads as elegant without reading as religious. See the Mek Lai page for construction rules and examples.
Pra Jum Yam — star and flower
Pra Jum Yam (ประจำยาม) is the radial star-flower motif found on royal regalia, crown headdresses, and ceremonial textiles — typically an eight-petaled or sixteen-petaled rosette constructed on a radial grid. The motif derives from Hindu padma (lotus) iconography and symbolises the cosmic order; historically it is reserved for elite and ceremonial contexts rather than domestic decoration. For brand designers working on Thai luxury or heritage briefs, Pra Jum Yam is the motif most often requested as a hallmark. See /patterns/pra-jum-yam/.
Lai Dok Mai — floral patterns
Lai Dok Mai (ลายดอกไม้) is the family of floral motifs — lotus, jasmine, champa, and bougainvillea — that dominate Thai textile and packaging decoration. Each flower has distinct iconographic weight: lotus for spiritual purity, jasmine for motherhood and Mother’s Day (12 August, the Queen Mother’s birthday), champa for remembrance, bougainvillea for hospitality. Designers working on spa, hospitality, or wellness briefs draw most heavily from this family. See the Lai Dok Mai page.
Naga, Kinnari, Garuda — mythological motifs
The three mythological motifs most often encountered by designers are the Naga (multi-headed serpent), Kinnari (half-human half-bird celestial), and Garuda (bird-king, national symbol of Thailand). Each has specific rules about use: Garuda is reserved for royal and state decoration (its commercial use requires Royal Household Bureau approval); Naga is widely used on temple balustrades and staircases; Kinnari appears on murals and ritual objects. All three are off-limits for disrespectful or satirical brand use — Thai law treats lese-majeste-adjacent iconography seriously, and the Garuda specifically carries legal weight. Dedicated pages: Naga, Kinnari, Garuda.
Yantra (Sak Yant) — sacred geometric patterns
Yantra, known in Thai as Sak Yant (สักยันต์), are sacred geometric tattoo designs combining Pali-Khmer script with canonical grid patterns, codified into approximately eighty-five named configurations. The forms originated with forest-tradition monks and are traditionally applied by ajarn (master) practitioners who chant consecration formulas during inscription. For design work, Yantra is a fraught territory: it is religious material rather than cultural vocabulary, and commercial use is generally considered disrespectful by both Buddhist authorities and the general Thai public. Historical study is welcome; appropriation for fashion or novelty brands is not. See the Yantra page for the full cultural and legal context.
Temple pediments and borders
Thai temple pediments (the triangular roof-gables above temple entrances) are the single richest compositional source in Thai ornamental tradition — combining Lai Kanok, Lai Thai, Mek Lai, floral, and figurative elements into a unified heraldic composition. For graphic designers the pediment is useful as a compositional reference rather than a direct source: the rules that govern pediment construction (symmetry, radial organization, iconographic register) map directly onto modern brand systems. See the Thai branding gallery for examples of pediment-derived contemporary work.
Border patterns (continuous horizontal repeats) are the most frequently reused element in contemporary Thai-inspired design. See /patterns/thai-border/ for the conventions, and the downloads page for free SVG vector files.
Using traditional patterns in contemporary work
Three rules separate respectful, effective modern use of Thai patterns from pastiche: choose one motif, simplify its geometry, and let modern typography and layout carry the composition. The failure mode of untrained Thai-inspired branding is to pile up motifs — Lai Kanok corners, Pra Jum Yam seals, Mek Lai borders, and floral accents all on one artefact. Heritage-aware contemporary brands pick a single motif, reduce it to its minimum readable form, and place it in generous negative space. See the Thai branding gallery for thirty award-winning examples of the pattern-minimalism approach done well.
Simplify the geometry. Traditional Lai Kanok has dozens of internal curls. A modern brand mark typically needs two or three.
Scale up, not down. These motifs were designed for architectural and textile scale. At thumbnail size the detail reads as noise. Enlarge them and crop.
One color. Modern monochrome treatments (single Thaitone color on a neutral field) read as confident heritage; full-color traditional palettes read as folk kitsch unless the brief specifically calls for it.
Do not combine mythological and everyday motifs. Garuda, Naga, and Kinnari belong with their registers. Pairing them with casual floral patterns reads as disrespectful to culturally attuned audiences.
Free vector pattern downloads
Twenty-five traditional patterns are available as free, CC BY 4.0-licensed SVG and AI vectors on the downloads page, including Lai Kanok, Mek Lai, Pra Jum Yam, Naga balustrade, Garuda crest, and thirty common border repeats. Credit line for commercial use: “Pattern via ThaiGraph.com, CC BY 4.0.” Sourced patterns are reconstructions from public-domain temple, manuscript, and textile references — not scans of copyrighted modern artwork.
Open the downloads page →
---
## SOURCE: /industry/
Thai Graphic Design Industry: The Complete Overview
Thailand’s $44.5 billion creative economy, the organizations that shape it, the schools that feed it, the studios that produce its work, and the salaries and trends that define careers in {year}.
Thailand’s creative economy by the numbers
Thailand’s creative industries produced THB 1.62 trillion ($44.5 billion) of GDP in 2024, approximately 8.1% of national GDP, and employed around 989,700 workers — making creative work one of the ten largest employment categories in the country (Creative Economy Agency, 2024; Office of the National Economic and Social Development Council, 2024). Graphic design as a sub-sector sits inside the broader creative economy under the visual-content cluster, alongside advertising and publishing. Of the ten creative-industry sub-sectors tracked by the CEA, visual content accounts for roughly 11% of creative GDP and 14% of creative employment.
The creative economy has outgrown the overall Thai economy in every year of the last decade. Between 2015 and 2024 creative GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 5.4% versus 2.7% for overall GDP. The fastest-growing sub-sectors are digital media (9.1% CAGR) and design services (7.3% CAGR); print and publishing are in structural decline (-1.8% CAGR). For a graphic designer in 2026 the implications are concrete: agency work in digital product, packaging, and branding is abundant; editorial-print work is scarce and tends to come through adjacent cultural-sector clients (museums, foundations, hospitality).
Key organizations: TCDC, ThaiGa, CEA, DITP
Four organizations shape the institutional landscape of Thai graphic design: the Creative Economy Agency (CEA), the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC), the Thai Graphic Designers Association (ThaiGa), and the Department of International Trade Promotion (DITP). Each plays a distinct role and every practicing designer interacts with at least two of them regularly.
CEA (Creative Economy Agency) — public agency under the Office of the Prime Minister. Publishes the Creative Economy Indicators, funds Bangkok Design Week and Chiang Mai Design Week, and runs TCDC as a subsidiary. Primary source of official creative-economy data.
TCDC (Thailand Creative & Design Center) — public design library, exhibition space, and materials archive in Bangkok (Charoen Krung) and Chiang Mai. Core daily resource for working designers; membership is affordable and materials archive is unmatched in Southeast Asia.
ThaiGa (Thai Graphic Designers Association) — professional body established in 1995. Sixty-five individual member designers, twenty-five member firms, fifteen member institutions as of January 2026. Runs the Thai Design Graphic Award, publishes a member directory, and advocates on licensing and contract issues.
DITP (Department of International Trade Promotion) — Ministry of Commerce agency that funds Thai participation in international design fairs and awards. Pathway for Thai designers to reach Red Dot, iF, and A’ Design competitions through subsidised entry.
Design education in Thailand
Eight universities dominate formal graphic design education in Thailand, led by Silpakorn University’s Faculty of Decorative Arts (founded 1943), Chulalongkorn’s Communication Design programme, and KMUTT’s School of Architecture & Design. Silpakorn is the oldest and produces most of the country’s traditional-craft-literate designers; Chulalongkorn and KMUTT skew contemporary and digital. The remaining five schools cover a range from heritage craft (Chiang Mai University) to commercial advertising (ABAC) to technology-oriented (KMITL).
Complete program-by-program guide with curricula, tuition, portfolio requirements, and alumni outcomes: Complete Guide to Design Education in Thailand.
The Thai design studio landscape
The Thai design studio ecosystem consists of roughly 3,500 active firms with approximately 80% based in Bangkok, 12% in Chiang Mai, and the balance distributed across Phuket, Khon Kaen, and Hat Yai (Creative Economy Agency, 2024). Studios cluster into four size bands: solo practitioners and duos (~2,200 firms), three-to-ten person studios (~1,050), eleven-to-thirty person studios (~210), and agencies with more than thirty staff (~40). The top tier — global-brand agencies like Wunderman Thompson Thailand, Ogilvy Thailand, Leo Burnett Thailand — handles multinational clients; the three-to-ten band does most of the award-winning independent branding work; the solo and duo band is where most fresh graduates start.
Specialisation is more Bangkok-concentrated than ownership suggests. Packaging-focused studios cluster in the Rama IX / Sukhumvit 71 corridor; branding and identity work clusters in Ari and Ekkamai; illustration and editorial work concentrates in Charoen Krung (around TCDC). Chiang Mai is the country’s second centre with a distinct character — strongly craft-oriented, with close ties to textile and product design. The full directory of Thai design studios with city, size, specialisation, and client list: /studios/.
Thai designers on the international stage
Thai designers and studios have won approximately 142 Red Dot, iF, and A’ Design awards between 2015 and 2025, with a notable acceleration in the last three years driven by packaging and brand-identity work for Thai FMCG exporters. The most decorated Thai studios include Prompt Design (Bangkok, 30+ international awards), Farmgroup (multiple D&AD pencils, Cannes Lion entries), and Somchana Kangwarnjit’s Prompt (the single most awarded Thai packaging studio, known for beverage and FMCG work that regularly appears on Dieline and Packaging of the World).
The full list of Thai design award winners with categories and project references: Thai Design Awards — Every Competition Worth Entering and Thai Design at International Awards.
Major events and design weeks
Three annual events dominate the Thai design calendar: Bangkok Design Week (late January–early February, approximately 465,000 visitors), Chiang Mai Design Week (December), and BITS (Bangkok International Typography Symposium, biennial). All three are CEA-funded and free to attend. Bangkok Design Week is the largest design gathering in Southeast Asia and the primary annual meeting point for the Thai design industry; attendance has grown steadily from an estimated 180,000 visitors in 2018 to 465,000 in 2026.
Secondary events include the annual Thai Design Graphic Award (ThaiGa), the Thailand Graphic Design Conference (hosted by KMUTT most years), and the Adobe MAX Bangkok satellite event. Full event guide: /industry/events/.
Salary data and career paths
Entry-level Thai graphic designers earn THB 22,000–32,000 per month in Bangkok and THB 18,000–25,000 in Chiang Mai; senior designers with 5–10 years of experience earn THB 70,000–120,000 in Bangkok (ThaiGraph Salary Survey 2026, 210 respondents). The agency-to-in-house pay differential favours agencies by approximately 15% at junior levels and reverses in favour of in-house by 10–20% at senior and creative-director levels. Freelance day rates for mid-career designers cluster between THB 4,500 and 9,000 in Bangkok; hitting the upper end requires an established portfolio and English-speaking clients.
Full methodology, cohort breakdowns, specialisation-by-specialisation data, and Bangkok/Chiang Mai comparison: Thai Graphic Designer Salary Report 2026.
The AI impact on Thai design in 2026
Generative AI adoption among Thai graphic designers reached an estimated 72% by the end of 2025, with ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly the three most commonly used tools (ThaiGraph Tool Survey 2026). Adoption is highest among designers under thirty-five and in agencies serving e-commerce, FMCG, and digital product clients; it is lower among designers working in heritage, hospitality, and print-editorial contexts. The Canva surge is the clearest market shift: Canva Pro subscriptions in Thailand grew 41% year-over-year in 2025, compressing the entry-level graphic-design market by moving small-business work away from designers onto platform DIY.
The current tension in the industry is ethical rather than technical. Thai heritage clients are unusually sensitive to AI-generated cultural content: temple imagery, traditional patterns, and royal motifs generated by foreign-trained models reliably fail cultural review. Studios have responded by restricting AI use to early-stage ideation and by writing client-facing AI-use clauses into contracts. Full picture: State of AI in Thai Design 2026.
Working as a foreign designer in Thailand
Foreign designers working in Thailand require a Non-Immigrant B visa plus a work permit sponsored by a Thai employer or a Thai-incorporated company; the Smart Visa route (Smart T for talent) eliminates the work-permit requirement but requires a minimum THB 200,000 monthly income or a startup-category endorsement. Agency employment is the most common pathway; freelance work without an appropriate visa is technically illegal even when clients are abroad. The practical market for foreign designers in Thailand is in (a) global agencies serving multinational clients that need Western cultural fluency, (b) digital product teams at Thai tech companies where English is the working language, and (c) specialist roles (type design, motion, 3D) where Thai specialists are scarce.
Tax, visa, and contract detail: Working as a Freelance Designer in Thailand.
Trends, growth areas, and opportunities
The five growth areas for Thai graphic design in the next three years are: FMCG packaging for Thai exports to ASEAN, brand identity for Thai heritage tourism, digital product design for Thai fintech, motion and video for short-form e-commerce, and specialty type design serving the growing Thai loopless type market. Each has distinct economics. FMCG packaging serves exporters chasing the ASEAN premium-food market and pays well through export-oriented clients. Heritage tourism design serves a government-supported segment as Thailand repositions from mass tourism to cultural tourism. Fintech and e-commerce motion reflect the general Thai consumer-digital boom. Specialty type is a small market but one where independent designers can build international reputations.
The structural challenge remains English-language visibility. Thai designers produce work comparable in quality to Japanese, Korean, or Singaporean peers but earn less international attention because Thai documentation is fragmentary in English. That gap — and the opportunity to close it — is the reason ThaiGraph exists.
---
## SOURCE: /faq/
Thai Graphic Design FAQ
Common questions about Thai design resources, font usage, licensing, the Thaitone system, pattern usage rights, and how to work with Thai typography. For detailed answers, follow the “full detail” link on each item.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/banana-leaf.mdx
## What Banana Leaf is
**Banana Leaf Green (เขียวใบตอง, *khiao bai tong*) is the saturated tropical green of fresh banana leaves used in Thai food and craft — a mid-saturation yellow-biased green at #4a7a3e that reads as alive and tropical rather than forest-dark.** The reference is the upper surface of a mature *Musa paradisiaca* leaf in direct tropical sun.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places it inside the everyday (*wisai*) category. It is lighter than pandan green and darker than young rice-plant green. The color reads as edible, fresh, and tied to food preparation rather than religious or royal contexts.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the wrapping leaf used for *khao tom mat*, *khanom sai sai*, and grilled-fish packages at Thai markets across every region.** Banana leaf functions in Thai daily life as plate, wrapper, and steamer lining, with the green visible constantly at markets, temples, and food stalls.
The color appears on temple offering trays (*khan toke* arrangements), Loy Krathong float bases, the woven leaf *bai si* offering cones used at wedding and blessing ceremonies, and as the dominant green in pad thai, som tum, and grilled dishes served on leaf. It is not typically a silk or dye color — banana leaf green exists in Thai culture as the color of the leaf itself rather than a pigment.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Banana Leaf signals food, hospitality, and everyday Thai life — a warm, welcoming green with no royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *khiao bai tong* as a common color term describing freshness and tropical vitality.
The color carries strong association with Thai food culture specifically and does not code strongly to weekday color systems. Its use in branding is considered safe across categories, though it reads most specifically as Thai food when used at full saturation.
## Using Banana Leaf in modern design
**Banana Leaf works best for Thai food brands, craft market identity, and hospitality aiming at casual authenticity.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Thai food product packaging** — 60–80% banana leaf field with cream and red accents; reads as fresh Thai food at both local and export retail.
- **Craft market and street food festival identity** — full-field green with hand-rendered type; signals craft authenticity and Thai origin.
- **Casual restaurant and delivery brand** — banana leaf as dominant brand color paired with rice paper; works for casual dining chains aiming at approachable Thai positioning.
It fails for luxury hospitality (too casual), tech (too literal), and wellness (too green-bright).
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Banana Leaf cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the canonical Thai food palette — green on cream is how Thai dishes photograph best and translates directly into editorial and packaging. With [Thai Vermilion](/colors/thaitone/thai-vermilion/), the pairing evokes festival and temple offering trays at a higher saturation register. With [Jasmine](/colors/thaitone/jasmine/), the green reads as craft-market signage and casual restaurant identity with a slightly warmer base than rice paper.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/buddha-yellow.mdx
## What Buddha Yellow is
**Buddha Yellow (เหลืองพระ, *lueang phra*) is the soft, luminous yellow used for Buddha-image drapery and royal-affiliated institutional design — a paler, higher-luminance yellow at #f2c14e that carries less red than Saffron and reads as serene rather than warm.** The color sits above Saffron on the Thaitone register and below Royal Gold in saturation.
Pittayamatee documented the hue within the royal-temple crossover category. Its function in Thai cultural design is to represent enlightenment and serenity — the Buddha at rest — as distinct from monastic practice, which is the saffron register. On screen it reads as warm ivory-yellow.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the textile drapery on Buddha images in royal temples — particularly the seasonal robe changes (*krong*) on the Emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew.** Three sets of royal robes are changed on this image three times a year, and the hot-season robe sits close to this yellow register.
It appears on Buddha-image altar cloths, ceremonial fans (*talapat*) carried by senior monks during official functions, banner fringes on royal funerary *phra merumas* structures, and the textile backgrounds behind Buddha images in royal and historic temples. Chulalongkorn University uses a near-identical yellow as its institutional color, tied to King Chulalongkorn's Monday birth.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Buddha Yellow signals serenity, enlightenment, and royal-institutional authority — a calmer register than Saffron or Royal Gold.** It functions as the color of Buddha-image robes rather than monastic practice.
The color carries Monday association and ties to Chulalongkorn University and by extension other royal-affiliated institutions. Its use carries less strict social rule than robe-saffron, but full-field yellow is still read with royal or Buddhist connotation in Thai public space.
## Using Buddha Yellow in modern design
**Buddha Yellow works best for premium hospitality, royal-affiliated institutional identity, and Thai heritage food.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Spa and wellness within Thai cultural framework** — 20–30% buddha yellow with rice paper and lacquer black; warm but calm, reads as Thai rather than generic luxury.
- **Institutional identity for Thai universities, foundations, and cultural bodies** — full-field yellow with a deep accent; close to the Chulalongkorn palette.
- **Heritage fruit, honey, or dessert packaging** — Thai mango, longan, palm sugar products; buddha yellow reads as sun-ripened rather than religious in food contexts.
It fails for contemporary tech and fintech — too warm, too institutional — and for streetwear or casual fashion where royal association is off-register.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Buddha Yellow cleanly.** With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the contrast is editorial and premium; 10–20% yellow on black is the standard treatment for Thai cultural publishing. With [Royal Purple](/colors/thaitone/royal-purple/), the pairing draws directly on Thai institutional color history — yellow with purple is a documented royal pairing. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the yellow reads as warm daylight, suitable for wellness and spa identity on uncoated stock.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/celadon.mdx
## What Celadon is
**Thai Celadon (เขียวเซลาดอน, *khiao seladon*) is the soft sage green of Sangkhalok ceramic glaze — a low-saturation, slightly grey-green at #93a287 that sits between warm and cool and carries the signature muted quality of reduction-fired iron glaze.** The color is specifically tied to the ceramic tradition of Si Satchanalai and Sukhothai kilns active from roughly the 13th to 16th centuries.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the canonical hue in the neutral craft category. It is darker and warmer than Chinese Longquan celadon but lighter and cooler than Korean Goryeo celadon, which is the lineage Thai ceramicists position themselves within.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is Sangkhalok stoneware — the fish plates, covered boxes, and jars produced at Si Satchanalai that were the dominant regional ceramic export through mainland Southeast Asia in the Sukhothai period.** Museums across Thailand and Southeast Asia hold major Sangkhalok collections.
The color appears on modern Chiang Mai celadon revival ware produced at Siam Celadon, Mengrai Kilns, and the Doi Tung ceramic studios. It is also standard on reproduction temple tile for restoration projects and on contemporary Thai tableware aimed at heritage hospitality.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Thai Celadon signals craft heritage, Sukhothai and Lanna identity, and quiet sophistication.** It does not carry royal or religious restriction and is considered a safe, high-register color for design.
The color reads as northern Thai by default. Chiang Mai hotels, restaurants, and craft studios use celadon both as tableware and as brand color, which has strengthened the association. It is one of the small number of Thai craft colors with international recognition — celadon buyers in Japan, Europe, and the US understand the category.
## Using Celadon in modern design
**Thai Celadon works best for heritage hospitality, wellness and spa, and premium craft retail.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Chiang Mai boutique hotel identity** — 60–80% celadon field with teak and rice paper accents; reads as Lanna craft hospitality at international luxury register.
- **Wellness, spa, and natural beauty brands** — celadon label system with cream and black typography; the muted green codes as calm and natural.
- **Heritage ceramics and homeware retail** — celadon alongside teak and lacquer black; a direct recreation of the Sangkhalok display register.
It fails for food packaging where the muted green reads as faded, and for tech brands where the colour is too craft-referential.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Celadon cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the canonical Lanna craft register — celadon tableware on cream cloth, translated directly into editorial. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the contrast sharpens the celadon into editorial sophistication, suitable for menus and cultural catalogues. With [Teak](/colors/thaitone/teak/), the pairing reconstructs the northern Thai interior palette — celadon ceramic on teak wood — used across contemporary Chiang Mai hospitality.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/champa.mdx
## What Champa is
**Thai Champa (จำปา, *champa*) is the mellow golden yellow of the champa flower and heritage hospitality — a warm saturated yellow-gold at #e9b24a that sits between Buddha Yellow and Royal Gold on the Thai yellow register.** The reference is the petal of *Magnolia champaca*, a fragrant tropical flower used in temple offerings and Thai perfumery.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color in the nature and ceremonial crossover category. It reads as softer and more organic than Royal Gold and warmer than Buddha Yellow. Unlike the royal yellows, Champa is considered a safe, non-politically-loaded yellow for commercial branding.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the champa flower itself — offered in small temple arrangements, used in *bai si* ceremonial structures, and distilled into traditional Thai perfume.** The flower appears across northern Thai and Lao cultural contexts as a sacred offering material.
The color appears on traditional Lao-Thai women's ceremonial textiles (Champa is the national flower of Laos and carries Mekong-regional significance), on festival banners for Buddhist Lent, on hand-painted umbrella decorations in Bor Sang, and on the label systems of Thai heritage perfume houses like Harnn and Thann. It also appears in the natural-dye output of *khamin* (turmeric) combined with champa petal infusion.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Champa signals cross-Mekong cultural heritage, fragrance, and warm ceremony — a nature-coded yellow without monarchic restriction.** The flower carries romantic and nostalgic associations in both Thai and Lao folk literature.
The color reads as culturally Lao-Thai or northern Thai rather than central Bangkok Rattanakosin. It is appropriate for contexts that want yellow warmth without invoking the monarchy. Because of its natural-flower reference, it reads as soft and organic rather than institutional.
## Using Champa in modern design
**Thai Champa works best for heritage perfume and cosmetics, hospitality aiming at Mekong-regional heritage, and premium food packaging.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Natural perfume and cosmetics brand identity** — champa as primary color with cream accents; directly references the traditional Thai perfume palette.
- **Boutique hotel identity in Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang-adjacent, and Mekong corridor** — champa with teak and rice paper; reads as cross-cultural Lanna-Lao heritage.
- **Premium Thai food — honey, palm sugar, dessert** — champa packaging with black type; warm and appetising without tipping into saffron religious register.
It fails for tech, fintech, and casual fast food where the warmth reads as too premium-craft.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Champa cleanly.** With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the combination is the standard premium Thai cosmetics palette — champa on black at 20-30%, used across Thai luxury fragrance. With [Royal Teal](/colors/thaitone/royal-teal/), the pairing is bencharong-adjacent, pairing warm yellow with peacock green for heritage tableware and hospitality. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the champa softens into warm editorial register suitable for publishing and premium packaging on uncoated stock.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/elephant-grey.mdx
## What Elephant Grey is
**Thai Elephant Grey (เทาช้าง, *thao chang*) is the mid neutral grey of Asian elephant skin — a warm balanced grey at #6a6d6a with a faint green undertone that reads as natural rather than industrial.** The reference is the wet-hide color of *Elephas maximus*, the species that holds national symbolic status in Thailand.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color in the nature and royal crossover category. Elephant grey sits slightly warmer than digital neutral grey and carries a barely perceptible green cast that makes it pair better with natural-dye colors than cool industrial greys do.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the royal white elephant, which despite the name is actually this grey-neutral register in live photographs — albinism standards in Thai elephant tradition rely on specific skin and nail markings rather than pure white color.** The color describes working elephants across Thai elephant sanctuaries in Chiang Mai, Surin, and Chiang Rai.
The color also appears on carved sandstone temple sculpture at Sukhothai and Ayutthaya historical parks, on Ban Chiang grey-fired pottery (a pre-historic Thai ceramic tradition), on the stone elephants at Wat Phra Kaew, and on traditional Thai ceremonial blankets (*pha mai*) used in royal elephant parades.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Elephant Grey signals national symbol, strength, and continuity — a neutral grey with royal weight distinct from Western grey's corporate defaults.** The elephant is a protected national animal, and anything referencing it carries latent political-symbolic weight.
The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *chang* (elephant) as one of the most culturally loaded animal terms in Thai, and the color associated with it inherits that weight. It is considered safe across design categories but reads as distinctly Thai rather than generic neutral when viewers are culturally aware of the reference.
## Using Elephant Grey in modern design
**Thai Elephant Grey works best for heritage hospitality, elephant conservation organisations, and premium Thai brands aiming at masculine sophistication.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Elephant conservation and tourism identity** — elephant grey as dominant color with gold or vermilion accent; used by sanctuaries, tour operators, and conservation foundations.
- **Premium Thai spirits and coffee branding** — grey as base with rice paper and black type; reads as masculine Thai heritage at the premium register.
- **Luxury hospitality with Thai heritage positioning** — grey surfaces in interior branding, paired with teak and celadon; sits between contemporary minimalism and heritage reference.
It fails for children's, food, and wellness categories where warmer colors are preferred.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Elephant Grey cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the premium editorial register — warm cream with warm grey for Thai heritage publishing and hospitality identity. With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the pairing evokes the royal elephant ceremonial palette — grey hide with gold howdah and regalia — suitable for cultural publishing. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the grey sits as mid-tone between black and cream, a useful tonal structure for premium packaging and editorial layouts.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/indigo.mdx
## What Indigo is
**Thai Indigo (คราม, *khraam*) is the deep blue-black of fermented-vat indigo dye used on northeastern and northern Thai cotton — a dark, slightly purple-biased blue at #26314a that reads as the ground color of rural Thai textile tradition.** The pigment is *Indigofera tinctoria* fermented in clay vats, with depth achieved through repeated dip cycles.
The color sits darker than Japanese *ai* indigo and slightly cooler than Hmong indigo due to the specific fermentation temperatures in Isan and Phrae. Pittayamatee's Thaitone register places it within everyday and craft categories. It is distinct from royal navy or western indigo fashion defaults.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is *pha mor hom* cotton shirts from Phrae province and *pha khraam* indigo silk from Sakon Nakhon.** These are the two most geographically specific Thai textile traditions built around indigo.
It also appears on Hmong and Karen hill-tribe cotton garments, Isan *pha khao ma* checked sarongs, traditional Lao-Thai women's wrap skirts (*pha sin*) at deeper dye intensities, and on the dyed cotton bundles sold at Chatuchak and Warorot markets. The color is also the ground for *pha mor ram* ritual textiles in Isan shamanic practice.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Indigo signals rural craft, regional identity, and everyday Thai textile work — distinct from the royal or temple register.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *khraam* as the standard term for both the plant and the color.
The color is not weekday-coded at court level but is strongly region-coded: Sakon Nakhon and Phrae identify themselves by it, with both provinces running indigo festivals annually. The craft revival movement since the 2010s has elevated natural indigo into a design-conscious marker of Thai sustainability and slow-fashion.
## Using Indigo in modern design
**Indigo works best for heritage fashion, craft tourism, and sustainability-positioned consumer brands.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Slow-fashion and craft textile brand identity** — full indigo field with rice paper or silk rose accents; directly evokes the Sakon Nakhon and Phrae traditions.
- **Heritage tourism for northern and northeastern Thailand** — indigo with gold signage typography; reads as regional and craft-rooted rather than generic luxury.
- **Premium Thai spirits and coffee** — indigo label with cream typography; the color sits close enough to navy for international shelf presence while coding Thai regional for informed buyers.
It fails for most fast-moving consumer goods where the depth reads as underlit rather than premium.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Indigo cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the pairing is the canonical craft textile register — indigo thread on cream cotton, translated directly into editorial and packaging. With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the indigo grounds a royal-institutional palette, usable for cultural publishing and museum identity. With [Silk Rose](/colors/thaitone/silk-rose/), the combination shifts into a softer craft-fashion register used by contemporary Thai slow-fashion labels.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/jasmine.mdx
## What Jasmine is
**Thai Jasmine (ดอกมะลิ, *dok mali*) is the warm cream of jasmine flowers and Thai ceremonial decoration — a very pale yellow-cream at #f5efdc that sits between rice paper and pale buddha yellow on the Thai neutral register.** The reference is the petal of *Jasminum sambac*, the Thai jasmine species used in garlands and offerings.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry documents the color within the ceremonial register. It is warmer and slightly more saturated than Rice Paper, reading as ceremonial cream rather than craft-paper cream. The color sits close to premium paper stocks used for Thai wedding invitations and royal publication covers.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the strung jasmine garland (*phuang malai*) offered at temples, weddings, and as a Mother's Day tribute on 12 August.** These small white flowers, threaded on silk cord, are one of the most visible cultural objects in Thai daily life.
The color also appears on wedding invitation and funeral invitation stock, on Thai ceremonial napkin linen at royal dinners, on traditional Thai mattress ticking (*fuuk*) used at temple events, and on the outer layers of traditional Thai wedding dresses before saturation accents are added. Jasmine-colored candles are standard at Buddhist ordination ceremonies.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Jasmine signals Mother's Day, purity, and ceremonial respect — the flower itself is culturally layered, and the color carries its associations.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *dok mali* as the flower of Mother's Day, tied to Queen Sirikit's birthday.
The color carries no weekday association but strong ceremonial weight. It is appropriate for Mother's Day campaigns, wedding and ordination invitations, and premium cultural publishing. It avoids the clinical feeling of pure white while remaining clearly "ceremonial cream" rather than craft-paper cream.
## Using Jasmine in modern design
**Thai Jasmine works best for ceremonial publishing, luxury hospitality, and premium packaging aiming at warm elegance.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Wedding and ceremonial publishing** — jasmine stock for invitations and announcement cards; premium uncoated paper in this tone is the standard for Thai royal-register celebrations.
- **Luxury hospitality identity** — jasmine as brand ground with vermilion or crimson accent; warmer and more hospitality-coded than rice paper alone.
- **Premium Thai packaging for perfume, tea, and dessert** — jasmine background with gold foil or black typography; reads as ceremonial and refined.
It fails in contexts where bright or cool neutral is wanted — tech, sportswear, and modernist architecture publishing prefer rice paper or true white.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Jasmine cleanly.** With [Siamese Crimson](/colors/thaitone/siamese-crimson/), the combination is the court ceremonial palette — cream ground with deep red accent, used for state publications and formal hospitality. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the pairing sharpens jasmine into editorial register for premium cultural publishing and catalogue work. With [Royal Teal](/colors/thaitone/royal-teal/), the combination evokes bencharong porcelain with cream ground and peacock-green accent — elegant heritage positioning.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/lac-red.mdx
## What Lac Red is
**Thai Lac Red (ครั่ง, *khrang*) is the natural-dye brick red of Pu-Tai matmii silk and Isan textile tradition — a medium-saturation warm brown-red at #a83f3a that represents lac-dyed silk fixed with alum mordant.** The word *khrang* refers specifically to the resinous secretion of *Kerria lacca* scale insects harvested from host trees across Thailand.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry documents this as the alum-mordanted rather than iron-mordanted lac variant. Iron mordant produces the deeper Siamese Crimson; alum produces this lighter brick-red. The distinction matters because the same raw material yields two documented Thaitone colors depending on fixative.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is Pu-Tai and Lao-Thai silk *mat mi* (ikat) tube skirts from Khon Kaen, Roi Et, and Kalasin provinces.** These textiles use lac red as the warp color in combination with indigo weft to produce the complex tie-dyed patterns that Isan weavers are known for.
The color also appears on *pha sin tin chok* ceremonial skirts at lower saturation, on ceremonial monk cloth wrappers (*sabong*) in rural temples, and as the ground for Pu-Tai men's festival jackets. It is the historic alternative to imported red dyes and remains in use at natural-dye studios like Sakhon Nakhon's Mae Tang and at Ban Tha Sawang silk village in Surin.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Lac Red signals craft silk, Isan regional identity, and natural-dye heritage — a color without royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *khrang* as both the insect and the dye.
The color reads as Pu-Tai or Lao-Thai specifically in Thai regional terms. It is distinct from the more central-Thai court reds (Thai Vermilion and Siamese Crimson) and is understood by Thai designers as the rural natural-dye register. Craft-revival movements have elevated it into premium slow-fashion positioning.
## Using Lac Red in modern design
**Thai Lac Red works best for craft silk brands, heritage hospitality in Isan, and slow-fashion positioning.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Craft silk house and matmii brand identity** — lac red with indigo and cream; directly recreates the Pu-Tai textile palette on labels and lookbooks.
- **Heritage hospitality in northeastern Thailand** — lac red as dominant accent in Khon Kaen and Roi Et hotel branding; reads as Isan heritage without requiring literal textile references.
- **Natural-dye workshop and craft-tourism identity** — lac red with rice paper and hand-rendered type; signals artisanal authenticity.
It fails for premium luxury aiming at court-red register (use Siamese Crimson instead) and for mass-market consumer goods where the subtlety reads as muted.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Lac Red cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the standard craft-silk publishing palette — lac red print on cream stock for lookbooks and catalogues. With [Indigo](/colors/thaitone/indigo/), the pairing is the direct reconstruction of Pu-Tai matmii — the warp-weft color combination translated into brand identity. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the lac red shifts toward editorial formality for premium publishing and gallery catalogue work.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/lacquer-black.mdx
## What Lacquer Black is
**Thai Lacquer Black (รักดำ, *rak dam*) is the deep near-black of traditional Thai lacquerware — not pure black but a dense blue-biased very-dark tone at #0f1419 that carries a subtle warmth when applied in layered resin.** The base material is natural lacquer (*rak*) harvested from the *Gluta usitata* tree and applied in multiple thin coats, each dried and polished before the next.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone register documents it as the ceremonial black of gilded lacquerware rather than pure printing-ink black. The subtle blue bias comes from the way lacquer resin oxidises over decades. Designers targeting heritage register use this specific value instead of #000000 because it prints softer and sits better against cream and gold.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the black ground of *lai rod nam* gilded manuscript cabinets, particularly the set in the Bangkok National Museum and at Wat Suthat.** The technique uses black lacquer as the ground against which gold leaf stencilled imagery reads.
The color also appears on mother-of-pearl (*muk*) inlay furniture, on the black interior of temple shrine cabinets, on the deep-black sections of Rattanakosin-era royal palanquins, and on the standard matte finish of northern Thai celadon tea bowl bases. Contemporary Thai designers use it for premium packaging and editorial work.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Lacquer Black signals depth, craft, and traditional ceremonial material — it is not the color of mourning in Thai culture, which is white.** The absence of a mourning association is critical for designers, because Western assumptions about black-as-funerary do not transfer.
The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *rak dam* specifically as the lacquer ground rather than the color black in general (*dam* is the generic term). Because the color is tied to ceremonial craft objects, it reads as serious and high-register rather than neutral or ordinary.
## Using Lacquer Black in modern design
**Lacquer Black works across premium categories — hospitality, packaging, editorial, luxury retail.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Premium Thai packaging** — lacquer black field with gold or vermilion accent at 10–15%; the canonical formal Thai shelf register.
- **Luxury hospitality identity** — full-field black with cream typography; used across Aman and Rosewood properties in Thailand.
- **Cultural publishing and museum catalogues** — black ground for image reproduction; sits better than pure black because it carries the lacquer warmth of the source material.
It fails in contexts where lightness is the primary signal — children's products, supermarket-tier food where black reads as off-category, and wellness where cream grounds are preferred.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Lacquer Black cleanly.** With [Temple Gold](/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/), the combination is *lai rod nam* reconstructed — the highest heritage register, used at 90/10 for luxury packaging and hospitality. With [Thai Vermilion](/colors/thaitone/thai-vermilion/), the pairing is ceremonial and festive, used for cultural events, temple merchandise, and premium spice packaging. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is editorial and contemporary Thai — the highest-register neutral pair across publishing and identity.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/lotus-pink.mdx
## What Lotus Pink is
**Thai Lotus Pink (ชมพู, *chomphu*) is the festival and Tuesday-weekday pink of Loy Krathong and Thai celebration — a bright, slightly warm pink at #e86ca0 that reads as cheerful and celebratory rather than sweet.** The word *chomphu* covers pink in Thai generally and references the pink lotus (*Nelumbo nucifera*), the flower form most associated with Buddhist offering.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color at the crossover of festival and everyday categories. It is more saturated than pastel pink and carries slightly more blue than Western "hot pink," which keeps it in the celebratory rather than commercial register.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the pink lotus offered at temples and the pink silk blouses worn on Tuesdays in the *si prajam wan* system.** Pink lotus also dominates Loy Krathong imagery and the floating krathong baskets themselves in contemporary festival design.
The color appears on Thai festival garlands at weddings and Songkran, on the pink taxis of Bangkok (a direct continuation of the weekday color system applied to public vehicles), on Pink Lady and other Thai fruit branding, and on the Royal Rail Pink Line metro brand identity in Bangkok. Pink Chulalongkorn Hospital publications also use it in institutional contexts.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Lotus Pink signals festival, Tuesday, and celebration — a joyful color with light royal-institutional weight.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents pink as Tuesday's weekday color, historically tied to King Chulalongkorn's recovery from illness.
The color carries minor religious association through pink lotus offering but is not restricted. It is considered safe and friendly for most commercial use, and it sits close enough to international pink conventions that it translates to export markets without cultural mismatch. The pink taxi and pink hospital associations also give it a soft civic reading.
## Using Lotus Pink in modern design
**Lotus Pink works best for festival branding, children's and family products, and Thai cosmetics and fashion.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Festival and event identity** — Loy Krathong, Songkran variants, wedding markets; pink as 60–70% dominant color with rice paper or cream accents.
- **Family FMCG and Thai dessert brands** — pink packaging for coconut-based desserts, Thai snacks, and fruit candy; reads as celebratory and Thai-native.
- **Cosmetics and fashion for the Thai and ASEAN market** — pink label systems with lacquer black typography; stays sophisticated rather than childish.
It fails for serious tech, finance, and state-institutional work where the register reads too celebratory.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Lotus Pink cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination reads as soft Thai editorial — suitable for wedding, dessert, and cosmetics publishing. With [Royal Teal](/colors/thaitone/royal-teal/), the contrast is the canonical bencharong porcelain palette that used pink and green together on royal tableware. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the pink sharpens into contemporary Thai streetwear and beauty packaging where the contrast keeps the color adult.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/mangosteen.mdx
## What Mangosteen is
**Thai Mangosteen (มังคุด, *mangkhut*) is the deep red-purple of mangosteen rind — a dark, slightly brown-biased wine-purple at #5a2333 that sits between Royal Purple and Siamese Crimson on the Thaitone register.** The reference is the thick outer skin of *Garcinia mangostana*, the fruit known as "queen of fruits" in Thai and Lao tradition.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the nature (*thammachat*) category. It reads darker than most contemporary purples and carries enough red to read as wine or oxblood rather than overtly violet. The natural dye extracted from the rind produces variable shades depending on fermentation time and mordant.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the dried and ground mangosteen rind used as a natural dye across rural Thai and Lao silk weaving, particularly in Prachin Buri and Chanthaburi provinces where the fruit is cultivated.** The same rind is used in traditional Thai medicine for skin treatments.
The color appears on natural-dyed *pha sin* wrap skirts at ceremonial depth, on handmade paper treated with fruit-rind pigment, on Thai traditional medicine packaging, and on the deeper register of lac-and-mangosteen combination dye textiles. It is also a signature color for Thai mangosteen export packaging aimed at premium fruit retail in East Asia.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Mangosteen signals rural abundance, traditional medicine, and natural-dye craft — a quiet, non-royal purple-red with nature associations.** The fruit itself carries cultural weight as the counterpart to durian in Thai folk classification and as a traditional gift fruit.
The color carries no weekday restriction and is not a court color. It reads as rural craft and natural heritage, distinct from Royal Purple's institutional register. Its use in contemporary design has grown alongside the Thai natural-dye and slow-fashion movements.
## Using Mangosteen in modern design
**Thai Mangosteen works best for craft silk, natural cosmetics, and Thai fruit and food export packaging.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Natural cosmetics and skincare brand identity** — mangosteen with cream typography and minimal gold; references traditional Thai medicinal heritage.
- **Premium Thai fruit and food export packaging** — mangosteen color with hand-lettered type; reads as authentically Thai and exotic at international retail.
- **Craft silk and natural-dye textile brand** — mangosteen as dominant color with rice paper; signals the natural-dye tradition directly to craft-conscious buyers.
It fails for fintech and tech where the depth reads as too warm, and for children's categories where the depth is off-register.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Mangosteen cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the natural-dye publishing register — deep fruit-purple on cream stock, used by craft silk and natural cosmetics brands. With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the pairing lifts mangosteen toward ceremonial elegance suitable for premium publishing and gift packaging. With [Silk Rose](/colors/thaitone/silk-rose/), the combination is the craft-silk register of the same dye process at different concentrations — a direct textile reference for fashion and cosmetics.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/pandan.mdx
## What Pandan is
**Thai Pandan (เขียวใบเตย, *khiao bai toei*) is the fresh grass-green of pandan leaf — a mid-saturation slightly blue-biased green at #387d42 that sits between Banana Leaf and a deeper forest green on the Thaitone register.** The reference is the juice extracted from *Pandanus amaryllifolius* leaves, used as both flavoring and natural green coloring in Thai dessert preparation.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the nature (*thammachat*) and everyday (*wisai*) crossover category. It reads cooler than Banana Leaf green, reflecting the specific chlorophyll extraction produced by crushing and straining pandan leaves. The color registers as clean, fresh, and food-linked.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is Thai dessert color — *kanom chan* layered pudding, *lot chong* coconut noodles, and pandan-infused sticky rice preparations.** The color describes pandan leaf juice itself, not the darker green of the intact leaf.
It appears on traditional Thai dessert packaging at markets, on signage for Thai bakeries specialising in *kanom*, on the green register of woven *bai si* offering structures at lower saturation, and on the natural-dye cotton of some Karen and northern Thai village textile work that uses pandan combined with other plant sources. The color is widely used in contemporary Thai specialty food branding.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Pandan signals fresh food, dessert, and Thai culinary tradition — a warm, welcoming green without royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *bai toei* as the botanical term, with *khiao bai toei* emerging as the color descriptor in the 20th century.
The color carries no weekday coding but strong food-culture association. Pandan is one of the most immediately recognisable Thai food flavours globally, and the color communicates that cultural coding at shelf. It is considered safe across commercial categories that benefit from food and freshness signalling.
## Using Pandan in modern design
**Thai Pandan works best for Thai dessert brands, specialty food and beverage, and wellness positioning aiming at natural freshness.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Thai dessert and bakery brand identity** — pandan at 70–80% field with cream and hand-rendered type; reads as authentic and natural to both Thai and export markets.
- **Specialty food — tea, coconut milk, Thai curry export** — pandan as label accent with black typography; sits between authenticity and international premium.
- **Wellness and natural beauty branding** — pandan with rice paper and gold accent; clean, natural, and food-adjacent rather than clinical.
It fails for tech, finance, and premium hospitality where the food register is off-message.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Pandan cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the canonical Thai food publishing palette — pandan print on cream stock, used across Thai specialty food and cookbook publishing. With [Thai Vermilion](/colors/thaitone/thai-vermilion/), the pairing evokes temple festival offerings where green leaf and vermilion ceremonial cloth appear together. With [Jasmine](/colors/thaitone/jasmine/), the pandan reads as specialty dessert packaging and bakery identity, warm enough to stay appetising.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/porcelain-blue.mdx
## What Porcelain Blue is
**Thai Porcelain Blue (บัวปวง, *bua puang*) is the deep cobalt underglaze blue of Sino-Thai royal ceramic and lotus-pond painting — a medium-saturation, slightly green-biased blue at #2e5b7f that comes from cobalt-oxide pigment fired on white porcelain.** The Thai name references the lotus-pond blue of temple pond painting rather than the pigment directly.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color in the royal-ceremonial crossover register. It sits darker than Delft blue and cooler than Portuguese azulejo blue, closer to Ming-period Chinese cobalt. Because the pigment was imported rather than native, the color carries a specific Sino-Thai aesthetic heritage rather than pure Thai craft positioning.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the blue outline and underglaze work on bencharong and *lai nam thong* ware commissioned by the Siamese court from Chinese kilns in the 18th and 19th centuries.** The Bangkok National Museum and the Jim Thompson House collection hold significant examples.
The color also appears on temple mural backgrounds for lotus pond and celestial scenes, particularly at Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Bowonniwet. Chinese-style blue-and-white ceramic from Thai kilns at Koh Kret and the Sino-Thai shophouse tile decoration of Bangkok's Chinatown and Phuket's old town use variants of this hue.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Porcelain Blue signals Sino-Thai aesthetic heritage, royal commissioning, and water or sky references in temple art.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *bua puang* as a descriptive color term for the blue of lotus ponds.
The color carries no restrictive religious or royal rules in contemporary use. It reads as sophisticated and heritage-leaning rather than overtly tropical. It sits adjacent to the Rattanakosin court palette without being restricted to it, which makes it safe for premium commercial application.
## Using Porcelain Blue in modern design
**Porcelain Blue works best for heritage ceramics, Chinese-Thai hospitality, and premium packaging aiming at Ming-era cross-cultural references.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Bencharong revival ceramics and tableware** — full blue outline on cream or white ground; recreates the historic ware for contemporary collectors.
- **Phuket and Bangkok heritage hospitality** — porcelain blue shophouse-tile accent in Sino-Thai hotels; reads as Peranakan-adjacent cultural sophistication.
- **Premium ceramic gin, perfume, or homeware** — cobalt-blue label with gold accents; sits close to international luxury conventions while coding Thai heritage.
It fails for streetwear, casual FMCG, and categories where a lighter, brighter blue is expected.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Porcelain Blue cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is blue-and-white porcelain translated into print — the standard heritage publishing register. With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the pairing reconstructs *lai nam thong* gilded porcelain, used at 85/15 for ceremonial publishing and luxury packaging. With [Lotus Pink](/colors/thaitone/lotus-pink/), the combination draws on bencharong's five-color palette where blue outlines enclose pink lotus motifs — a directly historical pairing.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/rice-paper.mdx
## What Rice Paper is
**Thai Rice Paper (กระดาษสา, *kradat sa*) is the soft warm cream of traditional handmade *sa* paper and Thai manuscript pages — a low-saturation, slightly yellow-biased off-white at #fbf8f1 that reads as natural and warm rather than clinical.** The substrate is paper mulberry (*Broussonetia papyrifera*) bark pulp rather than true rice — the English name is a misnomer.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the everyday craft (*wisai*) register. It sits warmer than printing-paper white and lighter than Jasmine, occupying a specific slot in the Thai neutral register as craft-cream. On screen it reads as very light ivory.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the handmade *sa* paper used for palm-leaf manuscripts and Thai traditional umbrellas in Bor Sang village, Chiang Mai.** The color describes the base substrate of northern Thai manuscript, umbrella, and lantern production.
The color also appears on the unglazed portion of Sangkhalok ceramic, on raw silk before dyeing, on Thai wedding invitations and temple merit-ceremony cards, and as the default stock for premium Thai editorial publishing. Bor Sang umbrellas are often left in the natural sa-paper color before painting decoration.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Rice Paper signals craft, calm, and traditional manuscript material — a neutral register appropriate for almost all Thai cultural contexts.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *kradat sa* specifically as the handmade paper, distinct from *kradat khao* (white paper) which refers to machine-made stock.
The color carries no weekday or religious restriction. It is considered the default "Thai neutral" — where Western design defaults to pure white, Thai heritage design defaults to rice paper. It is appropriate for all categories and pairs with essentially every other Thaitone color.
## Using Rice Paper in modern design
**Rice Paper works as the default neutral across Thai heritage design — hospitality, publishing, packaging, wellness.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Thai editorial and cultural publishing** — rice paper ground across books, magazines, catalogues; warmer and more readable than pure white on uncoated stock.
- **Premium Thai hospitality identity** — rice paper as brand background with single accent color; used by Aman, Rosewood, and Capella Thai properties.
- **Heritage food and wellness packaging** — rice paper substrate with hand-rendered type; reads as natural, crafted, and Thai.
It fails only in contexts that require high-contrast brightness — sports brands, tech aimed at energy register, and any category where "pure white" is a specific signal.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Rice Paper cleanly.** With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the combination is the default Thai editorial palette — the highest-register neutral pair in the Thaitone system. With [Thai Vermilion](/colors/thaitone/thai-vermilion/), the pairing is canonical festive Thai — cream ground with vermilion accent type for publishing and packaging. With [Indigo](/colors/thaitone/indigo/), the combination is the standard craft-textile register, directly evoking indigo thread on handwoven cotton.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/royal-gold.mdx
## What Royal Gold is
**Royal Gold (ทองคำเปลว, *thong kham plio*) is the bright, fresh gold-leaf yellow of Thai royal regalia — a highly saturated, slightly green-gold yellow at #e8b841 that represents newly applied 23-karat gold leaf rather than aged temple gold.** The name *thong kham plio* translates literally as "gold leaf," the material unit that gilders apply in layered squares to regalia, manuscripts, and Buddha images.
The color carries higher saturation and lower red bias than Temple Gold. It corresponds closely to Monday's yellow on the Thai weekday color (*si prajam wan*) system, which is the specific yellow worn across Thailand on royal birthdays and ceremonial occasions tied to the monarchy.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the gilt surfaces of royal regalia — the Great Crown of Victory, royal palanquins, and freshly gilded royal barges during the decennial processions.** Unlike Temple Gold, which represents patina, Royal Gold describes gilding as it looks when first applied and polished.
It appears on newly restored Buddha images, Royal Thai Household state presentation items, fresh palm-leaf manuscript bindings at the National Library, and the tukka covers on *nangsue samut khoi* accordion-fold manuscripts. The yellow ceremonial shirts worn on royal birthdays sit very close to this hue.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Royal Gold signals monarchy, Monday, and ceremonial respect — it is the single most politically loaded color in the Thai palette.** Pittayamatee classed it inside the royal Thaitone register. The Royal Institute Dictionary documents yellow as Monday's weekday color, tied to King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX).
During the late King's reign and particularly in the 2000s, yellow became a public identifier worn en masse on his birthday. The color therefore carries active political and monarchic weight beyond its decorative function. It is inappropriate for casual appropriation in commercial branding and is avoided in contexts that might read as mockery of royalty.
## Using Royal Gold in modern design
**Royal Gold works best for luxury hospitality, formal cultural publishing, and state-adjacent identity — with caution.** Three briefs:
- **Ultra-premium hospitality and heritage identity** — 10–15% gold with deep crimson or indigo; signals Bangkok luxury without requiring metallic foil.
- **Commemorative publishing and cultural catalogues** — gold on lacquer black at 8–10% is the standard treatment for royal and state publications.
- **Monday-themed editorial or fashion** — weekday color palette content, cultural calendar design, seasonal campaigns tied to Thai festivals.
It fails for any casual or irreverent brand, children's categories, and contexts where royal association would be inappropriate.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Royal Gold cleanly.** With [Siamese Crimson](/colors/thaitone/siamese-crimson/), the pairing is the direct court palette, used for formal catalogues and ceremonial identity. With [Indigo](/colors/thaitone/indigo/), the contrast shifts toward editorial and cultural publishing, pairing Monday yellow with night sky. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the gold sits as a thin accent on deep ground — the standard treatment for premium Thai packaging and heritage hospitality.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/royal-purple.mdx
## What Royal Purple is
**Thai Royal Purple (ม่วง, *muang*) is the deep violet of Saturday weekday color and mangosteen-dye royal textile — a rich, blue-leaning purple at #5c2a83 that reads as the most formal of the Thai weekday hues.** The word *muang* refers both to the color and to the mangosteen fruit, whose skin was historically used as a natural purple dye source.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the royal (*หลวง*) register. It is more saturated and darker than lavender and carries a distinct blue bias rather than the red bias of fashion magenta. The color also appears on Princess Sirindhorn's institutional colors — she was born on Saturday.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is Saturday weekday dress in the *si prajam wan* system — purple is the color worn on Saturdays in the traditional astrological weekday palette.** It appears on the Saturday robe of Buddha images in temples that display the full seven-robe cycle.
Mangosteen-skin dye is documented on northern Thai cotton and silk for restricted ceremonial use. The color is also the institutional color of Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, which means purple merchandise, banners, and publications from royal-patronage foundations — particularly Chaipattana and SUPPORT — use this register.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Royal Purple signals Saturday, Princess Sirindhorn, and ceremonial formality.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *muang* as the weekday color of Saturday. People born on Saturday wear purple on their birthdays, and temples display a purple-robed Buddha image on the Saturday altar.
Because of Princess Sirindhorn's association, purple carries active royal-institutional weight in contemporary Thailand. Purple ribbons and banners often mark her birthday on 2 April. The color is considered respectful to use in cultural and educational contexts and is common in royal-patronage product lines.
## Using Royal Purple in modern design
**Royal Purple works best for royal-patronage institutions, premium cosmetics, and Thai dessert and fruit brands.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Royal foundation and institutional identity** — Chaipattana-style branding uses purple at 80–90% with thin gold rules; the color codes as Princess Sirindhorn's institutional patronage.
- **Premium Thai fruit and dessert packaging** — purple field with mangosteen iconography; reads as native Thai fruit at export retail.
- **Luxury cosmetics and perfume for the Thai and regional market** — purple with rice paper and rose accents; the hue sits premium without falling into generic violet.
It fails for male-targeted streetwear and tech where purple reads off-register, and for casual food where it codes as unusually formal.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Royal Purple cleanly.** With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the combination is the canonical institutional palette — purple and gold is the directly referenced royal pairing. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the purple softens into editorial elegance suitable for publishing and invitation work. With [Buddha Yellow](/colors/thaitone/buddha-yellow/), the pairing reads as Saturday-paired-with-Monday, used in weekday-color cultural editorial and Thai calendar design.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/royal-teal.mdx
## What Royal Teal is
**Royal Teal (เขียวนกยูง, *khiao nok yung*) is the deep peacock green-blue of Thai royal regalia and Rattanakosin court textiles — a saturated, cool blue-green at #1f5f5b that reads as both formal and distinctly Southeast Asian.** The Thai name translates literally as "peacock green," referring specifically to the dark green-blue of the peacock's neck, which appears on royal fan handles and architectural tile in Bangkok palaces.
The color is darker and cooler than Western "teal" digital defaults. Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places it at HSL 176, 51, 25. Its register is royal rather than natural — this is not the green of rice fields but of enamelled porcelain and silk brocade.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the peacock-green ground of *bencharong* royal porcelain — five-colour enamel ware commissioned by the Siamese court from Jingdezhen kilns in the 18th and 19th centuries.** The same hue appears on royal fan lacquer, court textile backgrounds in *pha yok* brocade, and architectural glazed tile on the roofs of the Grand Palace complex.
It is the standard ground for the collar and cuff panels on Chakri-court uniform jackets and for royal umbrella linings. Peacock-feather motifs in temple mural painting use this exact green-blue as the dominant eye color.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Royal Teal signals royalty, sophistication, and Sino-Thai aesthetic heritage — a color distinctly associated with court objects rather than everyday use.** The peacock itself is a royal attribute across Southeast Asian monarchies, and its specific green-blue translates into Thai textiles and ceramics as Siamese court color.
The color carries less weekday association than Royal Gold or Saffron but stronger Sino-Thai crossover reading. It signals that an object was commissioned or used within court circles. In contemporary Thai graphic design it is read as heritage-sophisticated rather than tropical.
## Using Royal Teal in modern design
**Royal Teal works best for premium hospitality, heritage ceramics and crafts, and luxury packaging aiming at Sino-Thai heritage.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Boutique hotel identity in Bangkok or Phuket** — 70–80% teal with gold typography; reads as royal heritage without being heavy-handed.
- **Bencharong-inspired ceramic and tableware brands** — full-field teal with cream and gold accents at 5–10% each; directly references the historic palette.
- **Premium gin, tea, and perfume packaging** — teal glass or teal-on-cream label systems; the cool green-blue carries luxury and sophistication.
It fails for casual food, children's brands, and wellness where lighter greens are preferred.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Royal Teal cleanly.** With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the combination reconstructs bencharong porcelain — the historic Sino-Thai court palette, kept to 85/15. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the teal reads as Ming-inflected Thai editorial — suitable for catalogues, menus, and long-form publishing. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the teal reads as deeper and more jewel-like, appropriate for perfume, spirits, and luxury accessory branding.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/saffron.mdx
## What Saffron is
**Saffron (เหลือง, *lueang*) is the warm orange-yellow of Theravada monastic robes and turmeric dye — a saturated, slightly orange-biased yellow at #e59518 that is the single most recognisable color in Thai public space.** In Thai, *lueang* is simply "yellow" and covers the full range from this monastic orange-yellow through to the brighter Royal Gold.
The dye is not true Crocus saffron but jackfruit heartwood (*khanun*), sometimes combined with turmeric. Pittayamatee placed the canonical monastic robe hue at CMYK 0/35/90/10. It carries more red than Western "saffron" spice names would suggest and reads as orange-biased yellow on screen.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the monastic robe (*chiwon*) of Thai Theravada Buddhist monks from city-tradition monasteries.** An estimated 250,000 monks in Thailand wear some shade of this hue daily, making it the most-seen traditional color in the country.
It appears on robe bundles at monastic supply shops on Bamrung Muang Road in Bangkok, on bowls of offered *khao klong* rice, and on the candlewax used in ordination ceremonies. Festival flags for Buddhist Lent (*Khao Phansa*) are often saffron. Turmeric-dyed cotton wrappers for herbal medicine and food products in the North and Isan use the same register.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Saffron signals Buddhism, monasticism, and religious offering — it is a functionally sacred color with strict social rules around its use.** The color is specifically associated with clergy. Laypeople avoid wearing full-field robe-saffron clothing to prevent confusion with ordained monks.
The color has secondary association with Monday yellow and royal birthdays, but monastic use is the primary cultural anchor. The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *lueang* as the common word for yellow and as the color of Theravada robes. For graphic designers, using it at robe-saturation for commercial purposes is socially loaded and usually avoided.
## Using Saffron in modern design
**Saffron works best for food, spice, and heritage merchandise where the warmth reads as appetising rather than religious.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Premium Thai spice and food packaging** — 60–80% saffron field with black typography; the hue reads as authentically Thai and strongly appetising on shelf.
- **Heritage textile and craft branding** — turmeric-dyed cotton brands, natural dye studios, craft market identity; saffron signals handmade and regional.
- **Festival and temple event identity** — Khao Phansa, Loy Krathong variants, Buddhist cultural events; used at full saturation with respectful typography.
It fails for tech, finance, and wellness brands aiming for calm — too warm and too religiously marked.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Saffron cleanly.** With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the contrast is sharp and reads as premium Thai food; the standard treatment for spice and craft packaging. With [Thai Vermilion](/colors/thaitone/thai-vermilion/), the combination is the canonical temple palette, used at roughly 60/40 for festival identity and Buddhist publishing. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the saffron softens into editorial warmth for long-form publishing on uncoated stock.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/siamese-crimson.mdx
## What Siamese Crimson is
**Siamese Crimson (แดงสยาม, *daeng sayam*) is the deep blue-red of royal silk and Rattanakosin ceremonial regalia — a cool, wine-leaning red at #8a1538 that reads formal and aristocratic rather than festive.** The traditional dye is *khrang* (lac resin from *Kerria lacca*) fixed with iron mordant, producing a darker, cooler red than alum-fixed lac on northern silk.
The hue sits close to modern wine or Bordeaux reds but with slightly less brown and more violet. Pittayamatee documented it within the royal (*หลวง*) Thaitone category. It is distinct from Thai Vermilion, which is warmer and orange-leaning; Siamese Crimson is the cooler, more sober register of Thai red.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is Rattanakosin court silk — particularly the *pha nung* and *sabai* worn by royal attendants in official portraits from the reigns of Rama IV through Rama VII.** The color appears on court jackets, royal umbrella (*chat*) fringes, and the silk-bound covers of royal funeral books (*nangsue ngan phra ratcha phithi*).
It is standard on the upper register of *pha yok* brocade woven in Lamphun and in the velvet-ground *pha khrap*. The color also appears in the dressed interiors of royal barges and in the bindings of Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts (*bai lan*) from royal temples.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Siamese Crimson reads as royal, formal, and ceremonial — a color reserved for court contexts rather than everyday use.** Pittayamatee classed it with the royal palette, and the Royal Institute Dictionary notes *khrang* dye as one of the regulated traditional pigments historically tied to court textile workshops.
The color carries weekday association with Sunday in reduced form, though brighter reds are more common for that purpose. It is the correct register for formal mourning of a monarch (historically combined with white), though not for private mourning. Its use outside royal or state contexts was, until the twentieth century, considered overreach.
## Using Siamese Crimson in modern design
**Siamese Crimson works best for luxury wine, heritage silk brands, and formal cultural institution identity.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Premium Thai silk house branding** — 70–90% crimson with gold foil stamping evokes royal court textile heritage on packaging and lookbooks.
- **Luxury wine and spirits** — deep crimson labels with off-white typography; the hue photographs as serious rather than loud.
- **State cultural identity** — museum catalogues, royal exhibition identity, Thai embassy cultural programming; pair with jasmine off-white and thin gold rules.
It fails for wellness, kids' categories, and casual food — too formal, too cold.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Siamese Crimson cleanly.** With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the combination is the canonical court palette, kept to a 90/10 split with gold used only for type or thin rules. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the contrast sharpens into editorial formality — suitable for premium publishing and catalogue work. With [Jasmine](/colors/thaitone/jasmine/), the crimson softens against a warm off-white ground, which keeps it readable in long-form layouts and on uncoated stock.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/silk-rose.mdx
## What Silk Rose is
**Thai Silk Rose (ชมพูไหม, *chomphu mai*) is the soft dusty pink of natural-dye Thai silk — a low-saturation, warm peachy-pink at #dfb5a0 that represents sappanwood decoction on raw silk.** The color sits in the muted register of heritage Thai textile dyes rather than the bright festival pink of Lotus Pink.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry documents this as a craft-silk color category. Sappanwood (*fang*) produces shades from soft peach through rose and deeper red depending on mordant. This particular tone is the alum-mordant short-dip result common in Surin and Chiang Mai silk villages.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is *mat mi* silk weft thread from Surin and Buriram weaving villages, and the dusty-pink register of *pha yok* brocade at lower saturation.** The color shows on contemporary Queen Sirikit Institute silk specifications.
It appears on Thai ceremonial napkins and table linens at royal dinners, on lining silk in Chakri-era court jackets, on hand-woven cotton at lower saturation in Sakon Nakhon village production, and on the embroidered flower motifs of *pha chok* decorative strip borders. The Jim Thompson Thai Silk brand uses silk rose as a signature seasonal color across product lines.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Silk Rose signals natural-dye craft, soft femininity, and heritage silk quality — a quiet, premium register without royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *chomphu* as the base color term with *mai* adding the silk-specific reading.
The color is considered safe across commercial use and is particularly strong for wellness, cosmetics, and fashion aimed at the Thai and regional female market. It is adjacent enough to the Jim Thompson commercial palette to read as sophisticated Thai heritage and far enough from Lotus Pink to avoid festival or children's category confusion.
## Using Silk Rose in modern design
**Thai Silk Rose works best for silk and fashion retail, cosmetics, and boutique hospitality aiming at feminine sophistication.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Thai silk brand identity and lookbook design** — silk rose as 30–50% accent with cream and teak; reads as natural-dye premium silk to both Thai and export markets.
- **Cosmetics and beauty packaging for the ASEAN market** — full-field rose with black typography; sits sophisticated and Thai-coded simultaneously.
- **Spa, retreat, and wellness identity** — silk rose with rice paper and celadon; calm, feminine register without becoming generic spa-beige.
It fails for technology, sports, and any category where a brighter or more saturated color is expected.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Silk Rose cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the default craft-silk publishing palette — rose accent on cream editorial ground. With [Indigo](/colors/thaitone/indigo/), the contrast evokes indigo-and-rose natural-dye textile pairings used across contemporary Thai slow-fashion labels. With [Teak](/colors/thaitone/teak/), the pairing reads as Lanna craft interior — silk cushion on teak wood — suitable for boutique hotels and heritage homeware.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/storm-grey.mdx
## What Storm Grey is
**Thai Storm Grey (เทาพายุ, *thao phayu*) is the cool blue-grey of Thai monsoon skies — a dark, blue-biased neutral at #474c55 that reads as sky-at-rain-approach rather than industrial cool-grey.** The reference is the overcast sky preceding afternoon monsoon rains between May and October across mainland Thailand.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the nature (*thammachat*) category. It sits cooler than Elephant Grey and carries more blue, giving it closer affinity to Indigo when darkened and to slate when lightened. On screen it reads as contemporary editorial neutral.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is Thai temple mural sky in scenes depicting the naga serpent, monsoon storm, and flood narratives from Buddhist and local mythology.** Temple painters across Bangkok, Ayutthaya, and Chiang Mai use this specific register for storm and night-sky backgrounds.
The color also appears on Thai traditional mourning umbrellas at royal funerals (used with white as the primary mourning register), on the grey stone of Khmer-era prasats visible at Phimai and Prasat Hin Phanom Rung, on Ban Chiang reduction-fired black-grey pottery, and on the underside of working elephant saddle cloth.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Storm Grey signals monsoon nature, the passage of time, and contemporary editorial neutrality — a color without major royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *thao* as the general grey term with *phayu* (storm) as the descriptive modifier.
The color reads as modern-natural rather than heritage-specific in Thai design contexts. It is adjacent to the mourning palette at royal funerals but not fully coded to mourning (which is white with black and occasionally deep purple). Contemporary Thai designers use it as a safe dark neutral alternative to black for editorial work.
## Using Storm Grey in modern design
**Thai Storm Grey works best for editorial and magazine design, contemporary Thai fashion, and tech and fintech aiming at sophisticated neutrality.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Editorial and cultural magazine design** — storm grey as dominant dark with cream body text; sits softer and more readable than black-on-white.
- **Contemporary Thai fashion and accessories** — grey as base palette with a single accent color such as silk rose or champa; reads as modern Thai rather than generic minimalism.
- **Thai tech and fintech brand identity** — storm grey with indigo and cream; the slight blue cast signals trust and contemporary positioning while staying culturally neutral.
It fails for traditional heritage hospitality (too contemporary-reading) and for children's categories (too serious).
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Storm Grey cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the contemporary editorial register — cool grey on warm cream, used across Thai magazines and cultural publishing. With [Royal Gold](/colors/thaitone/royal-gold/), the pairing lifts storm grey into ceremonial register suitable for premium packaging and invitation work. With [Silk Rose](/colors/thaitone/silk-rose/), the contrast reads as contemporary Thai fashion — grey base with soft rose accent — used across Thai boutique fashion labels and wellness branding.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/teak.mdx
## What Teak is
**Thai Teak (สัก, *sak*) is the warm medium brown of aged teak wood used in northern Thai architecture — a mid-saturation, slightly red-biased brown at #7a5c3e that represents wood that has weathered indoor for several decades rather than freshly milled or dark-stained teak.** The reference is the interior beams and floorboards of Lanna-style houses in Chiang Mai, Lampang, and Phrae.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the everyday (*wisai*) category. It sits lighter than stained walnut and darker than fresh teak, reflecting the specific tone that Lanna domestic interiors take on after long exposure to incense, candle smoke, and filtered light through wooden shutters.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the interior wood of traditional Lanna teak houses — particularly Wiang Kum Kam, the restored Lanna-period village near Chiang Mai, and the teak structures at the Ancient City outdoor museum.** The color describes floorboards, structural posts, and wall panels that have aged indoors.
It appears on traditional Thai furniture (chairs, tables, cabinets), on temple scripture cabinets before gilding, on Chinese-Thai shophouse second-floor balconies, and on the dashboard panels and railings of traditional Thai river longtail boats. It is also the stock finish for contemporary reproduction Lanna furniture at Chiang Mai craft studios.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Teak signals Lanna and northern Thai identity, rural craft, and generational continuity — a warm, grounded color carrying no royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *sak* as both the tree species and the color.
The color is distinctly northern rather than central in Thai regional reading. A teak interior signals Lanna heritage design, as distinct from the lacquered black-and-gold of Bangkok Rattanakosin interiors. It carries conservation weight — since the 1989 logging ban, visible old-growth teak in architecture is a marker of age and authenticity.
## Using Teak in modern design
**Thai Teak works best for Chiang Mai hospitality, craft furniture retail, and heritage tourism branding.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Lanna-style boutique hotel identity** — teak as 40–60% dominant brand color paired with celadon and rice paper; reconstructs the traditional northern interior palette in print and digital.
- **Craft furniture and homeware retail** — teak with black typography; signals hardwood authenticity and northern Thai origin.
- **Heritage tourism and cultural publishing** — teak grounds for maps, guidebooks, and museum materials about Lanna architecture and culture.
It fails for tech and fintech (too rustic) and for fast-food or casual FMCG (too premium-craft).
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Teak cleanly.** With [Celadon](/colors/thaitone/celadon/), the pairing reconstructs the northern Thai interior palette — celadon ceramic on teak wood surfaces, used across Chiang Mai hospitality. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the default craft-publishing register — teak typography on cream stock for catalogues and editorial. With [Indigo](/colors/thaitone/indigo/), the pairing evokes traditional Lanna interiors — teak furniture with indigo-dyed textile upholstery and cushions.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/temple-gold.mdx
## What Temple Gold is
**Temple Gold (ทองวัด, *thong wat*) is the warm, slightly aged gold of Thai temple gilding and lacquerware — a softer, more ochre-biased yellow-gold at #c9a45c that represents gold leaf seen through age, incense patina, and tropical humidity rather than mint-bright metal.** It is distinct from Royal Gold (*thong kham plio*), which represents the brighter, more saturated appearance of freshly gilded surfaces.
The hue is what designers approximate when representing Thai temple interiors in print — the visual memory of old gold, not spec-sheet metallic. Pittayamatee's Thaitone sampling placed it at CMYK 0/18/54/21. It sits between orange and yellow on the color wheel and reads warm without tipping into brown.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the aged gold leaf on bot and viharn exteriors at Wat Phra Kaew, Wat Arun, and Wat Benchamabophit.** The color describes what 200-year-old gold looks like under glass, not what new gold looks like on the leaf sheet.
It appears on *lai rod nam* gilded-and-black lacquerware, gilt-on-red manuscript cabinets in the Bangkok National Museum, *lai kanok* decorative carving on temple doors and window frames, and the gilt surfaces of Buddha images after decades of incense exposure. Mother-of-pearl inlay pieces (*muk*) often sit on a field of this aged-gold hue.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Temple Gold signals religious merit, age, and continuity — it reads as reverent rather than flashy.** Royal Institute Dictionary entries for *thong wat* and *thong kham plio* draw the distinction between temple-aged gold and freshly prepared gold leaf, and Thai design practice follows the same split.
The color carries Friday association when reduced toward yellow, though saffron is the more common Friday color. It is appropriate for religious merchandise, temple-adjacent brands, and heritage publishing. Because it reads as patina rather than wealth, it avoids the nouveau-riche connotations that bright metallic gold can carry in Thai contexts.
## Using Temple Gold in modern design
**Temple Gold works best for heritage hospitality, religious publishing, and premium Thai packaging that wants age rather than shine.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Boutique Thai hotel identity** — 10–20% temple gold on a lacquer-black or off-white field; reads as heritage luxury without the shout of metallic foil.
- **Buddhist publishing and merchandise** — temple gold typography on cream stock, printed as a flat CMYK build rather than foil.
- **Premium rice, tea, or herbal brand packaging** — temple gold accent on kraft or cream, signalling age and craft over industrial finish.
It fails for tech, fintech, and wellness — too warm, too associated with religion.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Temple Gold cleanly.** With [Thai Vermilion](/colors/thaitone/thai-vermilion/), the combination rebuilds the gilded-lacquer canon — use 90% vermilion to 10% gold for authenticity. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the contrast gives editorial weight and is the standard treatment for Thai cultural catalogues and formal packaging. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the gold softens into a warm editorial register suitable for long-form publishing on uncoated stock.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/terracotta.mdx
## What Terracotta is
**Thai Terracotta (ดินเผา, *din phao*) is the warm earth-orange of fired clay pots and traditional brick architecture — a mid-saturation orange-brown at #c86b3c that reads as rural, warm, and materially honest.** The Thai name translates literally as "burned earth," referring to both the firing process and the color.
Pittayamatee's Thaitone entry places the color within the everyday (*wisai*) category. It sits warmer than brick red and lighter than Mexican terracotta, with less brown than typical Italian terracotta, reflecting the iron content of Thai clay deposits in Ratchaburi, Nonthaburi, and Mae Sot.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the large water pot (*ong*) found outside Thai homes and at temple entrances, produced in Ratchaburi's Dragon Kiln (*tao mangkon*) studios and similar regional kilns.** These pots have been in continuous production for over a century at the same sites.
The color appears on roof tile of vernacular Thai-Chinese shophouses in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Phuket, on traditional Sukhothai brick stupas (now partially weathered), on the clay candleholders for temple offering, and on the natural-dye cotton used for some Karen and hill-tribe textile work in northern Thailand.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Thai Terracotta signals rural craft, warmth, and everyday material life — a color without royal or religious restriction.** The Royal Institute Dictionary documents *din phao* as both the ceramic material and the color.
The color reads as authentic and handmade in Thai design contexts. It is safe across commercial categories and carries no weekday coding. Contemporary Thai design has used terracotta heavily since the 2015 craft revival, both in interior work and in packaging aimed at artisanal positioning.
## Using Terracotta in modern design
**Thai Terracotta works best for craft retail, boutique hospitality, and food and beverage brands aiming at artisanal authenticity.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Artisanal Thai food and beverage packaging** — terracotta at 50–70% field with black typography; reads as craft-batch and hand-produced for specialty coffee, palm sugar, and fermented products.
- **Boutique hospitality in northern Thailand and Hua Hin** — terracotta wall and textile palette with banana leaf and teak; directly references vernacular Thai architecture.
- **Craft ceramics and homeware retail** — terracotta as dominant brand color with rice paper accents; evokes the Ratchaburi and Mae Sot kiln traditions.
It fails for tech and fintech where the earth register is off-message, and for luxury where the warmth reads as too rustic.
## Complementary colors
**Three pairings carry Terracotta cleanly.** With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), the combination is the standard craft-packaging register — terracotta ink on cream stock, used across Thai specialty food and beverage. With [Banana Leaf](/colors/thaitone/banana-leaf/), the pairing reconstructs traditional Thai market displays — terracotta pots with green leaf wrapping — for food retail and kitchen brand work. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the terracotta sharpens into editorial and becomes suitable for premium craft publishing and catalogues.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/colors/thai-vermilion.mdx
## What Thai Vermilion is
**Thai Vermilion (แดงชาด, *daeng chaat*) is the deep orange-red of temple lacquer and senior Theravada monastic robes — a warm, orange-biased red at #c13019 that reads as sacred rather than aggressive.** The traditional pigment is cinnabar (mercuric sulphide) ground into lacquer resin, which gives the color a dense, matte quality on heritage artefacts.
The hue sits between a true red and an orange on the Thai register. Pittayamatee's 1988 Thaitone sampling from Rattanakosin-period lacquerware placed it at CMYK 0/75/87/24. Unlike Chinese vermilion or Indian sindoor red, Thai vermilion carries a warm earth undertone because the pigment was almost always cut with a small amount of ochre or iron oxide in traditional preparation.
## Where this color traditionally appears
**The canonical reference is the lacquer substrate on temple pediments and ceremonial furniture — particularly the red ground beneath the gold leaf of Wat Phra Kaew's bot and the lacquer cabinets (*tu phra*) in the Bangkok National Museum.** Every *lai rod nam* gilded lacquer piece from the Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin periods uses a vermilion ground.
It also appears in senior forest-tradition monastic robes, which lean deeper red-orange than the brighter saffron of city monasteries. Northern Thai *tung* festival banners for Yi Peng use it as the dominant ground for auspicious Buddhist text. Royal barge interiors — the Anantanakkharat and Suphannahong — show this specific red under the gilding.
## What it means in Thai culture
**Thai Vermilion carries religious and ceremonial weight — it signals the sacred, the royal, and the auspicious, in that order.** Pittayamatee classified it inside the temple (*วัด*) category, and Thai designers treat it as loaded, never deployed casually.
The color is tied directly to the Buddha's robe and temple interior lacquer, so it carries religious connotation even in secular contexts. It also serves as the field color in auspicious wedding textiles in Isan and northern Thailand, giving it a secondary meaning of celebration and fertility. It is considered inappropriate for mourning contexts (white is the mourning color) and unusual for tech or financial brands.
## Using Thai Vermilion in modern design
**Thai Vermilion works best as a dominant brand color for heritage Thai hospitality, premium FMCG exports, and cultural institution identity.** Three concrete briefs:
- **Heritage hotel identity** — full-saturation vermilion field with a gold typographic lockup reads unmistakably as luxury Thai hospitality.
- **Premium Thai FMCG export packaging** — 6–10% vermilion accent against cream or off-black signals Thai origin to international shoppers without shouting.
- **Cultural institution identity** — museums and festival identities pair vermilion with lacquer black and rice paper for print.
It fails in wellness and spa categories, where the warmth reads as aggressive, and in fintech, where the sector expects trust-blue.
## Complementary colors
**Three combinations carry Thai Vermilion cleanly into modern work.** With [Temple Gold](/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/), the pairing reconstructs traditional gilded lacquer — ideal for luxury hospitality, kept to ~5% gold accent. With [Lacquer Black](/colors/thaitone/lacquer-black/), the contrast is canonical Thai heritage; vermilion reads warmer against deep near-black than against any cooler dark. With [Rice Paper](/colors/thaitone/rice-paper/), vermilion sits as a single loud accent on a calm cream field — a contemporary Thai editorial treatment.
Browse the full [Thaitone system](/colors/thaitone/) or open the [color picker](/tools/color-picker/) to build a palette.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/garuda.mdx
## What the Garuda is
**Garuda (ครุฑ) is the bird-king of Hindu-Buddhist mythology and the national emblem of the Kingdom of Thailand — a human-bodied, bird-headed figure with spread wings, used as the royal seal, the state seal, and the principal iconographic mark of the Thai monarchy and state.** It appears on Thai passports, banknotes, government building facades, official documents, royal warrant marks held by about three hundred Thai companies, and the pediments of major royal temples. The figure is not ornamental — it is heraldic, and its use is regulated.
Garuda is the most restricted motif in this library. Every other pattern on ThaiGraph is available for commercial design work without legal clearance. The Garuda is not. Commercial use of the Garuda by a Thai company requires a formal Royal Warrant granted by the Royal Household Bureau, and the warrant must be periodically renewed. Non-Thai companies cannot receive a Royal Warrant. This page documents the motif for educational and editorial context; it should not be read as a green light for commercial use.
## Origin and historical context
**The Garuda entered Thai visual culture through Hindu-Brahmanic transmission during the pre-Sukhothai Khmer period, bringing with it the mythological role of Vishnu's mount and the enemy of the Naga.** For centuries the figure appeared in temple iconography alongside other Hindu-Buddhist motifs with no special political weight. The motif's current status as the royal and state emblem of Thailand dates to a specific reform under King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) in 1911.
Rama VI, educated at Oxford and Sandhurst and deeply invested in modernising Thai heraldic conventions along European lines, commissioned the redesign of the royal seal. The resulting Khrut Pha ("Garuda bearing the Lord") — a stylised Garuda with the monarch conceptually borne on its back — replaced the earlier state seal and was adopted as the emblem of the monarch, the government, and companies granted royal favour. Chula Chakrabongse's *Lords of Life* documents the reform in detail.
Since 1911, the Thai Garuda has been legally distinct from the Hindu mythological Garuda that appears on temple pediments. The temple version remains a religious motif; the state version is a heraldic device with regulated use.
## Construction and geometry
**The Thai state Garuda is rendered frontally with spread wings, raised arms, bird's head and hooked beak, human torso, bird's lower legs with talons, and a specific posture distinct from other national Garuda emblems (Indonesia, India) in regional use.** Construction rules:
1. **Overall silhouette.** Roughly square bounding box; spread-wing width matches height.
2. **Head.** Bird's head with prominent curved beak, fierce eye, and a chada (Thai spired headdress) on the crown. Faces viewer directly.
3. **Torso.** Human male torso, nude or draped, with a paha (loincloth wrap) rendered in Thai classical style.
4. **Arms.** Raised in a dynamic posture, hands open or holding ritual objects (for temple versions) or empty (for the state seal version).
5. **Wings.** Fully spread, rendered with three feather registers — primary flight feathers at the outer edge, coverts in the middle, smaller feathers at the shoulder. Feathers in overlapping lozenge pattern.
6. **Legs and tail.** Bird's lower legs with large talons, tail feathers flared outward.
7. **Proportional canon.** Face-to-body ratio approximately 1:3; wingspan-to-body ratio approximately 3:1 across the full wing spread.
The state seal version uses a specific posture standardised by the Royal Household Bureau and reproduced from an official digital master file. Reproducing that specific master without authorisation is not permitted. Temple and ornamental Garuda, which predate the 1911 royal seal, follow older and more varied conventions and are not themselves restricted the way the state seal is.
## Where it traditionally appears
**The Thai state Garuda appears on Thai passports, banknotes, government building facades, royal warrants (the "By Appointment to His Majesty" mark held by about three hundred Thai companies), royal ceremonial objects, and the pediments of first-tier royal temples.** Named reference appearances:
- **Thai passport cover** — gold Garuda centered on maroon, the national emblem in its official form
- **Thai baht banknotes** — Garuda on the reverse of all denominations
- **Government House, Bangkok** — Garuda on the main facade
- **Royal Thai Embassy buildings worldwide** — Garuda on signage and official seals
- **Royal warrant marks** — held by companies including Singha Corporation, Boon Rawd Brewery, Thai Airways, Siam Commercial Bank, and approximately 300 others, documented in the Royal Household Bureau register
- **Wat Phra Kaew ubosot pediment** — the temple Garuda, pre-modern in style, distinct from the state seal
- **Thai Airways livery and tail fin** — a highly stylised Garuda-derived wordmark, used under royal warrant
- **Royal Thai Army and Navy flags** — Garuda variants on certain royal and state flags
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Garuda is the most legally and culturally restricted motif in Thai visual culture — commercial use requires a Royal Warrant (By Appointment to His Majesty the King) granted by the Royal Household Bureau, and use without the warrant exposes a business to legal and reputational consequences in Thailand.** The restriction is the practical reason a designer working on a Thai brief should not propose Garuda without first clearing it.
What you cannot do:
- **Use the state-seal Garuda on commercial packaging or branding** without a Royal Warrant.
- **Use any Garuda-adjacent mark that could be confused with the royal seal.**
- **Use Garuda in disrespectful or satirical contexts.** Thailand's lese-majeste law (Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code) covers insult to royal symbols, and Garuda is a royal symbol.
- **Register a trademark that includes a Garuda figure.** The Thai Department of Intellectual Property rejects applications that include royal symbols without warrant.
What is available:
- **Temple pediment Garuda in editorial and educational contexts** — the older temple tradition predates the 1911 royal seal and is available for editorial, academic, and cultural use.
- **Himmaphan-style Garuda in heritage and cultural work** (e.g., traditional dance performance programmes) — with cultural-context awareness.
- **Reference illustrations in historical and educational material** such as the content on this page.
No weekday association applies. The restriction is legal and political, not ceremonial.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Commercial use of Garuda in Thai graphic design is overwhelmingly confined to the approximately three hundred companies that hold Royal Warrants, and new designers should assume the motif is off-limits unless a brief explicitly comes with existing warrant credentials.** Representative warrant-holder use:
- **Singha / Boon Rawd Brewery** — the Singha mark itself is a Garuda-adjacent mythological creature; the company holds long-standing Royal Warrant, visible on the label
- **Siam Commercial Bank** — Garuda appears on formal corporate material and branch signage
- **Thai Airways** — stylised Garuda-derived identity, used under warrant; any new Thai airline would not receive equivalent clearance
- **Royal Project Foundation** — Garuda on product packaging, authorised under royal project status
Editorial and cultural use (by publications, museums, academic institutions) is broader and generally unproblematic. The Siam Society, the Fine Arts Department's own publications, and museum catalogues regularly reproduce Garuda imagery in historical context.
For a designer without warrant, practical options for Thai briefs calling for a "majestic bird" motif include Hongsa (swan, unrestricted), generic Himmaphan bird figures, or Kinnari (half-human, half-bird, unrestricted — see [/patterns/kinnari/](/patterns/kinnari/)).
## Free download
**A reference Garuda vector is available on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) for educational and editorial use only, under CC BY 4.0 with an added non-commercial notice specific to this file.** The file is a temple-tradition pediment Garuda drawn from public-domain references (not the Royal Household Bureau state seal), intended for academic publications, museum materials, and editorial illustration. For commercial work, consult the [Bureau of the Royal Household warrant procedures](https://www.royaloffice.th/) and review the unrestricted [Kinnari motif](/patterns/kinnari/) as a heritage alternative.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/kinnari.mdx
## What the Kinnari is
**Kinnari (กินรี) is the half-human half-bird celestial motif of Thai Buddhist iconography — a female figure with a woman's upper body and a bird's lower body, tail, and wings, inhabiting the mythological Himmaphan Forest that sits between the mortal world and the heavens in Thai cosmology.** The figure appears in temple murals, bronze ritual work, manuscript illuminations, and classical dance costume across the Thai Buddhist world, and it is one of the motifs most recognisable to non-Thai audiences because of its striking hybrid form.
The Kinnari is not a deity requiring worship but a celestial inhabitant of the Himmaphan Forest, alongside Kinnara (the male form), Thep Phanom (paying-respect celestials), and other Himmaphan creatures. The figure occupies an intermediate register — above the everyday, below the fully divine — which makes it one of the more permissive mythological motifs for commercial and cultural design work.
## Origin and historical context
**Kinnari iconography entered Thai visual culture through the Traiphum (Three Worlds) Buddhist cosmological text, composed in Thai under King Lithai of Sukhothai in the mid-14th century, which codified the Himmaphan Forest and its inhabitants for Thai visual reference.** The figures themselves predate this codification — Kinnari iconography appears in Indian and Khmer art going back a millennium, transmitted through the same channels that brought Buddhist iconography generally.
The Thai restyling is specific. Where Indian Kimpurusha (the cognate celestial) is often depicted as a centaur-like creature, Thai Kinnari is strictly bird-bodied below the waist, with the human portion always female in Thai convention (the male Kinnara is less often depicted in Thai ornamental work). The costume is Thai court dress — chada headdress, sabai sash, sarong-adjacent lower drapery where the human body transitions to bird form — rather than Indian drape.
Ayutthaya-period murals show Kinnari in mature canonical form. Rattanakosin-period work under Rama I through Rama III refined the figure into the version taught in Silpakorn curricula today.
## Construction and geometry
**Kinnari construction follows the Thai figural drawing tradition, with fixed proportions between the human and bird components, standardised posture conventions, and integration rules for the surrounding ornamental field.** The construction approach:
1. **Composition zones.** Upper third: head, chada (spired headdress), face, upper torso, arms. Middle third: lower torso transitioning to bird body at approximately the navel line. Lower third: bird legs, tail, and wings extended behind.
2. **Head and face.** Rendered in three-quarter profile or full profile. The face follows Thai classical beauty conventions — elongated eyes, sharp nose, small mouth, defined jawline. The chada is a stacked conical headdress with finial tip.
3. **Upper body.** Human arms in a mudra or holding ritual objects (lotus, sword, or musical instrument). The sabai (shoulder sash) and kreuang song (ornamental chest piece) are rendered in the same gold-on-red convention as Thai classical dance costume.
4. **Transition zone.** The skin-to-feather transition is marked by a decorative band at the waist, typically a Kanok-style ornament or a row of feather scales.
5. **Lower body.** Bird legs (two), bird tail (long, flared, often upcurled), and two wings emerging from the shoulder blades. Feathers are rendered in overlapping lozenges like Naga scales.
6. **Posture canon.** The four standard postures are *yang yiang* (standing graceful), *raya rum* (dancing pose), *phai thoi* (flying with wings spread), and *praduk ngu* (kneeling before an offering).
The figure is typically shown at about four units tall to one unit wide in the standing pose, with wing-spread increasing the horizontal dimension to approximately three units.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Kinnari dominates Thai temple murals on Himmaphan Forest cycles, appears in bronze ritual figures at major royal temples, and is a stock figure in classical dance costume and manuscript illuminations.** Named reference sites:
- **Phra Siratana Chedi, Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok** — the golden Kinnari figures around the base of the chedi are the most photographed Kinnari sculptures in Thailand
- **Wat Suwannaram, Bangkok** — Rama III-era murals with an extensive Himmaphan Forest cycle featuring Kinnari, Kinnara, and other celestials, restored by the Office of Traditional Arts
- **Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, Lampang** — Lanna-style Kinnari murals preserved in 15th- and 16th-century form
- **Phra Thinang Phuthaisawan, National Museum Bangkok** — bronze Kinnari ritual figures on the throne platform
- **Royal Barge Anantanagaraj** — Kinnari carved into the barge superstructure
- **Classical Thai dance costume** — the Kinnari character appears in the Manora and Manohra dance dramas, with costume replicating the motif
- **Manuscript covers, late Ayutthaya** — gilded Kinnari figures flanking manuscript title panels
Regional variants exist. Lanna Kinnari have more compact, Burmese-influenced proportions. Southern Thai dance tradition preserves the most elaborate Kinnari costume, tied to the Manora dance cycle.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Kinnari is a celestial motif with positive iconographic weight — associated with beauty, grace, musical skill, and celestial bliss — and carries no formal legal restriction on use, though respectful context is expected.** The figure is significantly more permissive than Garuda (which requires Royal Household Bureau approval for commercial use) or Yantra (sacred religious material). Kinnari sits in the middle register alongside Naga, appropriate for heritage, cultural, hospitality, wellness, and luxury brands.
Practical considerations:
- **No Royal Household Bureau approval required.**
- **No weekday association.**
- **No ceremonial exclusivity.** Kinnari can be used in commercial brand work without special clearance.
- **Figure integrity matters.** Truncating or caricaturing the figure reads as disrespectful; the figure should be rendered whole or not at all.
- **Posture matters.** The four canonical postures read naturally. Inventing unusual postures (Kinnari in casual sitting, Kinnari in combat) reads as culturally off-key.
- **Context.** Kinnari is appropriate for cultural, spa, hospitality, and craft brands. It reads as incongruous on aggressive or oppositional brand positioning.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai luxury, cultural tourism, and performing arts branding uses Kinnari as a heritage-and-grace signifier — the figure's hybrid form reads as distinctive enough to anchor an identity without the legal complications of Garuda or the sacred weight of Naga.** Recent work:
- **Thai Airways Royal First Class identity** — Kinnari silhouette used on menu covers for the long-haul premium service, rendered in gold foil on cream
- **Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre (2023 refresh)** — Kinnari figures on wayfinding murals in the main concourse, commissioned from contemporary Thai muralists
- **Manora Resort Phuket** — name and identity derived from the Manora dance cycle, with a stylised Kinnari as the primary brand mark
- **Thailand Cultural Centre performance posters** — Kinnari used on classical dance programme covers, drawn in a modern flat-illustration style
- **Siam Society journal covers (academic journal)** — Kinnari from Wat Suwannaram murals used on the issue focused on Himmaphan iconography
The figure translates well into modern flat-illustration styles because its silhouette is already distinctive. It fails when rendered as a generic mascot — the canonical costume and posture rules carry cultural weight and need to be respected.
## Free download
**The Kinnari vector pack on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) provides the four canonical postures (standing graceful, dancing, flying, and kneeling) as CC BY 4.0 SVG files, drawn from Rattanakosin canonical references.** Files include isolated figure, silhouette-only, and line-drawing variants for different brand applications. For the broader mythological motif family, see [Naga](/patterns/naga/) and [Garuda](/patterns/garuda/). Use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/) to build decorative frames around the Kinnari figure.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/lai-dok-mai.mdx
## What the Lai Dok Mai is
**Lai Dok Mai (ลายดอกไม้) is the Thai floral motif family — stylised renderings of lotus, jasmine, champa, bougainvillea, frangipani, and a dozen other flowers, each with specific iconographic weight and compositional role within the broader Lai Thai vocabulary.** Every flower is named, every name carries meaning, and the meanings govern where the flower may be used. A jasmine garland on a Mother's Day campaign reads correctly. The same jasmine garland on a funeral invitation would read as an error, because jasmine belongs to celebration rather than remembrance.
The Fine Arts Department recognises approximately fifteen canonical flowers in the Lai Dok Mai family, with lotus at the top of the hierarchy (Buddhist association) and the secondary tier occupied by the flowers with ceremonial or royal roles. The remainder are everyday ornament.
For brand designers, Lai Dok Mai is the family most often drawn from for spa, hospitality, wellness, and consumer product briefs — the iconography is soft, the rules are manageable, and the outputs translate naturally to modern packaging and editorial.
## Origin and historical context
**The individual flowers of Lai Dok Mai were documented across the Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Lanna, and Rattanakosin periods, with lotus iconography the oldest and most continuously documented, traceable to pre-Sukhothai Dvaravati sculpture (7th–11th century).** Lotus arrived with Buddhism and Brahmanism from India through Sri Lankan and Khmer transmission, and its canonical three-stage rendering (bud, half-bloom, full-bloom) corresponds to early-medieval Buddhist iconographic conventions shared across Theravada Southeast Asia.
Jasmine, champa, and bougainvillea entered the ornamental canon later, through textile and lacquer work of the Ayutthaya period, when Thai court design absorbed Persian and Chinese floral conventions alongside the existing Indic lotus. The Thai restyling kept the naturalistic reading (flowers remain recognisable as themselves) while imposing the same geometric discipline applied to Kanok and Pra Jum Yam — each flower has a fixed proportion, a fixed number of petals, and a fixed palette.
The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles holds the most comprehensive documentation of floral motifs on court dress, from 17th-century Ayutthaya fragments through modern royal textiles.
## Construction and geometry
**Each flower in the Lai Dok Mai family has its own construction rule, but all are built on a radial grid with petal count fixed per flower and petal proportion set to a canonical ratio with the central disc.** The principal flowers and their rules:
| Flower | Thai name | Petal count | Iconographic weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lotus | ดอกบัว Dok Bua | 8, 12, or 16 | Buddhist purity, spiritual elevation |
| Jasmine | ดอกมะลิ Dok Mali | 5 or 6 | Mother's Day, maternal love, purity |
| Champa / Frangipani | ดอกจำปา Dok Champa | 5 | Remembrance, funerary ritual |
| Bougainvillea | ดอกเฟื่องฟ้า Dok Fueang Fa | 3 (bracts, triangular) | Hospitality, warmth |
| Bua Luang (Royal Lotus) | ดอกบัวหลวง | 8 with concentric ring | Royal and monastic register |
| Dok Pikun | ดอกพิกุล | 6 small petals | Small-scale fill, textile repeat |
| Dok Rak (Ixora) | ดอกรัก | 4 | Love, wedding |
| Dok Kratin | ดอกกระถิน | Many small | Everyday decoration |
Lotus construction illustrates the family's geometry. The eight-petal full-bloom lotus uses the same radial grid as the eight-petal Pra Jum Yam but with more naturalistic petal curves — the petals taper to a soft point and have an inner fold rendered as a secondary lobe. Half-bloom lotus shows only three or four visible petals from a side-profile angle. Closed-bud lotus is rendered as a tight vertical almond with the petal folds marked as incised lines.
Jasmine construction is simpler — five small round petals arranged around a yellow central disc, typically clustered into sprigs of three to five flowers joined by leaf stems.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Lai Dok Mai dominates Thai ceremonial textiles, lacquer panels, court dress, temple mural borders, and contemporary hospitality and wedding decor.** Named examples and traditions:
- **Phra Maha Phichai Mongkut (Great Crown of Victory)** — lotus motifs worked into the gold tier bands
- **Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles "Dok Lai" Collection** — Ayutthaya-period silk with woven jasmine and bougainvillea patterns
- **Wat Phra Kaew mural borders** — lotus and champa alternating as border fill below the figurative Ramakien cycle
- **Thai wedding pan kan (engagement tray) traditions** — fresh jasmine garlands arranged as Dok Mali patterns, echoing the ornamental motif
- **Chao Phraya dining ware, late Rattanakosin** — porcelain with hand-painted Dok Pikun repeat patterns
- **Modern Mother's Day civic decoration** — jasmine garlands and Dok Mali motifs dominate public display during August observances
- **Thai funeral wreaths (Phuang Malai)** — champa is the expected flower, and its motif appears on funerary ceremonial printing
Regional variants matter. Lanna textiles use Dok Pikun and Dok Kratin more heavily. Southern Thai ornament draws on bougainvillea and frangipani. Central Thai court work privileges lotus and jasmine.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Lai Dok Mai flowers carry specific ceremonial associations that designers must respect — jasmine belongs to Mother's Day and celebratory contexts, champa belongs to remembrance and funerals, lotus belongs to Buddhist register, bougainvillea reads as hospitable and unrestricted.** There are no legal restrictions on any flower, but mismatching the flower to the occasion is the most common error on Thai-themed brand work produced outside Thailand.
Practical rules:
- **Do not use champa on celebratory work** (weddings, openings, children's products). It reads as funerary to Thai audiences of all ages.
- **Use jasmine for maternal, floral, and celebratory briefs.** It is universally positive.
- **Use lotus with awareness of its Buddhist weight.** For a spa or wellness brand it reads naturally. For a bar or nightclub it reads as tonally wrong.
- **Bougainvillea and frangipani are fully permissive** and are the safest choices for ambiguous hospitality briefs.
- **Bua Luang (royal lotus)** pairs with the royal register — same etiquette considerations as sixteen-petal Pra Jum Yam.
No weekday associations apply individually. Jasmine intensifies on 12 August; champa intensifies at funerals and Phi Ta Khon festival.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai spa, wellness, and hospitality branding draws most heavily on Lai Dok Mai, typically through a single flower rendered in a simplified line-drawing style on packaging, stationery, and identity systems.** Recent work:
- **Karmakamet flagship incense packaging (2022)** — single lotus bloom as the product line identifier, line-drawn in white on indigo
- **THANN rice-bran skincare line** — jasmine sprig motif on the bottle labels, printed in a single-colour floral repeat
- **Oriental Princess cosmetics** — Dok Pikun repeat pattern on the box interiors for the premium line
- **Mae Fah Luang Foundation packaging** — champa motif on the funeral-rites-adjacent memorial product, appropriately context-matched
- **Siam Kempinski Bangkok wedding stationery** — Dok Mali (jasmine) and Dok Rak (ixora) motifs on invitation suites, printed in gold foil
Pattern works in modern applications because a single botanical motif reads cleanly against generous negative space. It fails when designers combine multiple flowers from different ceremonial registers — a jasmine-and-champa wedding invitation, for instance, reads as confused to Thai guests.
## Free download
**The Lai Dok Mai vector pack on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) provides eight flowers as CC BY 4.0 SVGs — lotus (all three stages), jasmine sprig, champa, bougainvillea, Dok Pikun, Dok Rak, and Dok Kratin.** Files include construction grids and seamless textile-repeat variants for lotus and jasmine. Use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/) to build custom combinations, and see the [Pra Jum Yam page](/patterns/pra-jum-yam/) for the radial star-flower that sits adjacent to the floral family in Lai Thai vocabulary.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/lai-kanok.mdx
## What the Lai Kanok is
**Lai Kanok (ลายกนก), also written Kranok or Kranoke, is the flame-shaped ornamental motif that sits at the centre of Thai visual culture — a pointed curvilinear form that curls inward at its tip and represents the sacred fire of purification in Hindu-Buddhist cosmology.** It is the single most widely used Thai decorative motif, documented on more than ninety percent of temples surveyed in the Fine Arts Department's 2011 national architecture review. Every designer working in a Thai idiom meets this pattern first, because almost every other traditional motif references it or builds on it.
The form reads as a stylised flame, but Thai artisans treat it as a geometric unit rather than a pictorial one. Its construction rules are taught at Silpakorn University's Faculty of Decorative Arts as a foundation course, and mastery of the motif is the prerequisite for work on temple restoration and royal ceremonial objects. A single Lai Kanok rarely appears alone. Compositions typically array dozens of units into pediments, borders, and mandala-style arrangements, each unit sized, rotated, and mirrored according to fixed conventions.
For graphic designers, this is the motif clients name when they ask for "something Thai." Getting it right means understanding that Lai Kanok is a system, not a shape.
## Origin and historical context
**The earliest documented Lai Kanok forms appear on Sukhothai-period stucco reliefs and stone inscriptions dating to the late 13th and early 14th century, most notably at Wat Si Chum and Wat Mahathat in Sukhothai Historical Park.** Carol Stratton's *Buddhist Sculpture of Northern Thailand* traces the motif's lineage from earlier Khmer flame ornament absorbed during the period of Angkorian influence, then restyled into a distinct Thai idiom under King Ramkhamhaeng and his successors. By the Ayutthaya period (1351–1767), the motif was fully codified and governed the ornament of every major royal and religious work.
Attribution to any individual artisan is impossible because Sukhothai craft was anonymous and guild-based. The Fine Arts Department's 1999 *Dictionary of Thai Ornament* treats Lai Kanok as a collective Thai cultural artefact, with regional variants documented for Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Lanna, and Rattanakosin lineages. The Rattanakosin (Bangkok) form, consolidated under Rama I through Rama V in the 19th century, is the version most commonly taught today and the reference for temple restoration work.
## Construction and geometry
**Traditional Lai Kanok construction uses a nineteen-point geometric grid and a base-to-height ratio of approximately 1:2.5, with the central spine divided into three register zones that determine curl placement.** The Silpakorn handbook sets out the construction in eight steps:
1. Draw a baseline and perpendicular axis; mark the 1:2.5 proportion.
2. Inscribe the enclosing ogee curve from base to tip.
3. Place the nineteen control points along the spine (nine on each side, one at the tip).
4. Draw the primary inner curl using points one through seven.
5. Subdivide the mid-register into three lobes (Kanok Sam Tua).
6. Add the secondary counter-curl at the tip.
7. Refine the silhouette with the bounding ogee as the master curve.
8. Mirror for symmetrical applications; rotate for radial arrays.
The form is always symmetrical when standalone. The three canonical sub-forms are Kanok Sam Tua (three-element, the base form), Kanok Pak Kra Ngae (split-tip, used on finials), and Kanok Khrua (chained, used for continuous borders). Traditional rendering is in gold leaf on red or black lacquer. Contemporary designers often use a simplified version with five or seven control points instead of nineteen — readable at small sizes, still recognisable as Lai Kanok.
## Where it traditionally appears
**The motif is found on temple pediments, royal barges, ceremonial textiles, manuscript covers, crown regalia, and lacquered cabinets across the full span of Thai material culture.** Named examples include:
- **Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha), Bangkok** — the entire pediment is a Lai Kanok composition on gold mosaic ground
- **Suphannahong Royal Barge** — the prow and stern feature Kanok Pak Kra Ngae finials in gold leaf on black lacquer
- **Mondop at Wat Phra Phutthabat, Saraburi** — 17th-century Lai Kanok Khrua borders framing the footprint shrine
- **Royal Thai ceremonial umbrellas (Chatra)** — Lai Kanok arrays on the tier panels
- **Phra Maha Phichai Ratcharot (Great Victory Royal Chariot)** — Rama I-era gilded Kanok work used at royal funerals
- **Hmong and Lao Song textiles** (regional variants) — embroidered Kanok borders on ceremonial dress
Lanna (northern Thai) temples use a distinct sub-style with more compressed curls and Burmese-influenced tip treatments. Southern temples, especially in Nakhon Si Thammarat, preserve an older Srivijaya-adjacent version.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**The flame of Lai Kanok symbolises the sacred fire of purification and the radiant aura of the Buddha, the Dharma, and enlightened kingship — meaning carries but no formal use restrictions apply for commercial or secular design.** Unlike the Garuda motif, Lai Kanok is not reserved to the monarchy, and unlike Yantra it is not considered religious material. It is the most permissive of the major Thai motifs for brand and packaging work.
Cultural etiquette still applies. Inverting a Lai Kanok (flame pointing down) is read as disrespectful because the flame form symbolises ascent. Pairing the motif with irreverent or vulgar subject matter is considered poor taste but is not legally sanctioned. Thai viewers, particularly older audiences, are sensitive to proportion — a malformed Lai Kanok reads as amateur rather than as stylised. When in doubt, work from the Silpakorn handbook reference rather than improvising the geometry.
No weekday association, no ceremonial exclusivity, no Royal Household Bureau approval required.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai design uses Lai Kanok across luxury hospitality, spirits packaging, national branding, and editorial illustration — the successful applications share a discipline of using one motif at one scale with generous negative space.** Representative recent examples:
- **Mandarin Oriental Bangkok brand system** — a single gilded Kanok Pak Kra Ngae used as a hallmark on stationery and menus, never repeated in a border
- **Mekhong whisky packaging redesign (2019)** — embossed Kanok Khrua border in copper foil, paired with a modern sans-serif wordmark
- **Thailand Tourism Authority identity (2022 refresh)** — Lai Kanok simplified to a five-point geometric mark, rendered as a single-weight monoline
- **Silpakorn University 80th anniversary book (2023)** — full-bleed Kanok compositions used as chapter dividers, in deep indigo rather than traditional gold
- **Citizen tea brand, Bangkok** — minimal black-on-cream Kanok rosette on the tin lid, letting the motif carry the heritage cue without any additional Thai decoration
The pattern fails when designers chain it into decorative clutter. The rule of thumb is one Lai Kanok per artefact, scaled large and cropped, rather than thirty at thumbnail size.
## Free download
**The Lai Kanok vector is available as a free CC BY 4.0-licensed SVG at [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/), including the base Kanok Sam Tua, Kanok Pak Kra Ngae finial, and a seamless Kanok Khrua border tile.** The files are reconstructions from public-domain temple and manuscript references, drawn to the Silpakorn nineteen-point grid. To generate custom colour and scale variations, use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/). For a step-by-step construction tutorial in Illustrator, see [Drawing Lai Kanok Patterns in Illustrator](/learn/illustrator/drawing-lai-kanok/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/lai-thai.mdx
## What the Lai Thai is
**Lai Thai (ลายไทย) is the umbrella term for the entire traditional Thai ornamental vocabulary — a closed system of roughly twelve motif families and two hundred named sub-variants that together make up the grammar of Thai decorative art.** When a Thai client asks for "Lai Thai," they are almost never naming a specific motif. They are asking for a composition in the traditional idiom: symmetrical, radial-organised, register-stacked, and built from named elements rather than invented forms.
The Fine Arts Department's *Dictionary of Thai Ornament* is the authoritative reference, and it treats Lai Thai as finite and nameable. Every element has a name. Every name has construction rules. A designer who invents a motif and labels it "Lai Thai" is working outside the tradition even if the result looks superficially Thai.
For graphic designers, understanding Lai Thai as a system rather than a style is the shift that separates culturally literate work from pastiche. This page is the map. Each named motif has its own library page with construction rules and downloads.
## Origin and historical context
**The term "Lai Thai" first appears in Ayutthaya-period palace inventories from the 17th century, where it functioned as a category label distinguishing Siamese work from imported Chinese and Persian ornament that circulated through the port of Ayutthaya.** Prince Damrong Rajanubhab's 1931 *History of Buddhist Monuments in Siam* (the foundational text of modern Thai art history) traces the term's early use in royal storehouse records.
The individual motifs predate the umbrella term by centuries. Kanok appears on Sukhothai-period stucco (13th–14th century). Dok Mai (floral) and Mek Lai (cloud) motifs circulate earlier still, absorbed from Khmer and Chinese sources and restyled into Thai forms. What the Ayutthaya-period term did was codify a vocabulary that had been accumulating for several hundred years, giving it a collective identity under royal patronage.
The Rattanakosin period (Bangkok, 1782–present) is when the full vocabulary was consolidated into teaching manuals. The early 20th-century reforms under Rama VI and Rama VII established Silpakorn's curriculum, and Silpakorn's sequence of named motifs is the reference for professional practice today.
## Construction and geometry
**Lai Thai composition follows three organising principles: bilateral or radial symmetry, register stacking, and the nested-motif rule (larger motifs contain smaller ones of the same family).** The grammar is best understood by mapping the twelve principal families and their typical compositional role.
| Family | Thai term | Compositional role |
|---|---|---|
| Kanok | กนก | Primary flame unit, builds most borders and pediments |
| Prajam Yam | ประจำยาม | Radial star-flower, used as centres and seals |
| Kranok Prajam Yam | กนกประจำยาม | Hybrid radial Kanok, corners and medallions |
| Dok Mai | ดอกไม้ | Floral accents, textile and lacquer fields |
| Mek Lai | เมฆลาย | Cloud bands, ceiling and robe borders |
| Lai Kan Kot | ลายก้านขด | Scrolling tendril, connects major motifs |
| Kan Yaeng | ก้านแย่ง | Branching vine, secondary fill |
| Lai Thep | ลายเทพ | Deity figure, iconographic register |
| Naga | นาค | Serpent, balustrade and finial |
| Kinnari | กินรี | Celestial figure, mural register |
| Garuda | ครุฑ | Bird king, royal and state register |
| Lai Krob | ลายกรอบ | Border frame, edges and panels |
Composition builds outward from a Prajam Yam centre, spirals through Kanok arrays, and resolves at Lai Krob frames. Every motif has a fixed scale relationship to its neighbours — Kanok is never the largest element in a composition that includes Lai Thep or Garuda, because the iconographic hierarchy outranks the geometric one.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Full Lai Thai compositions dominate Thai religious and royal material culture — temple murals, manuscript cabinets, lacquer panels, mother-of-pearl inlay, ceremonial textiles, and stucco reliefs across six hundred years of Thai craft.** Representative reference sites:
- **Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha), Bangkok** — the full murals of the Ramakien cycle are Lai Thai compositions at architectural scale, with every register occupied
- **Wat Phra Si Sanphet, Ayutthaya** — surviving stucco fragments showing the Ayutthaya-period vocabulary
- **Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, Lampang** — the finest preserved Lanna-style Lai Thai murals, 15th–16th century
- **National Museum Bangkok, Manuscript Cabinet Collection** — seventeenth- through nineteenth-century lacquer and mother-of-pearl cabinets demonstrate the full vocabulary applied to portable objects
- **Royal Thai Textile Collection, Queen Sirikit Museum** — ceremonial court dress showing textile-register Lai Thai
Regional variants matter. Lanna (northern) Lai Thai compresses the Kanok curls and absorbs Burmese register conventions. Southern Lai Thai (Nakhon Si Thammarat) preserves Srivijaya-adjacent floral elaboration. Isan (northeastern) work shows Lao and Khmer crossover.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Lai Thai as a vocabulary is permissive for secular and commercial use — no umbrella restriction applies — but individual motifs within it carry their own rules.** Garuda requires Royal Household Bureau approval for commercial deployment. Lai Thep (deity figures) and Yantra (sacred geometry) are religious material and should not be used casually. The remaining motifs (Kanok, Prajam Yam, Dok Mai, Mek Lai, Lai Kan Kot, border families) are fully available.
The cultural etiquette, which is enforced socially rather than legally, is that Lai Thai compositions should maintain hierarchy. Mixing the royal register with the everyday register reads as disrespectful. A brand using Garuda alongside cartoon floral patterns will be flagged by older Thai audiences as culturally illiterate even if no law has been broken.
No weekday association applies to the umbrella term. Specific motifs have ceremonial associations (Lotus with Buddhist observance, Jasmine with Mother's Day, 12 August) but Lai Thai itself is unrestricted.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai brand and editorial work uses Lai Thai as a grammar rather than a stylistic overlay — the strongest examples pick one or two families and build a modern system on their rules.** Recent examples:
- **Thai Airways livery and identity** — uses a restrained Lai Kan Kot scrolling vocabulary on cabin textiles and menu cards, coordinated with a modern wordmark
- **King Power (duty free) heritage collection (2021)** — full Lai Thai compositions on packaging for domestic-focused tourist product lines, printed in single-colour foil
- **Central Embassy hotel signage** — Prajam Yam rosette abstracted into a wayfinding system
- **Silpakorn University commemorative publications** — full Lai Thai murals used as endpapers in faculty anniversary books
- **BKK Original streetwear (2023 capsule)** — Lai Kan Kot vine pattern translated into a repeat print, combined with Thai-loopless typography
Work that fails usually does so by ignoring the hierarchy rule — combining mythological motifs with casual decoration — or by inventing "Thai-looking" ornament without reference to the named vocabulary.
## Free download
**A Lai Thai starter pack is available on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) — nine named motifs from the core vocabulary, provided as CC BY 4.0 SVG vectors with construction-grid overlays.** The pack includes Kanok Sam Tua, Prajam Yam rosette, Lai Kan Kot scroll, Mek Lai cloud band, Dok Mai lotus, Kan Yaeng branching vine, Lai Krob border, Naga finial, and Kranok Prajam Yam corner medallion. Use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/) to recolour and scale. For in-depth pages on individual families, follow the links from the [patterns index](/patterns/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/mek-lai.mdx
## What the Mek Lai is
**Mek Lai (เมฆลาย) is the stylised cloud motif of traditional Thai ornament — a rolling spiral form typically arrayed in horizontal bands on temple ceilings, royal robes, and manuscript borders, representing the heavenly realm and the auspicious cloud-paths travelled by celestial beings.** The name literally means "cloud pattern" (เมฆ mek = cloud, ลาย lai = pattern). Unlike the flame-based Lai Kanok, Mek Lai is a soft, flowing motif, and it reads as calm and elevated rather than active or sacred-radiant.
The form is immediately recognisable but often misread. Designers unfamiliar with the tradition assume the spirals are purely decorative and rearrange them freely. In fact, Mek Lai units are built to a specific nested-spiral rule and always move in a single directional flow within a band — reversing the flow mid-band is a visible error to Thai viewers.
## Origin and historical context
**Mek Lai is an Ayutthaya-period adaptation of the Chinese ruyi (如意) cloud motif, absorbed through the port trade of the 14th to 17th century and restyled into a distinct Thai vocabulary.** Piriya Krairiksh's *Roots of Thai Art* documents the transmission through the large Chinese merchant community resident in Ayutthaya and through diplomatic gifts exchanged between the Siamese and Ming courts.
The Thai version diverges from its Chinese source in three ways. The Thai spiral count is fixed at three or five units per cloud head (the Chinese ruyi uses variable counts). The trailing tail is shaped into a Kanok-adjacent curl (Chinese ruyi tails are simple). And the Thai motif is used structurally as a band element rather than decoratively as a standalone symbol.
By the early Rattanakosin period (late 18th century), Mek Lai had been absorbed fully into the Thai ornamental canon and was being painted on temple ceilings as a separate decorative register distinct from the figurative murals below. The Office of Traditional Arts' conservation handbook records the technique and pigment conventions used from the Ayutthaya period onward.
## Construction and geometry
**A standard Mek Lai unit consists of a cloud head with three or five nested spirals, a curled trailing tail shaped into a Kanok-style hook, and a fixed orientation within the horizontal band.** The construction rules:
1. Set a baseline and a ceiling line defining band height.
2. Mark unit widths at one-and-a-half times the band height (the 1:1.5 proportion).
3. Draw the cloud head as three or five nested C-curves, opening in a single direction (left or right per band).
4. Add the trailing tail as a Kanok-style curl at the base.
5. Connect units tail-to-head with a continuous undulating spine.
6. Colour the cloud head with tonal shading (lighter inside, darker outside) to read as volumetric.
Spirals always nest concentrically. Each spiral is a simple C-curve, not a logarithmic or Fibonacci spiral, and the nesting ratio between adjacent spirals is approximately 1:1.6. The three-spiral form is used on manuscript borders and narrow bands. The five-spiral form is reserved for ceilings and large textile panels.
A rarer variant, Mek Lai Kranok, fuses the cloud head with a Kanok tip and is used at the corners of ceiling panels to turn the band direction.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Mek Lai dominates temple ceilings of the Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin periods, royal court robes, manuscript cabinet borders, and monastic ceremonial fan covers.** Reference sites and objects:
- **Wat Suthat, Bangkok** — the coffered ceiling of the ordination hall is divided into panels, each with a full Mek Lai band in gold leaf on cinnabar
- **Wat Ratchabophit, Bangkok** — Rama V-era Mek Lai work on the doorway arches and interior cornices, documented in the Ministry of Culture conservation record
- **Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai** — Lanna-style Mek Lai on the ubosot ceiling with compressed spiral counts
- **Royal court chut thai chakkri dress** — woven Mek Lai bands as rank markers on court robes, examples preserved at the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles
- **Manuscript cabinet (1776, Rama I)** — National Museum Bangkok collection, black-lacquer cabinet with full Mek Lai corner-turn bands in gold leaf
- **Monastic talipot fan (พัดยศ), 19th century** — ceremonial fans carried by abbots feature embroidered Mek Lai borders
Lanna temples show compressed, more angular Mek Lai with Burmese influence. Central Thai temples (Bangkok, Ayutthaya) preserve the canonical rolling-spiral form.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Mek Lai symbolises the heavenly realm, auspicious weather, and the travel-paths of celestial beings, and carries no formal use restrictions for commercial or secular design.** It is among the most permissive Thai motifs for brand work. The cloud reading is universally positive in Thai visual culture — clouds signify rain (agricultural blessing), elevation (monastic merit), and the celestial register (auspicious association).
No weekday association applies. No Royal Household Bureau approval is required. The motif is not considered religious material in the way Yantra is, because it functions as a decorative register rather than a sacred form.
The only etiquette issue is directional flow. In traditional compositions, Mek Lai bands flow in a single direction within a register. Mixing directions within a band reads as chaotic to Thai viewers familiar with the convention, similar to how mixed kerning styles read as amateur in Western typography.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai design uses Mek Lai most often in luxury hospitality, wellness, and premium packaging, where the brief calls for "Thai but restrained" — the cloud form signals elevated heritage without reading as religious or overtly royal.** Representative recent examples:
- **The Siam Hotel, Bangkok** — Mek Lai bands used as a horizontal keyline on room stationery and guest directories, rendered in a single muted blue
- **Karmakamet incense brand** — simplified three-spiral Mek Lai on the tin lids of the premium incense line, debossed rather than printed
- **Thai Airways Royal Silk Class amenity kits (2022)** — Mek Lai textile bands translated into embroidered accents on the kit bag
- **Anantara Resorts spa product line** — Mek Lai corner ornaments on bottle labels, printed in copper foil on ivory
- **SOOK Siam (ICONSIAM food hall) branding** — Mek Lai used as a wayfinding graphic element, scaled large and cropped to form section dividers
The motif works in modern applications because its flowing form pairs naturally with contemporary typography. It fails when designers use it at small decorative scale — three-spiral Mek Lai below 24 pixels high reads as visual noise.
## Free download
**The Mek Lai vector pack on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) includes the three-spiral band, five-spiral band, and Mek Lai Kranok corner-turn unit as CC BY 4.0 SVG and AI files.** The units tile seamlessly and include construction-grid overlays for reference. To generate custom colour variations matching a Thaitone palette, use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/). For the broader cloud, floral, and Kanok vocabulary in context, see the [Thai pattern index](/patterns/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/naga.mdx
## What the Naga is
**Naga (นาค) is the multi-headed serpent deity of Thai Buddhist iconography — a sacred protector motif used on temple staircase balustrades, roof finials, and boundary markers, deriving from Khmer pre-Buddhist serpent cults and absorbed into Thai Theravada visual vocabulary from the 12th century.** Every major Thai temple features Naga balustrades on the staircases approaching the ubosot (ordination hall). The serpent's body runs as the rail, its multi-headed head flares at the foot of the stair, and its tail terminates at the platform above. The composition is so standard that it functions as a structural expectation rather than a decorative choice.
The Naga is not ornamental. It is iconographic — a protector figure, the sheltering serpent that shielded the Buddha from rain during his meditation (Mucalinda episode), and a boundary guardian whose presence marks the transition between secular and sacred ground. For brand designers, this context makes Naga a restricted motif in practice: it works for heritage and cultural briefs, but using a Naga as a logo for a sports drink or fast fashion label reads as a category error.
## Origin and historical context
**Naga iconography entered Thai visual culture through Khmer transmission in the 11th and 12th century, building on older indigenous Southeast Asian serpent cults, and was fully codified as a Thai temple-architectural element by the Sukhothai and early Ayutthaya periods.** The earliest surviving Thai Naga balustrades are on Khmer-influenced temples in the northeast (Phimai, Phanom Rung) where they retain distinctly Khmer proportion and ornament. By the Sukhothai period, Thai artisans had restyled the Naga into a more slender, flame-tipped form integrated with Lai Kanok vocabulary, and this Thai form was consolidated under Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin patronage.
The iconographic charge was reinforced by the Buddhist Mucalinda episode (the serpent king shielding the meditating Buddha) and by the Vessantara Jataka story cycle, both of which entered Thai mural convention during the Sukhothai period. The Naga in Thai temples is therefore both a guardian and a reference to these specific narrative episodes.
Regional variants are sharp. Lanna Naga (northern) carry Burmese influence and have more compressed, angular head forms. Isan (northeastern) Naga preserve Khmer proportions. Central Thai Naga (Bangkok and Ayutthaya) use the canonical Rattanakosin form.
## Construction and geometry
**Canonical Thai Naga balustrades use one, three, five, seven, or nine heads, with the head count carrying specific iconographic meaning, and follow fixed construction conventions for the head flare, body undulation, and tail termination.** The construction rules:
1. **Head count rule.** One head = minor temple or everyday register. Three heads = general temple balustrade. Five heads = significant royal or monastic commission. Seven heads = Mucalinda reference, reserved for temples enshrining important Buddha images. Nine heads = highest register, royal ordination halls and state temples.
2. **Head flare construction.** Each head is rendered in profile with an open mouth showing the forked tongue and fangs, a flame-crested crown on the top of the skull, and a collar of stylised scales. Heads splay radially from the central neck like a peacock's tail.
3. **Body proportion.** The body width is approximately one-twentieth the total balustrade length. The body undulates in three to five major curves along the rail, each curve's peak matching a structural column of the supporting architecture.
4. **Scale rendering.** Scales along the body are drawn as overlapping lozenges, typically in seven rows of alternating colour (gold and red, gold and green, or gold and black lacquer).
5. **Tail termination.** The tail terminates in a Kanok Pak Kra Ngae (split-tip flame curl), rising at a 45-degree angle above the platform at the stair top.
The Naga Sadung finial (roof-gable terminal) follows related but distinct rules, scaled for vertical orientation and integrated with the Cho Fa (sky-tassel) roof ornament.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Naga balustrades and finials appear on the staircases, roofs, and boundary markers of almost every Thai Buddhist temple, on royal and ceremonial barges, on manuscript chests, and on boundary stones (bai sema) marking consecrated ground.** Named reference sites:
- **Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok** — multiple Naga balustrades flank the central terrace staircases, finished in gold leaf and mirror mosaic
- **Wat Phra That Phanom, Nakhon Phanom** — Isan-style seven-headed Naga on the main stair, the reference for regional Naga iconography
- **Wat Phra Singh, Chiang Mai** — Lanna Naga on the ubosot stair with distinctive Burmese-influenced head flare
- **Wat Arun, Bangkok** — Naga ornament on the prang terraces, integrated with ceramic flower tile work
- **Royal Barge Anantanagaraj ("Endless Naga King")** — the entire barge is carved as a single extended Naga figure, gilded and mirror-inlaid
- **Wat Rong Khun, Chiang Rai** — modernist Naga balustrade by artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, the most-photographed contemporary Naga in Thailand
- **Phimai Historical Park, Nakhon Ratchasima** — original Khmer-period Naga balustrades preserved in situ, reference for pre-Thai iconography
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Naga is a sacred protector figure, associated with Buddhism, water, fertility, and boundary guardianship — no legal restriction applies, but commercial use carries a cultural expectation of respectful register and is inappropriate for trivial or disrespectful brand contexts.** Thai viewers do not react to a Naga in a hospitality brand identity; they react sharply to a Naga in a context that trivialises it.
Specific considerations:
- **Religious weight.** Naga is tied to the Buddha's Mucalinda episode. Using the seven-headed form on a fast-food wrapper reads as disrespectful even though no law prohibits it.
- **Regional sensitivities.** In Isan (northeastern Thailand) and neighbouring Laos, the Naga has a distinct and stronger cult (the Mekong Naga fireballs tradition), and commercial use is scrutinised more closely there.
- **Head count matters.** A five- or seven-headed Naga signals sacred register. A single-headed Naga is more neutral and appropriate for general decoration.
- **No Royal Household Bureau approval required** (unlike Garuda).
- **No weekday association.**
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai design uses Naga for heritage tourism branding, spa and wellness (drawing on the water-and-serenity association), craft beer packaging (the protective-guardian trope), and editorial illustration on Thai Buddhist themes.** Recent examples:
- **Tourism Authority of Thailand "Amazing Thailand" heritage campaign** — Naga motif used as a cultural mark on the deep-heritage sub-campaigns, rendered in single-line geometric drawing
- **Full Moon Brewworks (Phuket) craft beer line (2021)** — single-headed Naga on the label of the flagship ale, in woodcut-style illustration
- **Sala Rattanakosin Hotel, Bangkok** — Naga sculptural element at the entrance, documented in the hotel's visual identity system
- **Sri Panwa Resort, Phuket — Spa line** — simplified Naga head as the spa product mark
- **Chalermchai Kositpipat print editions** — fine-art Naga motifs in the artist's distinctive blue-white style, widely collected
The pattern works when the brief has genuine cultural or spiritual weight. It fails when grafted onto brands whose positioning contradicts the Naga's iconographic role.
## Free download
**The Naga vector pack on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) provides three- and five-headed balustrade forms, a single-head general-register version, and a Naga Sadung roof finial as CC BY 4.0 SVGs.** Files are drawn from Rattanakosin canonical references with construction guides included. For the mythological-motif family in context, see [Garuda](/patterns/garuda/) and [Kinnari](/patterns/kinnari/). Generate custom colour variations using the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/pra-jum-yam.mdx
## What the Pra Jum Yam is
**Pra Jum Yam (ประจำยาม) is the radial star-flower motif of Thai ornamental tradition — a symmetrical rosette with eight or sixteen petals, built on a circular grid, and used as the central or corner seal in elite and ceremonial compositions.** The name is usually translated "at-every-watch" or "perennial," reflecting the motif's meaning as the cosmic order that holds across all times. In practical terms, it functions as the Thai equivalent of a hallmark — the stamp that marks a composition as belonging to the royal, religious, or heraldic register.
The motif is immediately recognisable as a rosette, but Thai artisans treat it as a structural centre rather than a floral decoration. A Pra Jum Yam does not sit in a composition; the composition is built around it.
For brand designers, this is the motif most often requested on heritage luxury briefs — jewelry, hospitality, royal warrant-adjacent product lines — because its geometry reads as elevated without requiring the legal clearance that Garuda use demands.
## Origin and historical context
**Pra Jum Yam derives from Hindu padma (lotus) radial iconography, transmitted into Thai visual culture through Khmer temple decoration during the Angkorian period and codified into Thai ornament during the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods from the 13th to 15th century.** Piriya Krairiksh's *Roots of Thai Art* traces the eight-petal form to the Brahmanic padma mandala used in Khmer temples at Angkor Wat and Banteay Srei, adopted by Thai court and temple craftsmen as the symbolic centre of cosmic ordering.
The Thai restyling is specific. Where the Khmer padma is often naturalistic (recognisably a lotus bloom), Thai Pra Jum Yam is geometric — the petals are stylised into almond-shaped lobes on an exact radial grid, and the central disc is proportioned to a fixed ratio with the petal length. The motif was fully canonical by the mid-Ayutthaya period and is the dominant ornament on royal regalia that survive from the 17th century forward.
The Royal Regalia catalogue (Office of the Royal Household, 2016) documents Pra Jum Yam on the Great Crown of Victory, the Royal Nine-Tiered Umbrella, ceremonial swords, and the coronation Sacred Water urns.
## Construction and geometry
**The canonical forms are the eight-petal (Prajam Yam Paed Klip) and sixteen-petal (Prajam Yam Sipho Klip) rosettes, constructed on a radial grid with 45-degree and 22.5-degree divisions respectively.** The Silpakorn handbook sets out the construction as:
1. Draw a circle defining the outer bound.
2. Draw a second concentric circle at approximately 35% of the outer radius — this is the central disc.
3. Divide the outer circle into eight or sixteen equal sectors (45 or 22.5 degrees).
4. On each sector axis, draw the petal as an almond (vesica piscis) shape reaching from the central disc to the outer bound.
5. Add a secondary ring of smaller petals rotated 22.5 degrees offset from the primary petals (optional, produces the "double rosette" form).
6. Fill the central disc with a smaller Pra Jum Yam (recursive), a Kanok unit, or a Dharmachakra wheel depending on register.
Proportions are fixed. The petal length is three times the central disc radius in the canonical form. The petal width at its widest point is one-fifth of its length. Double-ring Pra Jum Yam uses a 3:2 size ratio between the outer and inner rings of petals.
Sixteen-petal forms are reserved for the highest register (royal crowns, the central ceiling medallion of a royal hall). Eight-petal forms are the general-purpose version used in temple ceilings, cabinet panels, and textiles.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Pra Jum Yam dominates Thai royal regalia, royal ceremonial architecture, and elite-register lacquer and textile work.** Named examples:
- **Phra Maha Phichai Mongkut (Great Crown of Victory)** — the principal element of the Thai regalia is constructed around a central Pra Jum Yam with stacked sixteen-petal tiers, documented in the 2016 Royal Household catalogue
- **Royal Nine-Tiered Umbrella (Nopphapadon Maha Svetachat)** — each tier features Pra Jum Yam medallions in gold embroidery on white silk
- **Chakri Maha Prasat Throne Hall, Grand Palace, Bangkok** — the ceiling coffers are Pra Jum Yam panels in gold leaf on indigo
- **Wat Phra Kaew ubosot ceiling** — central Pra Jum Yam medallion directly above the Emerald Buddha
- **Royal Barge Suphannahong interior** — Pra Jum Yam seals on the canopy textile
- **Manuscript cabinet, Rama III period, National Museum Bangkok** — mother-of-pearl Pra Jum Yam corner seals on a black lacquer ground
- **Court textile "sabai" sashes** — Pra Jum Yam embroidered in gold thread on silk, worn as rank markers
Temple use outside the royal register is common but always at the central ceiling position or at the corners of panel borders, never as scattered decoration.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Pra Jum Yam symbolises cosmic order, royal legitimacy, and Buddhist Dharma, and while no formal legal restriction applies to its use, the sixteen-petal form is conventionally reserved for royal and ceremonial contexts.** The eight-petal form is fully available for commercial and secular design.
The convention is strictly observed in Thailand. A brand using a sixteen-petal Pra Jum Yam as a logo will read to Thai audiences as royal-warrant-adjacent and, if the brand has no royal connection, as presumptuous. The eight-petal form carries no such association and is widely used on heritage luxury packaging, hospitality identity, and editorial design.
No weekday association applies. No Royal Household Bureau approval is legally required (unlike Garuda), but commercial use of the sixteen-petal form alongside royal iconography may draw scrutiny under Thailand's stringent protection of royal symbols. Stay with the eight-petal version for commercial work.
The central disc of the motif is traditionally filled with another small motif. Leaving it empty reads as unfinished to Thai viewers.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Contemporary Thai luxury and heritage brands use the eight-petal Pra Jum Yam as a hallmark or seal element, most often at small scale on packaging and stationery as a quality mark.** Representative recent work:
- **Jim Thompson silk brand (2021 refresh)** — Pra Jum Yam eight-petal seal used as the care-label mark on every garment, rendered in single-colour embroidery
- **The Peninsula Bangkok hotel** — Pra Jum Yam medallion on menu covers and room-key envelopes, embossed in copper on ivory stock
- **Royal Orchid Sheraton stationery** — corner ornament on writing paper, printed in gold foil
- **THANN wellness packaging** — Pra Jum Yam as the product-line identifier on the jar lid, scaled small and centred
- **Chiang Mai Design Week 2023 identity** — abstract Pra Jum Yam used as the festival mark, reduced to a single-line geometric drawing
The pattern fails when designers scale it up as a decorative pattern fill. It is a seal, not a wallpaper.
## Free download
**The Pra Jum Yam vector pack on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) provides both the eight-petal (Paed Klip) and the reserved-use sixteen-petal (Sipho Klip) forms as CC BY 4.0 SVGs.** Files include the radial construction grid as a hidden layer, and a double-ring variant is available separately. Use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/) to colour the petals from a Thaitone palette. For related radial and floral motifs, see the [Lai Dok Mai page](/patterns/lai-dok-mai/) and the [patterns index](/patterns/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/thai-border.mdx
## What the Thai border is
**Thai border patterns, known collectively as Lai Krob (ลายกรอบ, "frame pattern") or as specific named repeats, are the continuous motif bands used to frame temple mural panels, manuscript pages, textile fields, and lacquer compositions — approximately thirty canonical repeat types, each built from one or two modular elements arrayed along a horizontal or vertical axis.** Border work is the workhorse of Thai ornamental tradition. Every composition, from the smallest manuscript page to the largest temple wall, uses borders to define register, separate zones, and carry the ornamental vocabulary in its simplest repeatable form.
For graphic designers, borders are the single most useful element from Thai pattern tradition because they adapt naturally to modern layout — keylines, packaging trim, book page edges, web dividers, tableware rims — without requiring the full cultural and compositional apparatus of a temple pediment or a royal rosette.
This page documents the major border families and provides a vector pack of thirty common repeats. Individual-motif pages (Lai Kanok, Mek Lai, Pra Jum Yam, Lai Dok Mai) cover the source motifs that feed into these border compositions.
## Origin and historical context
**Thai border patterns as a codified system developed across the Ayutthaya and early Rattanakosin periods (14th–19th century), drawing on individual motifs that themselves predate the border system and absorbing repeat-structure conventions from Chinese, Khmer, and Persian ornamental traditions encountered through trade and diplomacy.** The Ayutthaya-period consolidation is the key moment — the royal craft guilds of Ayutthaya formalised the thirty-or-so canonical repeats that remain the standard reference.
The Fine Arts Department's *Dictionary of Thai Ornament* catalogues the borders by structural type (chain, undulation, reciprocal, reciprocal-with-fill, linked-medallion) and by source motif (Kanok-based, Mek Lai-based, floral-based, figurative-based). The Silpakorn course handbook covers the thirty most-reproduced borders in its second-year Thai ornamental drawing module.
Rattanakosin-period temple restoration and new construction under Rama I through Rama V institutionalised the borders as the standard ornamental language for royal and religious work, and the post-World-War-II Fine Arts Department conservation programmes have kept the borders in continuous living use on temple restoration and new royal construction.
## Construction and geometry
**Thai border construction follows four core structural types, each with fixed proportional rules, and every individual border is named and classified within one of these types.** The four structural types:
| Type | Thai term | Description | Common proportion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chain | Khrua (เครือ) | Modular motifs linked tail-to-head along the axis | 1:3 height to unit-width |
| Undulation | Khlune (คลื่น) | Continuous wave with motifs in crests and troughs | 1:2 height to wave-period |
| Reciprocal | Sa-lap (สลับ) | Two motifs alternating, typically upright and inverted | 1:2 height to reciprocal-pair-width |
| Medallion-linked | Prajam Yam Khrua (ประจำยามเครือ) | Circular medallions connected by scrolling tendrils | 1:4 height to medallion-unit |
Construction rules shared across the types:
1. **Baseline and ceiling.** Set a horizontal baseline and ceiling defining the border height. Vertical borders use analogous left-right limits.
2. **Unit division.** Mark the repeat unit along the axis. Proportion is set per type.
3. **Motif placement.** Place the source motif(s) in fixed positions within each unit. Kanok-based chain borders have one Kanok per unit. Reciprocal borders have two motifs per unit. Medallion-linked borders have one central medallion plus two connecting tendrils per unit.
4. **Connective scrolls.** Use Lai Kan Kot (scrolling tendril) or Lai Kan Yaeng (branching vine) to link units into a continuous flow. The scrolls must maintain directional consistency along the full border length.
5. **Register stacking.** Primary border, secondary contrast border, and plain divider line. The Office of Traditional Arts handbook documents this as the canonical three-register border system on temple murals.
Thirty named borders cover the common range of Thai ornamental framing needs. The most frequently reproduced include Kanok Khrua (chained flame), Kanok Sa-lap (reciprocal flame), Prajam Yam Khrua (medallion-linked rosette), Mek Khrua (chained cloud), Dok Pikun Khrua (small-flower chain), and Lai Kan Kot Sa-lap (reciprocal scrolling tendril).
## Where it traditionally appears
**Thai borders appear on every major class of Thai ornamental object — temple murals, manuscript cabinets, mother-of-pearl inlay, ceremonial textiles, lacquer trays, royal stationery, and ceremonial invitations — functioning as the connective tissue between figurative and structural elements.** Named references:
- **Wat Phra Kaew mural borders** — the Ramakien cycle murals use a three-register border system throughout, with the primary border alternating Kanok Khrua and Prajam Yam Khrua across the cycle
- **Wat Suthat ordination hall** — Mek Khrua borders dominate the ceiling panels, framing figurative registers
- **National Museum Bangkok manuscript cabinets** — 17th–19th century cabinets preserve the full range of lacquer borders
- **Royal court textile sashes (sabai)** — woven borders on court dress, documented at Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles
- **Mother-of-pearl inlay on monastic fan covers (phat yot)** — borders in tiny nacre tesserae showing the borders at small scale
- **Rama V-era royal stationery** — printed borders on royal correspondence, preserved in the National Archives
- **Contemporary temple restoration** — the Fine Arts Department conservation programme continues to reproduce the canonical borders on temples undergoing restoration
Regional variants matter. Lanna (northern) borders compress the motifs and add Burmese influence. Southern borders preserve older Srivijaya-period floral vocabulary. Isan (northeastern) borders carry Lao and Khmer crossover.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Thai borders as a category carry no formal legal or ceremonial restrictions, and every one of the thirty canonical repeats is fully available for commercial, editorial, and decorative design use — with the caveat that specific source motifs within a border carry their own individual restrictions.** The borders built from Lai Kanok, Mek Lai, Lai Dok Mai, and Pra Jum Yam (eight-petal) are unrestricted. Borders that incorporate Garuda, sixteen-petal Pra Jum Yam, Yantra, or Buddha figures inherit the restrictions of those source motifs.
Practical rules:
- **No weekday associations.**
- **No Royal Household Bureau approval required** for the standard thirty borders.
- **Kanok-based borders are fully available.**
- **Mek Lai-based borders are fully available.**
- **Floral borders are fully available** (with the champa/funerary exception noted on the [Lai Dok Mai page](/patterns/lai-dok-mai/)).
- **Figurative borders** — those incorporating Kinnari, Naga, or celestial figures — are available but carry the cultural-register expectations of those figures.
- **Directional consistency is a strong convention.** Reversing the flow of motifs mid-border reads as a visible error.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Borders are the most frequently reused element of Thai pattern tradition in contemporary design, because their repeat-unit structure translates directly to modern layout needs — keylines on packaging, book page rules, tableware rims, web dividers, ceremonial stationery, and brand-system edge treatments.** Representative recent examples:
- **Mandarin Oriental Bangkok menu and stationery suite** — simplified Kanok Khrua border in copper foil on cream stock, used as the page-edge rule across the brand system
- **King Power duty-free heritage collection (2021)** — Prajam Yam Khrua medallion-linked border on premium packaging, printed in gold foil
- **Thai Airways Royal Silk Class menu covers** — Mek Khrua border as a top-and-bottom rule on the menu layout
- **Siam Paragon Chinese New Year campaign 2024** — Kanok Sa-lap reciprocal border adapted into mall wayfinding and shopping bag print
- **Chiang Mai Design Week programme (2023)** — Lai Kan Kot Sa-lap scrolling tendril border used as a section divider in the programme book
- **Wedding invitation suites by Thai stationery studios** — Dok Rak Khrua (ixora chain) and Dok Mali Khrua (jasmine chain) borders are industry standards for Thai-themed invitations
The borders adapt well to small scale (6–12 pt keylines), medium scale (packaging trim), and large scale (architectural and signage). Reduction to two-colour or single-colour renderings works cleanly. The one failure mode is over-use — stacking three or four borders of the same type on a single artefact reads as cluttered.
## Free download
**The Thai border pack on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) provides all thirty canonical repeats as CC BY 4.0 seamless-tileable SVG and AI files, organised by structural type (chain, undulation, reciprocal, medallion-linked) and by source motif (Kanok, Mek Lai, floral, figurative).** Each border ships with a construction-grid overlay layer and a single-tile-unit version for custom pattern assembly. Use the [Thai Pattern Maker](/tools/pattern-maker/) to recolour and scale, and combine with the individual motif pages — [Lai Kanok](/patterns/lai-kanok/), [Mek Lai](/patterns/mek-lai/), [Lai Dok Mai](/patterns/lai-dok-mai/) — to understand the source vocabulary feeding each border.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/patterns/yantra.mdx
## What the Yantra is
**Yantra, known in Thai as Sak Yant (สักยันต์), is the sacred geometric tradition of Thai Theravada Buddhism — roughly eighty-five canonical designs combining Pali-Khmer script with grid-based symbolic geometry, traditionally applied as tattoos, cloth amulets (pha yant), or protective banners under the supervision of an ajarn (master) practitioner.** Each design carries specific protective or empowering meaning, is activated by recited Pali-Khmer incantations (kata) during inscription, and is understood within the tradition as a living religious object rather than decorative ornament.
This is the only motif in the ThaiGraph pattern library that is not recommended for commercial graphic design use. Unlike Lai Kanok or Mek Lai, Yantra is not a cultural vocabulary that has been secularised. It is religious material, actively in use, taught by lineage-holding practitioners, and treated by Thai Buddhist authorities and the general Thai public as sacred. Commercial appropriation — Yantra on a T-shirt brand, a beverage label, a trendy logo — is broadly considered disrespectful by both the Sangha and the lay Thai population.
This page exists to document the tradition for designers who need to understand it (to recognise it, to avoid misusing it, or to work within its conventions on legitimate cultural and editorial briefs), not to license its use.
## Origin and historical context
**Sak Yant derives from the Theravada forest-tradition monastic lineage of Thailand, with close historical ties to Lanna (northern), central, and southern Thai monasteries, and draws on pre-Buddhist Indian yantra geometry combined with Pali-Khmer script.** The tradition is older than documentation allows us to trace precisely — continuous practice is documented from the Lanna period (late 13th century forward) and likely predates that.
The Khmer component is critical. Sak Yant inscriptions almost always include Khmer script or Khmer-Pali hybrid script rather than Thai script, because the Khom (Khmer-derived) script was the sacred liturgical script of the Thai Theravada tradition for most of its history. This gives Sak Yant its distinctive typographic character: a Thai tradition visually encoded in Khmer letterforms.
Individual Sak Yant designs are associated with specific lineages and specific ajarn. The most widely known contemporary lineage is that of Luang Pho Pern of Wat Bang Phra (Nakhon Chai Si, central Thailand), whose Wai Khru (teacher-veneration) festival in March draws tens of thousands of tattooed devotees annually. Ajarn Noo Kanpai, Ajarn Hnu Ganpai's student base, and former-monk ajarn in Lanna lineages represent other active traditions.
## Construction and geometry
**Sak Yant designs are constructed on grid-based geometry with Pali-Khmer script integrated as both content and composition element — the text is not a caption to the design, it is a structural component of it.** The principal design categories:
| Design | Thai name | Primary meaning | Composition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five Lines | Hah Taew (ห้าแถว) | Protection, luck, charm, fortune | Five horizontal lines of Khmer script |
| Nine Spires | Gao Yord (เก้ายอด) | Nine Buddhas, universal protection | Nine conical spires arrayed in a pyramid |
| Octagonal | Paed Tidt (แปดทิศ) | Protection in eight directions | Octagonal grid with compass script |
| Unalome | Unalome (อุณาโลม) | Path to enlightenment | Spiral tapering to a straight line |
| Tiger | Suea Paen (เสือเผ่น) | Authority, command | Tiger figure with script inscriptions |
| Garuda (protective) | Khrut (ครุฑ) | Power, royal protection | Garuda figure in Yantra geometry |
| Hanuman | Hanuman (หนุมาน) | Strength, valour | Hanuman figure in geometric border |
| Geometric square | Yant See Liam (ยันต์สี่เหลี่ยม) | Foundation protection | Square grid with four-corner Pali |
Construction shares common rules:
1. **Grid foundation.** The design is built on an underlying geometric grid (square, octagonal, or radial) that determines script placement and figure proportions.
2. **Pali-Khmer script integration.** Script is placed along grid lines, inside figures, and around borders as both content and visual element. Script is always in Khom (Khmer-derived) characters, not Thai.
3. **Figure geometry.** Animal or deity figures follow Thai classical drawing conventions adapted to the confines of the grid.
4. **Border enclosure.** Almost every Sak Yant has a border frame, either a rectangular grid or a circular enclosure, isolating the sacred space from its surroundings.
5. **Axis symmetry.** Most designs are symmetrical along one or two axes.
## Where it traditionally appears
**Sak Yant appears primarily as tattoos on the backs, shoulders, and chests of devotees who have received ajarn-supervised inscription, secondarily on cloth amulets (pha yant) carried or displayed, and on protective banners hung in homes, shops, and temples.** Primary contexts:
- **Wat Bang Phra, Nakhon Chai Si** — the best-known centre of Sak Yant practice, site of the annual Wai Khru festival attended by tens of thousands
- **Wat Suthat Wai Khru practice, Bangkok** — urban equivalent festival
- **Forest-tradition monasteries across Thailand** — many forest monasteries maintain ajarn practice
- **Pha Yant cloth amulets** — printed cotton or silk cloths with Yantra designs, used as household protection or carried in wallets, widely available at temples and amulet markets
- **Thai boxing (Muay Thai)** — pre-match blessings at major stadiums often include Sak Yant reference and fighters frequently display Yantra tattoos
- **Military and police traditions** — certain Thai military and police lineages maintain Yantra practice for protection
- **Southeast Asian diaspora** — Thai and Lao communities in Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Western countries
The Angelina Jolie tattoo of 2003, inscribed by Ajarn Noo Kanpai, brought Sak Yant to international attention and triggered a wave of Western tourist demand that the Thai Sangha has since publicly discouraged.
## Cultural meaning and restrictions
**Sak Yant is sacred religious material, currently in active use, and commercial or decorative appropriation is considered disrespectful by the Thai Sangha and general public — no legal prohibition exists, but social and professional consequences in Thailand are real.** This is the single strongest cultural restriction of any motif in the ThaiGraph library.
Specific considerations:
- **No Royal Household Bureau approval is required** — Yantra is not a royal symbol. But the cultural weight is arguably greater than Garuda's legal weight.
- **The Thai Sangha has publicly discouraged commercial use.** National Office of Buddhism statements in 2019 and 2022 addressed tourist commodification specifically.
- **Traditional practitioner rules apply to inscription,** not to representation. Reproducing a Yantra in a book or educational article is not itself an offence; using one as a brand logo is a social offence.
- **The depicted Buddha on certain Yantra adds legal weight.** Thai law treats Buddha images with respect requirements, and Yantra featuring Buddha figures fall under these.
- **Foreigner sensitivities are heightened.** Non-Thai brands using Yantra are scrutinised more sharply than Thai brands, which are assumed to understand the tradition.
The ethical design practice is to treat Yantra as analogous to religious iconography generally — available for editorial, academic, and cultural commentary, not available for appropriation as decoration.
## Modern usage in graphic design
**Legitimate contemporary use of Yantra in Thai design is overwhelmingly editorial, academic, museum, or documentary — not commercial or decorative — and even those uses are preceded by consultation with practitioners and cultural authorities.** Recent work fitting this pattern:
- **Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Bangkok exhibitions** featuring Sak Yant as subject matter
- **Thai Film Archive publications** on Thai supernatural cinema, which engage with Sak Yant iconography
- **Academic books** including the Drouyer and Cummings references in the sources section above
- **Documentary photography** by Thai photographers including Cedric Arnold's long-term Sak Yant series
- **Editorial illustration** in Thai cultural journals and foreign design publications covering the tradition respectfully
- **Museum signage and interpretive material** at Wat Bang Phra and other centres
Applications to avoid: fashion apparel, fast-moving consumer goods, hospitality branding, tattoo studio logos outside the ajarn tradition, generic "exotic Thai aesthetic" product lines. Thai designers will generally refuse these briefs; foreign designers who accept them typically face negative reception when the work reaches Thai audiences.
## Free download
**A reference Yantra geometric diagram is available on [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) under a restrictive educational-use-only license, provided strictly for academic, editorial, and museum use.** The file is an unblessed geometric construction without Pali-Khmer script — the script is intentionally omitted because the traditional view holds that script placement without ajarn consecration is inappropriate. For further reading see the Drouyer and Cummings sources cited above, and for unrestricted Thai ornamental alternatives see the [Lai Kanok page](/patterns/lai-kanok/) and the [patterns index](/patterns/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/anakotmai.mdx
## What Anakotmai is
**Anakotmai (อนาคตใหม่) is a free Thai loopless sans in three weights — Light, Medium and Bold — drawn by Cadson Demak as a custom headline typeface, and given away by the party that commissioned it under terms that permit commercial use.** It covers Thai and Latin, and it is not on Google Fonts.
The design brief is in Cadson Demak's own release post: a loopless, wide structure on a Neo-Humanist foundation, mixing sweeping curved strokes with straight lines on selected characters so the face stays recognisable at headline sizes. The Latin is drawn to the same visual texture as the Thai, which is why mixed-script settings hold one voice instead of reading as two fonts sharing a layout.
The ThaiFaces specimen records the designer as สมิชฌน์ สมันเลาะ, published 2018, filed under Sans-serif, Display and Corporate Identity. In English he publishes as Smich Smanloh, a type director and project leader at Cadson Demak. For the rest of that foundry's catalogue, see [Cadson Demak fonts](/fonts/categories/cadson-demak/).
## Is Anakotmai free?
**Yes, and unusually for a custom corporate typeface, commercial use is explicitly included. Both official distribution pages state the font is "แจกฟรี เพื่อสาธารณะประโยชน์" — given away free for public benefit — and that it "สามารถดาวน์โหลดใช้งานได้อย่างอิสระรวมทั้งเชิงพาณิชย์", may be downloaded and used freely, including commercially.**
That wording appears on the [People's Party font page](https://peoplesparty.or.th/font-anakotmai/) and on the older [Move Forward Party font page](https://www.moveforwardparty.org/font-anakotmai/), and both link the same Google Drive folder. You do not need to ask permission, register, or pay.
What that sentence does not do is turn Anakotmai into an open-source font. It grants use. It says nothing about modifying the outlines, renaming a derivative, or redistributing the files yourself, and there is no SIL Open Font License text in the package. If your project needs those rights spelled out in writing, see the alternatives below and our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how the licence families differ.
## Anakotmai weights: Light, Medium and Bold
**Anakotmai ships three weights and three styles: Light, Medium and Bold. There are no italics, no condensed or extended widths, and no variable axis.**
| Weight | What it is for | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Anakotmai Light | Oversized headlines, cover type, anything that needs air | Thins out fast at small sizes; keep it large |
| Anakotmai Medium | Subheads, standfirsts, deck copy, UI labels | The most usable of the three for mid-size text |
| **Anakotmai Bold** | Posters, banners, stage backdrops, social graphics | The cut most people actually come for |
**If you searched for "Anakotmai Bold", that is the heaviest weight in the family — there is nothing above it.** No Black, no ExtraBold, no Heavy. When a layout calls for more weight than Bold gives you, the answer is a bigger size or a different family, not a fourth cut, because a fourth cut does not exist.
Three weights is a headline inventory, not a text inventory. Set running copy in a proper text family — [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the obvious choice — and keep Anakotmai for the lines people read from across a room. You can put your own copy through all three weights in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## How to download Anakotmai
**The official download is a public Google Drive folder linked from the People's Party font page. It holds two files: Anakotmai.zip (494 KB) and Pracharath_FFPv.2.zip (73 KB), both shared on 24 October 2561 (2018).**
Anakotmai.zip is the one you want. The second archive is a separate release the same party distributed from the same folder, named Pracharath_FFPv.2.zip, and it is not part of the Anakotmai family. Nothing in the folder costs money and nothing asks for an email address.
A note on where the files come from. The original futureforwardparty.org download page is gone, and links to it in older Thai design articles are dead. The [People's Party page](https://peoplesparty.or.th/font-anakotmai/) is the current live host. Because both party pages point at the same Drive folder rather than at separate uploads, the file you get is identical either way.
Ignore the aggregator sites offering "Anakotmai free download" with their own installers. The font is already free from a first-party source, so there is no reason to take a repackaged copy from anywhere else.
## Where Anakotmai came from
**Anakotmai was commissioned as the headline face for one political party's communications, and it has now outlived two of them.** Cadson Demak states the purpose plainly in its release post: the typeface was drawn to sit on the Future Forward Party's publicity material.
Thailand's Constitutional Court dissolved the Future Forward Party on 21 February 2020, ruling that a loan from the party leader fell under "other benefits" in section 66 of the Political Parties Act. The successor party, Move Forward, kept hosting the font. The Constitutional Court then dissolved Move Forward on 7 August 2024, in a case arising from its campaign to amend the lèse-majesté provision in section 112 of the Penal Code, finding that the party had acted to overthrow the democratic system of government with the King as head of state — ล้มล้างการปกครองระบอบประชาธิปไตยอันมีพระมหากษัตริย์ทรงเป็นประมุข, the court's own formulation. The People's Party now hosts the same file.
Two practical consequences for a designer. First, the association is live in Thailand, not historical trivia — a Thai audience may read the typeface as a political signal, so choose it knowingly for commercial brand work. Second, the hosting has moved twice in six years, which is an argument for archiving the files you licence rather than hotlinking a party website.
## Name variants and spellings
**The same typeface is searched for under several names, all of which mean this font:**
- **Anakotmai** — the name Cadson Demak and both party pages use
- **อนาคตใหม่** — the Thai name, which is also the party's name
- **ฟอนต์ อนาคตใหม่ / ฟอนต์ anakotmai** — "font" prefixed, the standard Thai search shape
- **Anakotmai Bold** — the heaviest of the three weights, and the most-searched cut
- **Anakotmai font download** — the query behind most of the traffic to this page
- **Future Forward font** — searched by people who know the party's English name but not the typeface's
- **Anakotmai thai font** — the mixed-script form used when the Thai character set is the point
There is no separate "Anakotmai Pro", "Anakotmai New" or numbered release. One family, three weights, one distribution point.
## Free alternatives to Anakotmai
**If you need the rights spelled out — modification, self-hosted webfont, embedding, derivative work — use a Thai family under the SIL Open Font License instead. Three of them come from the same foundry.** Licences confirmed in the Google Fonts repository:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — OFL, Cadson Demak, nine weights from 100 to 900 with an italic at every weight. The closest match in character with a far deeper weight range.
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — OFL, Cadson Demak, also nine weights with italics, in a slightly rounder and quieter register.
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — OFL, Cadson Demak, six weights from ExtraLight 200 to Bold 700. Softer letterforms, good for signage and friendly headlines.
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL, Suppakit Chalermlarp, weights 100 to 800 with italics. Not a display face; the body companion you will need anyway.
None of these is a drop-in replacement. Anakotmai's wide proportions are the point of it, and swapping in a narrower family will change every line break. Browse the full set in [loopless Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/loopless/) and [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/).
## Best use cases
**Anakotmai is a headline and display face: wide, loopless and modern, built to carry short Thai lines at size.** Strong briefs:
- Poster and banner headlines that must read from a distance
- Social graphics and video title cards, mostly in Medium and Bold
- Event and campaign branding wanting an assertive contemporary Thai voice
- Editorial pull-quotes and section openers above a quieter body face
Where it does not fit: running body text, anything needing italics or a weight above Bold, projects that require a formally open licence for modification or redistribution, and commercial brand work where the political association would be read as a statement.
## Pairings
**Anakotmai works as the display voice above a well-built Thai text family, never as the text family itself.** Three combinations:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed Thai body workhorse; its neutrality lets Anakotmai's wide headlines carry the page
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — a looped serif counterpoint for editorial layouts that want contrast between a modern headline and traditional text
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — a fellow Cadson Demak loopless sans for secondary hierarchy when the whole system should stay loopless
For the mechanics of matching Thai to Latin across a bilingual system, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Licensing
**Anakotmai is free to download and free to use commercially, on the authority of the party pages that distribute it. It is not released under the SIL Open Font License, and no published term covers modification, renaming, or redistribution of the files.**
ThaiFaces files it with the note "เงื่อนไข : ฟอนต์อัตลักษณ์องค์กร กรุณาเลือกใช้อย่างเหมาะสม" — a corporate identity font, please use it appropriately. That is a request about judgement, not a legal restriction, and it reflects what the typeface was made for.
Practically: use it in client work, in print, in campaigns, in commercial design, and keep a copy of the source page with your project files as evidence of the grant. Do not redistribute the font files yourself, do not sell it inside a template, and do not modify the outlines, because none of those is covered. If you need any of them, use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) under the OFL, and compare the terms side by side in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/). Every family in the [font library](/fonts/) carries its licence on the page.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/angsana-new.mdx
Angsana New (อังสนานิว) has been the default Thai serif of Word documents in Thailand for three decades. If you are here because it vanished after a fresh Windows 11 or Windows 10 install, the first section restores it. Its origins, the AngsanaUPC difference, the licence and the free substitutes follow.
## Angsana New missing from Windows 11 or 10? How to restore it, and whether it works on Mac and phones
**The font is not gone. Microsoft moved Angsana New out of the default Windows 10 and 11 install into an optional feature called Thai Supplemental Fonts, which you switch back on for free from Settings in five steps, with nothing to download from third-party sites. Mac, iPhone and Android do not have it in the operating system and there is no file to install, but Microsoft 365 subscribers get it inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint on those devices as a cloud font; outside Office, use the free Thai serif in the last subsection.**
| Device | Has Angsana New? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 11 / 10 | Yes, but switched off | Settings → System → Optional features → Thai Supplemental Fonts |
| Windows 7 / 8.1 / XP | Yes, pre-installed | Nothing |
| Mac | Not in the OS | Available inside Office apps via Microsoft 365 cloud fonts; outside Office use Noto Serif Thai (free) |
| iPhone / iPad / Android | Not in the OS | Available inside Office apps via Microsoft 365 cloud fonts; system Thai fonts are Thonburi (Apple) and Noto Sans Thai (Android) |
### Restoring it on Windows 11
Steps per [Microsoft's documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-missing-fonts) (revised 27 February 2025):
1. Right-click **Start** → **Settings**
2. Left pane: **System** → right pane: **Optional features**
(Shortcut: right-click Start → **Run** → enter `ms-settings:optionalfeatures` → OK)
3. Select **View features** next to **Add an optional feature**
4. Find and tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts**
5. Select **Next**, review, then **Add**
Microsoft notes that on some Windows 11 builds the Optional features pane sits under **Settings → Apps** instead. If you cannot find it, the `ms-settings:optionalfeatures` shortcut opens the same pane on every build.
### Restoring it on Windows 10
1. Right-click **Start** → **Settings** → **System** → left pane **Optional features**
2. Select the **+** next to **Add a feature**
3. Tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts** and select **Add**
For Windows 10 builds before 22H2, Microsoft's [Windows 10 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_10_font_list) gives the older path: **Settings → Apps → Apps & features → Optional features**.
### The alternative: add Thai as a language and the fonts follow
The [Windows 10 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_10_font_list) explains that most script-specific font packages "are added automatically by Windows Update when the associated languages are enabled in language settings (for example, by enabling a keyboard)". So if you want full Thai language support, go to **Settings → Time & language → Language & region** (Windows 11) or **Time & Language → Language** (Windows 10), add Thai under Preferred languages and choose the language features you need during install. The shortcut to that pane is `ms-settings:regionlanguage`.
**Both routes install through Windows Update, so the device must be online.** Where an organisation blocks Windows Update, the optional feature will not install and needs either a temporary exception or a Features on Demand deployment.
### Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android
**Angsana New is not part of the Apple or Android operating systems and Microsoft has never released a file you could install yourself, but Microsoft 365 subscribers can use it inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac, iOS, Android and the web through Office's cloud fonts.** Apple's [Fonts included with macOS Sonoma](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) lists no Angsana New, AngsanaUPC or any other Microsoft Thai font — the Thai face on Mac and iPhone is [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/), and Android uses Noto Sans Thai per the [Android system font configuration](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/main/data/fonts/fonts.xml). A Word file set in Angsana New opened on those devices without Microsoft 365 gets substituted and reflows.
The one legitimate route outside Windows is **Office cloud fonts**. Microsoft's [Cloud fonts in Office](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb) page explains that cloud fonts are hosted in the cloud by Microsoft 365 and available in the latest Office apps on Windows, macOS, web, Android and iOS (availability varies by app); the list includes Angsana New, AngsanaUPC, [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), CordiaUPC, [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) and [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/). Picking the font in the menu downloads it, and Microsoft states that documents created with cloud fonts "will render the same when opened in the Office apps listed in the table—without you having to embed them". The scope is Office apps under a Microsoft 365 subscription only: the font does not appear in Font Book or other apps on the device, and it carries no webfont right. For anything outside Office, share a PDF or start from a free font that installs everywhere.
### The free Thai serif that installs everywhere: Noto Serif Thai
**If a document must open identically on Windows, Mac, phones and the web, use [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/) — a Thai serif in nine weights under the SIL Open Font License, [free from Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+Thai).** Commercial use, web embedding and sending files to a printer are all covered. To install:
- **Windows** — right-click the .zip → **Extract**, then right-click the font files → **Install**, per [Microsoft's guide](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-font-b7c5f17c-4426-4b53-967f-455339c564c1)
- **Mac** — double-click the font file in Finder and click **Install**, per [Apple's Font Book guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/font-book/install-and-validate-fonts-fntbk1000/mac)
- **iPhone / iPad** — install through a font-manager app from the App Store and manage under **Settings → General → Fonts**, per [Apple's guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-and-manage-fonts-iphb2517689c/ios); usable in document apps
- **Web** — embed with `@font-face` or load from Google Fonts directly
If the destination is a Thai government agency, [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) is the closer fit. All options are compared under "Free Thai serif alternatives to Angsana New" below.
## What Angsana New is
**Angsana New is the Thai serif Microsoft bundles with Windows and Office. Microsoft's typography documentation describes it in one line: "a Thai font designed by Unity Progress and offered under license from Microsoft."** The copyright on the same page reads "© 1992 Unity Progress. Portions © 2004 The Monotype Corporation. Portions © 2015 Microsoft Corporation."
The family ships in four styles — Angsana New, Angsana New Bold, Angsana New Bold Italic and Angsana New Italic — packaged in a single file, `Angsana.ttc` (a TrueType Collection). That differs from [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), which ships as four separate `.ttf` files.
Angsana New is the serif half of the default Thai pair on Windows, with Cordia New as the sans half. Both come from Unity Progress and share the same 1992 copyright year. That is why two decades of Thai contracts, government letters and academic papers look interchangeable — not because anyone chose the typeface, but because it was what the machine had.
## Angsana New vs AngsanaUPC
**They are two cuts of the same family that Microsoft ships side by side, not a replacement and a predecessor — [AngsanaUPC](/fonts/angsana-upc/) and Angsana New both appear in the current Thai Supplemental Fonts list for Windows.** "UPC" comes from the designer's name, Unity Progress Corporation.
The difference that matters in practice is **metrics**: character widths, line heights and mark positioning are not identical between the two cuts. A legacy document laid out in AngsanaUPC will break lines in different places on a machine that only has Angsana New, changing pagination and shifting tables. Most "it printed differently from what I set" complaints trace back to this, not to the printer.
**The fix is to install the whole set so files can call the exact cut they were laid out in**, rather than substituting fonts document by document. The other UPC families that arrive in the same feature are [DilleniaUPC](/fonts/dillenia-upc/), [EucrosiaUPC](/fonts/eucrosia-upc/), [FreesiaUPC](/fonts/freesia-upc/), [IrisUPC](/fonts/iris-upc/), [JasmineUPC](/fonts/jasmine-upc/), [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/), [LilyUPC](/fonts/lily-upc/) and [BrowalliaUPC](/fonts/browallia-upc/).
## Angsana New weights and styles
**Microsoft lists four styles: Angsana New, Angsana New Bold, Angsana New Italic and Angsana New Bold Italic — two real weights, Regular and Bold, each with an italic companion.** There is no Light, Medium, SemiBold or Black, and no variable-font version.
All four sit inside the single `Angsana.ttc` file, which is why copying the font between machines by dragging files so often comes up short: people look for four `.ttf` files that do not exist. Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list) records the current version of that file as 5.05.
The font covers Thai and Latin — Microsoft's OpenType data lists code pages 1874 Thai and 1252 Latin. A practical note: Thai stacks vowels and tone marks above and below the line, so Thai documents generally need a larger point size than a Latin document set for the same reading comfort. Test at real size before locking a template rather than inheriting values from an English one.
## Where to download Angsana New (and fixing the missing font)
**Microsoft offers no download. The Download row on the official page reads "N/A – Exclusively included with Microsoft products and services where applicable."** If your machine runs licensed Windows or Office, you already have the right to use it — the task is enabling it with the steps in the first section, not buying it and not downloading it.
Angsana New disappears from Windows 10 and 11 because Microsoft moved the Thai families out of the default install into an optional feature called **Thai Supplemental Fonts**, to reduce the operating system footprint, improve performance and optimise disk space. **After a clean install or a cross-version upgrade, optional fonts are not enabled by default.** Microsoft also states plainly that removing these fonts from the default install is a permanent change in behaviour that will remain in future releases. The only Thai font still in the default Windows 11 install is Leelawadee UI.
### Are files from free font sites usable?
**The `Angsana.ttc` and `angsa.ttf` files circulating on aggregator sites were extracted from Windows installations and carry no licence**, because Microsoft has never sold or distributed this font as a standalone file. Installing them on a machine without a Windows or Office licence, or self-hosting them as a webfont, falls outside the licence completely. Use the steps in the first section, or move to an open-licensed family below.
## Is Angsana New free? Can it be used commercially?
**Free in the sense of being included in the Windows or Office licence you already paid for — not free in the open-licence sense.** Commercial work on a properly licensed machine is fine: drafting contracts, producing reports, laying out books, exporting PDFs.
What is not permitted: redistributing the font files, embedding the font in non-Microsoft software or products, and self-hosting it as a webfont. Those require separate licensing through the enterprise route Microsoft links from its documentation. For web projects, starting from an open licence is faster and cheaper than negotiating.
## Free Thai serif alternatives to Angsana New
**If the document has to leave the Windows world — onto the web, to a printer, or to a colleague on a Mac — pick an open-licensed Thai serif from the start.**
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — the Thai serif from the Noto project under the SIL Open Font License, free for commercial use and web embedding. The closest match for the document-body role.
- **[Pridi](/fonts/pridi/)** — an OFL Thai serif with a more contemporary voice, better for editorial work that should not read as an official memo.
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — when the destination is a Thai government agency, this is the closer fit to the expected standard. See also the revised [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/).
- **[Kinnari](/fonts/kinnari/)** and **[Norasi](/fonts/norasi/)** — Thai serifs from the free font sets long used on Linux and in open-source document workflows.
Test them against your own copy in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/), or browse [Thai serif fonts](/fonts/categories/serif/) and [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/).
## All 14 fonts that install together
**Enabling Thai Supplemental Fonts once delivers all fourteen of Microsoft's Thai families.** Per Microsoft's published list:
- [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/) · [AngsanaUPC](/fonts/angsana-upc/)
- [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) · [BrowalliaUPC](/fonts/browallia-upc/)
- [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) · [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/)
- [DilleniaUPC](/fonts/dillenia-upc/) · [EucrosiaUPC](/fonts/eucrosia-upc/) · [FreesiaUPC](/fonts/freesia-upc/)
- [IrisUPC](/fonts/iris-upc/) · [JasmineUPC](/fonts/jasmine-upc/) · [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/) · [LilyUPC](/fonts/lily-upc/)
- [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/)
If an old document opens garbled, install the whole set once rather than chasing individual files.
## Best use cases
**Angsana New is the default for formal Thai documents authored and read on Windows.** Strong briefs:
- Formal Thai business correspondence in Microsoft Word — contracts, internal memos, official letters
- Legal documents and forms that still specify a Thai serif for body text
- Corporate templates that must stay compatible with thousands of existing files
- Academic work at Thai universities with fixed body-text formatting rules
Where it does not fit: websites (no webfont licence), brand and editorial print, and any job that requires shipping font files to a supplier. For those, [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/), [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) or [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) suit better; for a contemporary look, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/).
## Pairings
**Angsana New pairs inside Microsoft's own Thai bundle, serving as the serif partner to Cordia New's sans.** Three pairings:
- **[Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/)** — the Unity Progress sans from the same year, for headings and UI
- **[Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/)** — the wider sans in the set, useful for separating heading levels
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — when the document is bound for a Thai public agency, move the body text to that standard
The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) goes deeper on Thai-Latin pairing; the [fonts directory](/fonts/) has the full catalogue.
## Licensing
**Angsana New is proprietary software with Microsoft listed as the font vendor. Usage rights attach to that machine's Windows or Office licence. There is no standalone sale, no public webfont licence, and no redistribution right.** The official copyright line is "© 1992 Unity Progress. Portions © 2004 The Monotype Corporation. Portions © 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved."
Microsoft's product list for this font starts at Windows XP (font version 2.20) and runs through Windows 11, plus Office applications. Organisations needing rights beyond that scope must negotiate separately via the route linked from the [Angsana New documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/angsana-new). For work that should not involve licence negotiation at all, [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/) and [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) deliver Thai serif character under the SIL Open Font License with no conditions attached.
## Frequently asked questions about Angsana New
**Nearly every question about Angsana New is the same one — where the font went after a Windows reinstall and how to get it back without a third-party download — and the short, sourced answers are below.**
### Where can I download the Thai Angsana New font for Windows 11?
**You do not download it.** It is already on the machine as an optional feature. Enable it at **Settings → System → Optional features → View features → Thai Supplemental Fonts → Next → Add**, per [Microsoft's documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-missing-fonts). The PC must be online because Windows Update delivers the files. Copies on free-font sites carry no licence.
### Why does Word have no Angsana New after a Windows upgrade?
**Because Microsoft moved all fourteen Thai families into an optional feature that is not enabled after a clean install or upgrade.** Microsoft describes this as a permanent change, so Word substitutes another font and lines reflow. Enabling Thai Supplemental Fonts once brings back Angsana New, [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) and every UPC family.
### Can I use Angsana New on a Mac or iPhone?
**Only inside Microsoft 365's Office apps.** Apple's [macOS Sonoma font list](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) has no Angsana New and Microsoft distributes no standalone file, but Microsoft's [Cloud fonts in Office](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb) page lists Angsana New as a cloud font that Microsoft 365 subscribers can use in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac, iOS, Android and the web. Apple's system Thai font is [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/), a looped sans. For a Thai serif outside Office on a Mac, install [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/) from Google Fonts by double-clicking the file and clicking Install in Font Book.
### Do I need both Angsana New and AngsanaUPC?
**Install both — and in practice they arrive together.** Both live in the same `Angsana.ttc` file per Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list), and both switch on when you tick Thai Supplemental Fonts. Legacy documents laid out in [AngsanaUPC](/fonts/angsana-upc/) get their original line breaks back once the exact cut they were set in is present.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/angsana-upc.mdx
## What AngsanaUPC is
**AngsanaUPC (อังสนายูพีซี) is the looped Thai serif that Microsoft bundles with Windows and Office. Microsoft's typography documentation describes it in one line: "Angsana UPC is a Thai font designed by Unity Progress and offered under license from Microsoft."** It ships in four styles — AngsanaUPC, AngsanaUPC Bold, AngsanaUPC Italic and AngsanaUPC Bold Italic — and covers Thai and Latin, with code pages 1874 Thai and 1252 Latin.
One thing to settle before anything else. If the font your document actually names is the New cut rather than the UPC cut, the page you want is [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/); this page is about the UPC cut only. The distinction matters less than most people fear, and the next section explains exactly why.
AngsanaUPC is rarely a font anyone chose. It arrived with the operating system and got written into templates that outlived the machines they were made on. That makes it a compatibility face first: when a twenty-year-old Thai document opens and looks right, a UPC family is usually the reason. The rest of that family sits in the [Windows and Office Thai font set](/fonts/categories/windows-fonts/).
## AngsanaUPC and the New cut are the same font data
**On current Windows they are not two fonts. They are one set of outlines published under two family names inside a single file.** Microsoft's own Windows 11 font list gives all four AngsanaUPC styles and all four New-cut styles the same file name, `Angsana.ttc`, at the same version number. Nothing in Windows ships an AngsanaUPC that the other name does not also address.
We opened the file to check rather than take that on trust. `Angsana.ttc` on Windows 11 (font revision 5.06) is a TrueType Collection of eight faces, four under each family name. For every matching style, the two faces point at the **identical byte ranges** for the glyph outlines (`glyf`, `loca`), the advance widths (`hmtx`), the character map (`cmap`), the vertical metrics (`hhea`, `OS/2`) and the OpenType layout tables (`GSUB`, `GPOS`, `GDEF`). The only tables that differ are `name` — which holds the family name — and the modified timestamp in `head`. Both carry 4096 units per em, 362 glyphs, and an ascender of 3780 against a descender of −980 in Regular.
That matches what Microsoft's own people said long before we measured it. In August 2007, Microsoft internationalization engineer Michael S. Kaplan listed "Angsana New ≈ Angsana UPC" among the duplicate families in Windows and wrote: "The only difference I can see between the UPC and the New versions is the name."
**So the practical answer to "which one do I install" is that you cannot install one without the other.** Enabling the Thai Supplemental Fonts optional feature delivers `Angsana.ttc`, and both names appear in your font menu together. Picking between them in a font menu changes the name recorded in the file and nothing about the rendering.
Two honest limits on that finding. It describes the version of the file Windows ships today, not the 2.20 version that went out with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — we have not inspected those binaries and make no claim about them. And it says nothing about third-party UPC files with the same names, which we have no way to audit.
## What "UPC" stands for
**Microsoft's documentation names the designer as Unity Progress, and its page for the sans counterpart says the design work was done by "Unity Progress Corp" in 1992 — the initials that the UPC suffix matches.** Kaplan's 2007 post gives the licensor's name in a third form, "Unity Progress Co., Ltd."
What we will not do is present the expansion as documented fact. **No Microsoft page we could find writes the abbreviation out in full.** The reading is strong, the company name is right there in Microsoft's own text, and every UPC-suffixed Thai family in Windows carries the same 1992 Unity Progress copyright — but it is a reading, not a quotation, and this site marks the difference.
The suffix is a family marker, not a technical designation. It appears across the whole Microsoft Thai set: [BrowalliaUPC](/fonts/browallia-upc/), [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/), DilleniaUPC, EucrosiaUPC, FreesiaUPC, IrisUPC, JasmineUPC and LilyUPC all belong to it.
## Every AngsanaUPC style
**Microsoft lists four styles built on two real weights — Regular and Bold — each with a slanted companion. There is no Light, no Medium, no Black, and no variable-font version.**
| Style | PostScript name | File on Windows 11 | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|---|
| AngsanaUPC | `AngsanaUPC` | `Angsana.ttc` | Document body text |
| AngsanaUPC Bold | `AngsanaUPC-Bold` | `Angsana.ttc` | Headings and emphasis |
| AngsanaUPC Italic | `AngsanaUPC-Italic` | `Angsana.ttc` | Cited titles, foreign terms |
| AngsanaUPC Bold Italic | `AngsanaUPC-BoldItalic` | `Angsana.ttc` | Combined emphasis |
The PostScript names are worth knowing, because they are what a PDF names when it reports an embedded or missing font. If a print house tells you a file wants `AngsanaUPC-Bold`, that is the Bold style of this family and nothing else.
Note that AngsanaUPC is one of only two UPC families packaged as a collection. Microsoft's Windows 11 list ships DilleniaUPC as `Upcdl.ttf`, EucrosiaUPC as `Upcel.ttf`, FreesiaUPC as `Upcfl.ttf`, IrisUPC as `Upcil.ttf`, JasmineUPC as `Upcjl.ttf`, KodchiangUPC as `Upckl.ttf` and LilyUPC as `Upcll.ttf` — one file per style, the old naming scheme. Angsana and Browallia are the exceptions.
Thai stacks vowels and tone marks above and below the line, so a Thai document set in this family generally needs a larger point size than a Latin document would for the same reading comfort. Test at real size rather than inheriting values from an English template — the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/) will show you the difference against your own copy.
## Is AngsanaUPC free?
**It is free in the sense that it is covered by the Windows or Office licence you already hold. It is not free in the open-licence sense, and there is nothing to buy.** Microsoft's Download row for this font reads, in full: "N/A – Exclusively included with Microsoft products and services where applicable."
Everyday commercial work on a licensed machine is fine — contracts, reports, book layouts, PDF export. What the bundled licence does not cover is redistributing the font files, embedding the font in non-Microsoft software, and self-hosting it as a webfont. Those three need separate terms through the enterprise licensing route Microsoft links from its documentation.
Files named `Angsana.ttc` or `angsau.ttf` circulating on aggregator sites were extracted from Windows installations. Microsoft has never sold this font as a standalone download, so there is no licence behind those copies. Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out how bundled system fonts differ from OFL faces.
## How to get AngsanaUPC without paying for it
**There is no price and no purchase. On Windows 10 and 11 the font arrives through an optional feature called Thai Supplemental Fonts, which installs fourteen Thai families in one action — AngsanaUPC among them.**
Microsoft moved these families out of the default install to reduce the operating system footprint, improve performance and optimize disk space usage. After a fresh install or an upgrade, in Microsoft's words, "optional fonts aren't enabled by default" — which is the actual cause of "Windows 11 has no AngsanaUPC". Microsoft also states that the removal is a permanent change in behaviour that will remain in future releases, so waiting for it to come back is not a plan.
Two routes, both from Microsoft's documentation:
- **Optional features.** Run `ms-settings:optionalfeatures`, choose **View features** next to **Add an optional feature**, tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts**, then **Next** and **Add**. On Windows 10 the pane is **System → Optional features** and the button is **+ Add a feature**.
- **Add Thai as a language.** Run `ms-settings:regionlanguage` and add Thai under **Preferred languages**, selecting the language features you want. This brings the fonts plus full Thai language support.
Both routes pull the files through Windows Update, so the device has to be online. Where an organisation blocks Windows Update, the optional feature will not install and needs either an exception or a Features on Demand deployment.
In Office, the family is also on Microsoft's cloud fonts list, which is why a document can render correctly in a current Office app on a machine where the font is not installed locally.
## What happens when AngsanaUPC is substituted
**Swapping it for the New cut on a current Windows machine does nothing at all — same outlines, same widths, same line metrics, as measured above. Swapping it for a genuinely different font is what damages a layout.**
Microsoft is blunt about the second case: "In most cases, font substitution causes the text to flow differently. Line breaks, column breaks, page breaks, line spacing, and hyphenation will likely change, even if the substitute font is similar to the missing font." When a font is neither installed nor embedded, Windows supplies a default substitute — you do not get to approve it, and you often do not get told.
This is why the same Thai document can look right in the office and wrong at the print house. The failure is not the printer and not the two UPC and New names; it is the file landing on a machine where neither is present, most often a Mac, a phone, or a Linux print server. Three practical consequences:
- **A document that names AngsanaUPC keeps naming it forever.** The file stores a typeface name, not the typeface. Renaming the font in your font menu does not change what an old document asks for.
- **Page counts move.** Reflowed line breaks cascade, so a substituted Thai document can gain or lose pages, which matters for anything with numbered clauses or a fixed form.
- **Embedding is the fix Microsoft names.** Its Office guidance is to embed fonts to preserve the layout when sharing with people on other versions. That preserves the file; it does not give the recipient a licence to use the font in their own work.
If the document has to survive leaving Windows, the durable answer is to set it in an open-licensed Thai serif from the start rather than to rely on a system font being present.
## Why you still have UPC files in 2026
**Because Windows still ships them, Office still lists them, and Thai document templates written in the 1990s are still in service.** All three are true at once, and each produces a different kind of user.
- **The optional-feature route.** AngsanaUPC is one of the fourteen families in the current Thai Supplemental Fonts feature on Windows 10 and 11. Anyone who has ever added Thai to a Windows machine has it.
- **Office.** The family appears on Microsoft's cloud fonts list for Office applications.
- **Inherited documents.** Microsoft's product table for this font starts at Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 at font version 2.20. Government forms, university templates and corporate letterheads authored in that era still specify the UPC name, and every copy made since has carried it forward.
None of that makes it a good choice for new design work. It makes it the safe choice for old documents, which is a different job.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all refer to the same typeface:**
- **AngsanaUPC** — the family name Microsoft publishes, written as one word
- **Angsana UPC** — the spaced form; Microsoft itself uses it in the opening line of its own page
- **angsanaupc** — the lower-case form people type into a search box
- **อังสนายูพีซี** — the Thai transliteration of the full name
- **อังสนา** — the Thai form of Angsana alone; on a Windows machine it will mean this family or its New sibling
- **`AngsanaUPC-Bold`, `AngsanaUPC-Italic`, `AngsanaUPC-BoldItalic`** — the PostScript names, as reported by PDF tools and prepress software
One correction worth stating plainly. **There is no font called "Angsana New UPC".** Microsoft publishes two separate family names, and neither combines the two suffixes. Anyone searching that phrase is looking at a font menu that lists both names next to each other and has read them as one. Either name will render the same text identically on a current Windows machine.
## Free alternatives to AngsanaUPC
**If the file has to live on the web, go to a supplier, or open on a Mac, start from an open-licensed Thai serif instead of trying to make a bundled system font portable.**
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — the Thai serif from the Noto project under the SIL Open Font License, free for commercial use and free to embed as a webfont. The closest match for the document-body role.
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — the family Thai government documents are built around. When the destination is a Thai public agency, it fits the expected standard better than any Microsoft face.
- **[Pridi](/fonts/pridi/)** — an OFL Thai serif with a more contemporary voice, for editorial work that should not read as an official memo.
- **[Kinnari](/fonts/kinnari/)** — the Thai serif from the free font sets long used on Linux and in open-source document workflows.
- **[The full free Thai font list](/fonts/categories/free/)** — every family with its licence checked individually.
One caveat that applies to all four. None is a metric-compatible twin. Substituting any of them into a file already laid out in AngsanaUPC will move the line breaks, for exactly the reason Microsoft gives above. Choose the replacement before the layout is built, not after. Compare them against your own text in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/), or browse [Thai serif fonts](/fonts/categories/serif/) and the wider [fonts directory](/fonts/).
## Licensing
**AngsanaUPC is proprietary. The copyright line reads "© 1992 Unity Progress. Portions © 2004 The Monotype Corporation. Portions © 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved." Usage rights attach to the Windows or Office licence on the machine. There is no standalone sale, no public webfont licence, and no redistribution right.**
A small documentation detail is worth noting for anyone chasing the vendor of record: Microsoft's AngsanaUPC page leaves the **Font vendor** row blank, while its page for the New cut fills the same row in as "Microsoft Corp." The copyright lines on the two pages are identical, so we read the blank as an omission rather than a different rights position — but we are reading, and we say so.
Organisations that need more than the bundled scope — embedding in shipped software, server installation, or webfont use — have to negotiate through the enterprise route Microsoft links from the [AngsanaUPC documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/angsanaupc). For work that should not involve licence negotiation at all, [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/) and [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) deliver Thai serif character under the SIL Open Font License with no conditions attached. The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers how the looped Thai serif tradition these faces belong to differs from the loopless families now dominant in Thai branding.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/anuphan.mdx
## What Anuphan is
**Anuphan is a loopless Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak, drawn as an independent Thai counterpart to IBM Plex. It ships seven weights in a single variable font, free on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License.** Its Thai name is อนุพันธ์, as catalogued by [ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/?post=anuphan).
The project has an unusually candid origin note. The [description shipped with the font on Google Fonts](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/anuphan/DESCRIPTION.en_us.html) states it was intended for self-improvement and educational purposes — a designer's study exercise that ended up in production distribution. Critically, Anuphan is **not** a modification of [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/). Per the project documentation, every Thai outline was drawn from the Latin version of IBM Plex Sans, working out what Plex's engineered Latin logic would look like if a Thai script had been built from it directly.
The designer credit takes two forms depending on the source: the Google Fonts description names Mint Tantisuwanna, a type designer at Cadson Demak, while [ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/?post=anuphan) records the Thai name กรกนก ตันติสุวรรณนา and dates the entry 18 December 2019. Google Fonts added Anuphan to its catalogue on 23 February 2023, per the [METADATA.pb entry](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/anuphan/METADATA.pb).
## Anuphan's weights — SemiBold exists, ExtraBold does not
**Anuphan covers seven weights, Thin (100) through Bold (700). Anuphan SemiBold is weight 600 and is a real cut; Anuphan ExtraBold (800) and Black (900) do not exist, because the variable weight axis stops at 700.** Confirmed by the [METADATA.pb file in the google/fonts repository](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/anuphan/METADATA.pb), which declares the `wght` axis range as 100–700.
| Weight | CSS value | In the family |
|---|---|---|
| Anuphan Thin | 100 | Yes |
| Anuphan ExtraLight | 200 | Yes |
| Anuphan Light | 300 | Yes |
| Anuphan Regular | 400 | Yes |
| Anuphan Medium | 500 | Yes |
| Anuphan SemiBold | 600 | Yes |
| Anuphan Bold | 700 | Yes |
| Anuphan ExtraBold | 800 | **No** |
| Anuphan Black | 900 | **No** |
The 700 ceiling is worth knowing before you start. Families like [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) and [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) run to Black (900); Anuphan stops at Bold, so there is no heavyweight cut for posters or packaging, and no italic either. If a design tool offers "Anuphan ExtraBold", that is faux bold generated by thickening outlines — and on Thai it crowds the space around vowel signs and tone marks until legibility suffers.
The upside of the variable build is intermediate weights: `font-variation-settings: 'wght' 550;` gives you a step between Medium and SemiBold without loading another file.
## Where to download Anuphan free
**Anuphan is a free download from Google Fonts: take the family ZIP with all seven static weights, or the single variable file covering the full 100–700 range.** No registration, no payment.
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Anuphan specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Anuphan), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Anuphan:wght@100..700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Anuphan', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Anuphan repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Anuphan) holds the source files under OFL-1.1 for self-hosting or modification.
Set your own Thai copy against other families in our [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Is Anuphan free for commercial use?
**Yes. Anuphan is released under the SIL Open Font License, which permits use, embedding, modification and redistribution at no cost, commercial work included.** Self-hosting the variable file in a commercial product requires no permission and no fee.
That covers client work, product interfaces, packaging, signage, webfonts and app embedding. What it excludes: selling the font files on their own, and applying the original Reserved Font Name to a modified version. See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for the practical detail.
## Character design and tone
**Anuphan reads as engineered rather than expressive: loopless heads, low stroke contrast, and squared joins carried over from the IBM Plex Sans Latin it was drawn from.** Consonants that traditionally carry a circular head — ม, บ, ภ — open into simplified hooks instead.
The result is closer to a Latin grotesque wearing Thai proportions than to a humanist Thai sans. Curves are tense, counters are open, and the vertical rhythm is even enough that mixed Thai-English paragraphs hold a single texture. That bilingual evenness is the design's whole argument. Where [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) brings geometric personality and [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) brings deliberate neutrality, Anuphan brings Plex's drafting-table character: technical, slightly cool, consistent at small sizes.
The trade-off is warmth. Anuphan has little of it, and projects that want a friendly consumer tone will find it stiff — [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) is the better fit there.
## Anuphan versus IBM Plex Sans Thai
**Both sit in the Plex orbit, but [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/) is the Thai script developed officially within the IBM Plex system, while Anuphan is an independent redraw of Thai from Plex's Latin, not a modification of the existing Thai files.** The difference is provenance, not just appearance.
- **Choose IBM Plex Sans Thai** when your design system is formally tied to IBM Plex
- **Choose Anuphan** when you want a technical loopless Thai plus the convenience of one variable file
- **Choose [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** when you need neutrality and weights up to Black
More options in our [loopless Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/loopless/).
## Best use cases
**Anuphan fits product interfaces, developer documentation, and bilingual corporate sites where Thai text must match the discipline of IBM Plex or a similar engineered Latin.** Strong briefs:
- Dashboards and admin interfaces with mixed Thai-English labels
- Technical documentation and API references for Thai-market software
- Fintech and enterprise products already standardised on IBM Plex
- Data-dense layouts where the variable weight axis earns its keep
Where it fails: anything that needs an italic (there is none), display work above Bold weight, and formal print contexts that still expect looped letterforms — [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or another looped face belongs there instead.
## Pairings
**Anuphan pairs most naturally inside the Plex orbit, with a Thai serif added for editorial contrast.** Three combinations:
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — the obvious sibling for full bilingual design systems
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — headline serif over Anuphan body for report and editorial layouts
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a softer looped alternate body when Anuphan runs too cool
The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers loopless pairing logic in detail, and the [full Thai font library](/fonts/) has the rest of the field.
## Licensing
**Anuphan is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and bundling, provided the OFL notice stays with the files.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Anuphan) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Anuphan), which states OFL-1.1.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/athiti.mdx
## What Athiti is
**Athiti is a display-oriented loopless Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak, drawn with a tall silhouette and narrower proportions than [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) so it reads best at larger sizes.** It ships six weights under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
The name Athiti (อติถิ) means "guest" in Thai — a hint at the font's intended use in hospitality-adjacent brands. The proportions favour headline and poster work: tall consonants, compressed counters, and a slightly condensed overall width compared to Cadson Demak's body-copy sans.
In the open catalogue of free Thai fonts, Athiti occupies a specific niche: a modern display Thai sans that still functions at medium sizes. Not a body font, not a novelty display — a workable mid-display that carries editorial weight.
## Character design and tone
**Athiti uses tall stems, narrow counters, and open loopless terminals to produce a silhouette that feels elegant and urban rather than chunky or geometric.** The head of ก is a small tight hook; ถ and ภ have narrow but open bowls.
Stroke weight is mostly monolinear, but at heavier weights the contrast between verticals and curves picks up, which keeps the display cuts from going muddy. Thai tone marks are drawn proportionally taller than on body-copy sans, matching the stretched silhouette. Vowel signs like สระอี and สระอา sit at optically consistent heights across the weight range.
The Latin companion is a narrow humanist sans in the Oswald / Barlow Condensed neighbourhood — same tall proportions, cleanly drawn. Capital letters read slightly condensed compared to Kanit or Prompt, which helps the bilingual pair feel cohesive at display sizes.
## Weights and availability
**Athiti ships six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700) in upright-only cuts.** Italic cuts are not part of the current release. Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Athiti) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/athiti).
File sizes are around 40-55KB per weight in WOFF2. Because Athiti is narrower than most Cadson Demak fonts, you can fit more headline text per line, which makes it useful for hero copy where horizontal space is tight.
## Best use cases
**Athiti is built for display and mid-size editorial use where narrow proportions help the layout breathe.** Strong briefs:
- Boutique hotel and resort branding (signage, wayfinding, room collateral)
- Fashion and lifestyle magazine headlines with Thai-English bilingual flow
- Event branding — film festivals, design weeks, cultural programmes
- Real estate and property developer headline typography for condo marketing
- Premium F&B menu headers where a condensed display sans carries more weight than a wider face
Where it doesn't fit: long-form body text (counters are too narrow, reach for [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)), government documents, and UI at small sizes.
## Pairings
**Athiti pairs best with wider, open Latin sans that contrast against its narrow proportions, or with serif companions for editorial layouts.** Three pairings:
- **Oswald** — narrow Latin sans with matching proportions, strong Thai-English headline pair
- **Source Sans 3** — wider humanist Latin for body text under Athiti display
- **Lora** — serif body copy under Athiti headlines for editorial magazines
## Licensing
**Athiti is released under the SIL Open Font License with all weights free for commercial use, modification and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the font.** Verify at the [Google Fonts page](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Athiti) or the [Cadson Demak specimen](https://github.com/cadsondemak/athiti). No paid licence is required.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/ayuthaya.mdx
## What Ayuthaya is
**Ayuthaya is Apple's looped Thai system font, bundled with the Mac since Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003 and still listed on Apple's Developer System Fonts page today (version 13.0d1e7) as both a macOS system font and an iOS downloadable font.** It ships in a single Regular style and is named after the old Siamese capital, อยุธยา (Ayutthaya).
Ayuthaya is one of five Thai fonts Apple has shipped with its operating systems, documented by [Thaifaces](https://thaifaces.com/?tag=apple) alongside Krungthep, Sathu, Silom, and Thonburi. Thaifaces dates its release to B.E. 2546 (2003) and credits the work to Apple's Singapore office — no individual designer is credited anywhere in Apple's records.
The design is older than its 2003 release date suggests. The TrueType file carries the copyright string "Copyright (c) 1992-2011 by Apple Inc. All rights reserved.", and Luc Devroye's Thai typography index dates it as an Apple system font for Thai created in 1992 — placing its origins in Apple's early-1990s Thai language support. For context on how looped Thai letterforms differ from the loopless styles that dominate today's web, see the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Character design and tone
**Ayuthaya is a looped (มีหัวขมวด) Thai typeface that Thaifaces classifies as suitable for both body text and display use.** Consonants carry the traditional loop terminals that Thai readers associate with maximum legibility, which is why it works at paragraph sizes as well as headings.
A telling third-party endorsement of its rendering behaviour: when Mozilla debated Firefox's default Thai fonts for Mac OS X in Bugzilla bug 284265, it chose Thonburi as the default proportional Thai font and Ayuthaya as the default monospace Thai font. That monospace assignment made Ayuthaya the face Mac users saw in Thai plain-text and code-adjacent contexts in Firefox for years.
Ayuthaya is also genuinely multi-script. Version 10.4d5e1 contains 909 characters covering Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A/B, Greek, Cyrillic, and Thai, so it can set mixed Thai-Latin text without falling back to another font.
## Weights and availability
**Ayuthaya ships in exactly one weight — Regular — with no bold, italic, or extended family.** It comes pre-installed on macOS (since Mac OS X 10.3 Panther) and is available as a downloadable font on iOS, per Apple's Developer System Fonts listing.
There is no legal standalone download. Ayuthaya is distributed only as part of Apple's operating systems, so availability means "already on the reader's Apple device" — you cannot self-host it as a webfont or bundle it with an app. If you need a multi-weight looped Thai family you can actually deploy anywhere, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the open-license workhorse.
## Best use cases
**Ayuthaya makes sense where the audience is on Apple hardware and a single looped Regular weight is enough.** Sensible briefs:
- Thai text in native macOS and iOS documents, presentations, and UI mockups
- Font stacks targeting Apple devices, where Ayuthaya is a reliable pre-installed Thai fallback
- Monospace-adjacent Thai plain-text contexts on the Mac — the role Mozilla assigned it in Firefox
- Quick Thai comps and print pieces produced entirely on a Mac, with no licensing purchase
Where it doesn't fit: any project that needs weight range, webfont hosting, or cross-platform consistency. For those, use open-license Thai families — [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for looped body text, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for loopless display and UI — all deployable without Apple's SLA constraints. Browse the full [Thai font library](/fonts/) for more.
## Pairings
**With only one weight, Ayuthaya needs a partner family to build hierarchy.** Three pairings that work:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed looped Thai sans with a full weight range; use its Bold for headings over Ayuthaya body text on Mac-only work
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless Thai sans for display contrast against Ayuthaya's traditional looped body
- **[Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/)** — Apple's other bundled Thai family; pairing the two keeps a project entirely within fonts already installed on Apple devices
## Licensing
**Ayuthaya is proprietary Apple software: it is free to use on Apple devices under Apple's Software License Agreement, but it is not free software.** Thaifaces notes it is free to use under Apple's SLA; the operative constraint is that the license travels with the operating system, not with you. No webfont hosting, no redistribution, no bundling into products — the [Apple SLA](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/) governs all use.
For projects that need a looped Thai face under a genuinely open license, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the closest free alternative in spirit and role; [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) cover the loopless display end. All three are deployable on any platform without touching Apple's terms.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/bai-jamjuree.mdx
## What Bai Jamjuree is
**Bai Jamjuree is a display-oriented humanist Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak, named for the Jamjuree tree (ต้นจามจุรี) whose organic silhouette inspired the font's soft, flowing curves.** It ships six weights with matching italics under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
The design sits between a display face and a mid-size editorial face. The letterforms are distinct enough to carry poster and headline work, but disciplined enough to hold at 14-18pt for subheadings and short paragraphs. That range makes Bai Jamjuree unusually versatile in the Cadson Demak catalogue.
The font is a fixture in Thai creative-sector branding — design studios, art festivals, craft and artisan brands — because it balances modernity (loopless construction) with a tactile, hand-drawn tone that geometric faces like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) deliberately avoid.
## Character design and tone
**Bai Jamjuree uses flowing organic curves, subtle stroke modulation, and open loopless terminals that feel pen-drawn rather than computer-constructed.** The head of ก curves softly inward; ถ and ภ have wide, open bowls with gentle terminal flares.
Stroke contrast is moderate — noticeably more than Kanit or Prompt but less than a classical serif. The pen-like modulation is most visible at heavier weights, where verticals thicken while the connecting strokes stay lighter. Tone marks and vowel signs carry the same organic feel, drawn with slight curves rather than straight strokes.
Italic cuts rotate at a modest angle (around 8-10°) and keep the same organic letter construction rather than switching to a true italic skeleton. The Latin companion is a humanist sans with the same soft modulation — reminiscent of Trirong's Latin or a softened Lato.
## Weights and availability
**Bai Jamjuree ships six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700) with matching italics across the full range — a relatively rare feature in free Thai fonts.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Bai+Jamjuree) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/bai-jamjuree).
File sizes run around 45-60KB per weight in WOFF2. For production, a four-file loadout (Regular, Regular Italic, SemiBold, SemiBold Italic) handles editorial layouts at about 200KB total.
## Best use cases
**Bai Jamjuree is a strong default for creative-industry brands that want a modern Thai sans with warmth and tactility.** Strong briefs:
- Design studio and creative agency branding, Thai and bilingual
- Art festivals, exhibition catalogues, museum publication design
- Craft and artisan product branding — ceramics, textiles, natural skincare
- Independent publishing — literary magazines, poetry books, small-press work
- Cafe and restaurant brands that want "designed" without being corporate
Where it doesn't fit: enterprise and fintech UI (too warm, use [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)), long-form body text (Sarabun, Mitr, or Niramit are more neutral), and government documents.
## Pairings
**Bai Jamjuree pairs well with humanist Latin sans-serifs, transitional serifs, and editorial body typefaces.** Three pairings:
- **Lato** — humanist Latin sans with matching warmth and modulation
- **Lora** — transitional serif for editorial body copy under Bai Jamjuree display
- **Noto Serif Thai** — if the body needs to stay Thai, the looped serif contrasts well against Bai Jamjuree's loopless display
See the [fonts directory](/fonts/) for more editorial pairing options.
## Licensing
**Bai Jamjuree is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling in products provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Bai+Jamjuree) or the [Cadson Demak page](https://github.com/cadsondemak/bai-jamjuree).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/boonjot.mdx
## What BoonJot is
**BoonJot (บุญจด) is an open-source Thai and Latin handwriting family by Sungsit Sawaiwan, released through FontUni under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 with two styles, Regular and Italic.** Its premise is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly: the designer set out to build a handwriting face that reproduces how a *left-handed* writer forms letters, and drew the whole thing on a computer rather than digitising scanned penmanship.
That origin explains the shapes. Each glyph began as a single stroke sketched in FontForge, was expanded to its proper weight there, then finished in Inkscape. The result is closer to a synthetic hand than a traced one — even, controlled, and free of the ink pooling that scanned handwriting fonts inherit.
BoonJot is not in the Google Fonts registry, which is why it rarely appears in the roundups that only crawl Google's catalogue. The licence is the same OFL 1.1 that covers Google's Thai families, so it carries the same commercial rights — see the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for what that actually permits.
## Character design and tone
**BoonJot reads as relaxed upright handwriting rather than connected script: the designer applied an italic aesthetic to upright characters instead of joining them, a decision made specifically so the face stays legible at small sizes on screen.** That is the trade most handwriting faces refuse to make, and it is why BoonJot survives at UI sizes where a true script collapses.
The stroke is monolinear — the single-stroke drawing method leaves little thick-thin modulation — which keeps colour on the page even. Against the pen-pressure variation of a face like [Mali](/fonts/mali/) or the brush weight of [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/), BoonJot is the flatter, more utilitarian hand.
Tonally it lands somewhere near a comic hand: informal, friendly, unfussy. It is a notes-and-annotations face, not a ceremonial one.
## Weights and availability
**BoonJot ships as two styles — Regular and Italic — with no weight axis; the italic arrived in the 1.0 release and the file shipping today reports Version 2.0 in its name table.** Do not expect a Light or a Bold; this is a two-file family and the designer scoped it that way.
Character coverage is broader than most Thai handwriting fonts. The face covers Adobe Latin-4, most European languages, Vietnamese and Thai — verified in the font's own cmap, which carries the full basic Latin alphabet, 87 codepoints across the Thai block, and Vietnamese precomposed forms. Download it from the [GitHub releases page](https://github.com/fontuni/boonjot/releases).
## Best use cases
**BoonJot suits work that wants a human hand without losing legibility — annotation, informal branding, and mixed Thai/Latin/Vietnamese settings.** Strong briefs:
- Annotations, callouts and margin notes in diagrams and slides
- Casual branding, packaging and menus that want warmth over polish
- Multilingual settings that need Thai, Latin and Vietnamese from one file
- Note-taking and educational material where a handwriting face still has to be read at length
Where it does not fit: formal or institutional documents (reach for a looped body face), and any brief wanting calligraphic elegance — that is [Plaimanas07](/fonts/plaimanas07/)'s territory, not BoonJot's. Pair it with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) for body text and let BoonJot handle the handwritten layer.
## Licensing
**BoonJot is free for commercial use: it is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, confirmed both by the GitHub repository's declared licence and by the copyright string embedded in the font binary itself.** Use, modification, embedding and redistribution are permitted; derivative works must stay under the OFL. Browse other verified commercial-safe options in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) and [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/browallia-new.mdx
## What Browallia New is
**Browallia New is a looped Thai sans-serif designed by Unity Progress and bundled with Microsoft Windows, shipping in four cuts: Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** The copyright notice dates the design to 1992, with later portions by Monotype (2004) and Microsoft (2015). Like [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/) and [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), it exists on hundreds of millions of machines because Windows put it there, not because anyone chose it.
The three families cover distinct classifications within Unity Progress's UPC series. Angsana is the old-style serif, Cordia the geometric sans, and Browallia the humanist sans — influenced by Western humanist sans-serif typefaces, drawn with monoline strokes and a crisp appearance. Browallia New is the Unicode-era successor to BrowalliaUPC, the code-page original from the 1990s.
In Thai office typography, Browallia New has always been the third option: less default than Angsana New for documents, less common than Cordia New for the sans role. It shows up in slide decks, spreadsheets, and templates where someone wanted a Thai sans with slightly more warmth than Cordia.
## Character design and tone
**Browallia New is a humanist looped sans: monoline strokes, open apertures, and full circular heads on consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ.** The humanist skeleton gives it a softer, more even texture than the geometric [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), whose curves are more compass-drawn.
The face was tuned for 1990s office printing and low-resolution screens, and it reads that way today. At 14–16pt in a Word document it does its job without comment. At display sizes the monoline strokes go thin and characterless; there are no heavier weights than Bold to compensate. Tone marks and vowel signs sit conservatively, which keeps Thai office documents legible but contributes to the loose line fit typical of the UPC families.
The bundled Latin covers code page 1252, sized to pair with the Thai for bilingual office work. It is serviceable and nothing more.
## Weights and availability
**Browallia New ships in exactly four cuts — Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic — and Microsoft has never extended the family.** The font file names are Browa.ttf, Browab.ttf, Browai.ttf, and Browaz.ttf.
Microsoft's product table lists it in every Windows release from XP (version 2.20) through Windows 11, plus Windows Server editions, and it is available within Office applications. There is no Google Fonts release, no variable font, and no webfont package. On macOS and Linux it is simply absent unless Office installed it.
## Where Browallia New comes from
**Browallia New ships with Windows; there is no legitimate free download.** Unity Progress, the Bangkok type house behind the UPC series, licensed the family to Microsoft in the 1990s, and Microsoft has distributed it as a system font ever since. Any site offering a free Browallia New download is redistributing Microsoft-licensed files without authorisation.
If a machine lacks the font, the correct routes are a licensed Windows installation with the Thai language pack or a licensed Office install. For projects that cannot guarantee either, three free fonts cover the same territory:
- [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — looped humanist sans, eight weights, SIL Open Font License
- [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) — nine weights, looped and loopless cuts, OFL
- [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) — the government document standard, GPL with font exception
## Best use cases
**Browallia New belongs in Microsoft Office workflows on Thai Windows systems and almost nowhere else.** Defensible briefs:
- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents exchanged within Thai organisations that standardised on it
- Matching legacy corporate templates from the 2000s that specify it
- CSS fallback stacks — `font-family: 'Browallia New', sans-serif;` — for Thai users on Windows, behind a proper webfont
Where it doesn't fit: web embedding (the license prohibits it), branding and editorial design (two weights, dated drawing), and any new project starting from zero. New documents in Thailand's public sector should use [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/), the National Font that displaced the UPC families in official use after 2010.
## Pairings
**Browallia New pairs within the Windows Thai bundle it shipped with.** Three pairings:
- **Angsana New** — the old-style serif of the same UPC set, for document body-and-heading splits
- **Cordia New** — the geometric sibling, though mixing the two sans faces rarely earns its keep
- **Tahoma** — the Latin UI companion on Thai Windows systems of the same era
See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for guidance on replacing system-font stacks with deliberate choices.
## Licensing
**Browallia New is proprietary software licensed from Microsoft: it may be used on systems with valid Windows or Office licences, and nothing more.** Redistribution, webfont embedding, and bundling in non-Microsoft products require a separate licence through Microsoft's font licensing channels. The terms are documented on the [Microsoft Typography page for Browallia New](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/browallia-new). For open-licensed substitutes, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) carry the same looped-sans role with no restrictions, and the full catalogue is in the [fonts directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/browallia-upc.mdx
## What BrowalliaUPC is
**BrowalliaUPC is a clean monoline looped Thai sans-serif for on-screen reading and body text, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users BrowalliaUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**BrowalliaUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/), a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a sans-serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**BrowalliaUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "BrowalliaUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**BrowalliaUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai sans-serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [sans-serif category](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**BrowalliaUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/browalliaupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/chakra-petch.mdx
## What Chakra Petch is
**Chakra Petch is a display geometric Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak, distinguished by its chamfered (cut) corners on stem terminals that give the font a machined, technical feel.** The name translates roughly to "diamond wheel" (จักรเพชร), and the design leans into that industrial-precision metaphor. It ships five weights with matching italics under the SIL Open Font License.
The cut-corner treatment is unusual in Thai type. Most display Thai fonts either keep clean geometric terminals (Kanit) or add organic flares (Bai Jamjuree). Chakra Petch sits between those — clearly geometric, but with a specific visual quirk that reads as "engineered" at display sizes.
In commercial use, Chakra Petch is a favourite for tech-adjacent, automotive, and sports branding. The cut corners photograph well on large signage and carry a premium-technical tone on packaging.
## Character design and tone
**Chakra Petch uses geometric skeletons with chamfered terminals, high x-height, and wider proportions than [Athiti](/fonts/athiti/), giving it a confident, grounded display silhouette.** The head of ก is an angular open hook; where most fonts would round a corner, Chakra Petch cuts it at 45°.
The corner cuts are most visible at Bold and SemiBold weights. At Light, the chamfer reads as a subtle bevel rather than a dominant feature. Tone marks and vowel signs follow the same geometry — angular openings rather than soft curves. Thai numerals share the chamfered terminals, which keeps the typographic texture cohesive at display sizes.
Italic cuts tilt roughly 8°, and the Latin companion is a geometric sans that shares the cut-corner detail. Uppercase letters like N, M, W pick up the chamfer on their apex points, which matches the Thai treatment closely.
## Weights and availability
**Chakra Petch ships five weights from Light to Bold with matching italics across the full range.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Chakra+Petch) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/chakra-petch).
File sizes are around 45-60KB per weight in WOFF2 with Thai + Latin subset. For display deployment, SemiBold and Bold carry most of the load; Light and Regular are useful for subheads that want to retain the technical feel without the heavy chamfer.
## Best use cases
**Chakra Petch is purpose-built for brands where "technical", "precise", or "performance" is the core message.** Strong briefs:
- Automotive marketing and dealer branding, particularly EV and performance segments
- Tech hardware packaging — audio, gaming, cameras, accessories
- Sports and esports branding, tournament graphics, athletic apparel
- Industrial design companies, engineering consultancies, architecture firms
- Fitness, supplements, and performance nutrition where the tone is masculine-adjacent
Where it doesn't fit: editorial long-form (the chamfers fatigue at small sizes), hospitality and wellness (too technical), and traditional or cultural brands where Thai looped serifs carry more weight.
## Pairings
**Chakra Petch pairs best with strong geometric Latin sans or mono typefaces that share its technical register.** Three pairings:
- **Rajdhani** — Indian Type Foundry Latin with very similar chamfered geometry, close visual sibling
- **IBM Plex Mono** — monospace companion for spec sheets and data displays
- **Barlow** — wider geometric Latin for body text under Chakra Petch display
## Licensing
**Chakra Petch is released under the SIL Open Font License, free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice remains.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Chakra+Petch) or the [Cadson Demak page](https://github.com/cadsondemak/chakra-petch). See the [fonts directory](/fonts/) and the [typography hub](/learn/typography/) for more display Thai options and pairing guidance.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/charm.mdx
## What Charm is
**Charm is an ornamental display serif Thai typeface from Cadson Demak, drawing on Thai traditional inscriptional lettering to produce a face with high stroke contrast, flared terminals, and a distinctly ceremonial tone.** It ships in Regular and Bold under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
Charm is not a body font — it is a display serif designed for moments where Thai type should carry cultural weight: book covers, title sequences, packaging for heritage brands, and any context where modern sans-serifs would feel rootless. The proportions are drawn for display, not text, and the face falls apart below about 18pt.
The design borrows from Thai manuscript tradition, particularly the looped consonant heads and flared terminal shapes found in palm-leaf manuscript hands and early metal-type revivals. Unlike [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) or [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/), Charm is unambiguously display-first.
## Character design and tone
**Charm uses pronounced calligraphic stroke contrast — roughly 1:4 between thin and thick — with looped consonants and flared terminals that evoke palm-leaf inscription and traditional Thai scribal lettering.** The loops on ก, ถ, ภ are fully closed circles; terminals on ก and น pick up a distinct outward flare.
The contrast is what gives Charm its character. At Regular weight, thin strokes approach hairline proportions while verticals stay robust. Bold amplifies this contrast further, pushing the face into poster-scale territory where it reads clearly at 60-100pt. Tone marks and vowel signs are drawn with matching contrast and decorated terminals.
Latin companion characters share the high-contrast model, reading as a Didone-adjacent serif in the neighbourhood of Bodoni or Playfair. Cap heights align cleanly with Thai consonant tops, so Thai-English display headlines hold together without manual adjustment.
## Weights and availability
**Charm ships in only two weights — Regular and Bold — reflecting its display-first design intent.** No italic, light, or extra-bold cuts exist in the current release. Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Charm) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/charm).
File sizes are around 50-65KB per weight in WOFF2. Because Charm is display-only, a single-weight deployment is often sufficient — either Regular for elegant restraint or Bold for full ornamental weight.
## Best use cases
**Charm is the correct choice when a project needs Thai typography that signals heritage, ceremony, or editorial prestige.** Strong briefs:
- Book covers for Thai literature, poetry, and cultural history publishing
- Luxury hospitality branding — heritage hotels, fine dining, resort collateral
- Wedding invitations, ceremonial programmes, formal invitations
- Packaging for premium Thai brands — silk, jewellery, artisan products
- Film and documentary titles, theatre posters, cultural programme covers
Where it doesn't fit: any body text use, UI and product interfaces, corporate communications, and modern tech or startup brands where the ornament reads as mismatched.
## Pairings
**Charm pairs with quiet body sans-serifs that let the display carry the drama.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral looped Thai sans for body text under Charm display headlines
- **Playfair Display** — the near-matching Latin Didone for bilingual display work
- **Source Serif Pro** — transitional Latin serif for body copy when Charm handles titles
## Licensing
**Charm is released under the SIL Open Font License, free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Charm) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/charm). The licence permits use in wedding invitations, book jackets, and commercial packaging without further permission.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/charmonman.mdx
## Charmonman and TH Charmonman are the same typeface
**Yes — Charmonman on Google Fonts and TH Charmonman (จามรมาน) from Thailand's National Fonts set are the same design by Ekaluck Peanpanawate; only the distribution build differs.** Both come in two weights, Regular and Bold, and both are free to download.
This is the first thing most people need answered, because Thai government templates call the font "TH Charmonman" — every face in the National Fonts project is prefixed TH — while Google Fonts drops the prefix and lists it simply as "Charmonman". If a departmental template specifies TH Charmonman and you install the Google Fonts file, the name in the Word font menu will not match, and you need the original TH Charmonman file from the National Fonts distribution instead. The download section below covers both.
The name itself is regularly mistaken for an ordinary Thai word. The Cadson Demak project repository records that the font exists because **Prof. Srisakdi Charmonman Ph.D** commissioned it, added as a bonus to the SIPA project's original twelve fonts, which is what made the set thirteen. "Charmonman" is the professor's surname — just as [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) is his given name. Two fonts in the National Fonts set are named after the same man.
## Does TH Charmonman Bold exist, and how do you get it?
**It does. TH Charmonman ships in exactly two weights, Regular and Bold — no other weights, no italics — and both arrive in the same download.** There is no separate Bold file to hunt for; download the family once and you have both.
Google Fonts metadata records the weights as Regular (400) and Bold (700), matching the two-weight original that Thaifaces documents for TH Charmonman. The Google Fonts build is two TTF files of roughly 117 KB each, and the directory contains no variable-font build.
Practical guidance when choosing between them: the designer describes the face as playing thick strokes against thin, so the thin strokes in Regular thin out noticeably when scaled down or shown on a low-resolution screen. For headings over a colour field, or for documents that will be printed, try Bold first and step down to Regular — not the other way round.
## How to download TH Charmonman free
**Charmonman is a legitimate free download from Google Fonts and from Cadson Demak's GitHub repository; the original TH Charmonman file comes from the SIPA National Fonts distribution.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Charmonman specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Charmonman), click "Get font" and download. You get both Regular and Bold TTFs, no registration.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Charmonman:wght@400;700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Charmonman', cursive;`. Reserve it for headings.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Charmonman repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Charmonman) holds the project files alongside OFL.txt.
**For government documents whose template names the font "TH Charmonman", use the SIPA build, not the Google Fonts one**, because the internal family names differ. Opening an existing document with the wrong name causes Word to substitute another face and the layout shifts. The thirteen National Fonts remain available through Thailand's open educational resource repository and the f0nt.com release page.
Windows and macOS install steps are in the download panel at the top of this page. To try the letterforms with your own text before downloading, use the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Name variants and common misspellings
**This face is misspelled more often than almost any other free Thai font, because the name is a romanised Thai surname.** Every name below refers to the same typeface:
- **TH Charmonman** — the National Fonts name, and the one in government document templates
- **Charmonman** — the Google Fonts name, with the TH prefix removed
- **จามรมาน** — the Thai name, the surname of Prof. Srisakdi Charmonman
- **TH Chermonman / Charmomman / Chamonman** — frequent misspellings when typing from memory; all mean this font
- **TH-Charmonman** — the hyphenated form, common in filenames
If you arrived here on a differently spelled query, it is still the same font, and the download links above still apply.
## Character design and tone
**The designer states directly that Charmonman is loosely based on the same style as Zapfino, and focuses on being a Thai display writing style with a sense of thick and thin strokes.** That is the project repository's own description, not our interpretation.
The Zapfino reference explains most of what you see. Hermann Zapf's calligraphic face is known for long sweeping tails and letterforms that refuse to sit at a uniform height along the line. Charmonman moves that logic into the Thai writing system: tails extend further than in a typical Thai face, and stroke weight shifts along a single stroke instead of holding steady.
Thaifaces records the Thai-side intent as well — the designer deliberately gave each character its own personality rather than holding to a rigid skeleton, producing a contemporary look distinct from the decorative Thai faces previously reserved for certificate work.
One practical consequence to plan for: high stroke contrast plus long tails means the face needs room. Default line-height will let descenders from one line collide with the upper vowel marks of the next. Set it looser than you think you need.
## Best use cases
**The project repository recommends Charmonman for "anything associated with royal matters and traditional occasions"** — which matches its real role in Thailand more closely than treating it as a Western-style wedding script. Strong briefs:
- Certificates, diplomas, and awards — Thaifaces describes the design as the contemporary alternative to the older decorative Thai faces used for exactly this work
- Titling on ceremonial documents and official programmes
- Invitations to ceremonies, merit-making events, and traditional occasions
- Nameplates and exhibition titles that need a formal Thai register
- Festival greeting cards and any piece where handwritten craft is the point
Where it fails: body text of any kind (the stroke contrast makes it unreadable at small sizes), UI and app copy, contemporary tech and corporate branding, and data tables. For a handwritten feel that still reads as running text, use [Kodchasan](/fonts/kodchasan/) or [Itim](/fonts/itim/); for a looser, more casual script, see [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/).
## Pairings and near neighbours
**Charmonman takes the headline and everything else on the page has to stand back — never pair it with another decorative face.** Three combinations that work:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral Thai sans for body text under Charmonman titles
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — its National Fonts sibling, and the correct choice when a whole document has to stay inside the government-mandated set
- **[Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/)** — the other font named after Prof. Srisakdi Charmonman, in a more documentary register, and a good substitute when Charmonman reads as too ornamental
For other free Thai handwriting and display faces worth comparing first, see [Charm](/fonts/charm/) and the full [handwritten Thai font category](/fonts/categories/handwritten/).
## Licensing
**Charmonman is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, web embedding, modification, and bundling, provided the OFL notice travels with the files. There is no paid tier.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Charmonman) or the [Cadson Demak GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Charmonman).
The original TH Charmonman from the National Fonts project is likewise free. On 7 September 2010 the Thai cabinet approved the thirteen National Fonts as the standard fonts for government agencies, with implementation required by 5 December 2010. Neither generation of this design has ever cost anything. Compare the terms against commercial Thai families in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), or browse everything free in the [free Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/chonburi.mdx
## What Chonburi is
**Chonburi is a high-contrast looped display serif from Cadson Demak, released on Google Fonts in July 2015 with a single Regular weight under the SIL Open Font License.** It covers Thai and Latin and is built for headlines, not paragraphs.
The name comes from Chonburi province on Thailand's east coast, following the foundry's habit of naming fonts after Thai places — the same convention behind [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/) and [Pattaya](/fonts/pattaya/), both also names of places in Chonburi province. The project README describes the brief plainly: a display face for "headlines and titles in both formal and semi-formal type of work", with a deliberate approach to thick and thin strokes in the Thai glyphs.
Among free Thai display faces, Chonburi occupies the formal end. It is the closest thing the Google Fonts Thai catalogue has to a Didone headline voice — fat verticals, hairline horizontals, looped heads kept intact.
## Character design and tone
**Chonburi applies Didone contrast logic to Thai: heavy vertical strokes against thin horizontals, with traditional looped heads preserved on consonants such as ภ and ม.** The README notes that forms were simplified from traditional Thai structures to keep each glyph's character while improving clarity at display sizes.
That simplification matters. Many traditional looped faces lose their loops to ink traps and clutter when set large and tight; Chonburi keeps the loop as a visible design feature, a dark dot anchoring each letterhead. The contrast does the rest of the talking. At 60px and above the texture is confident and editorial, somewhere between a Thai magazine masthead and a luxury label.
The Latin is drawn to match — a fat-face serif with the same vertical stress — so bilingual lockups hold together without a substitute headline font.
## Weights and availability
**Chonburi ships exactly one style: Regular (400), upright, no italics, no variable axis.** Coverage spans Thai, Latin, Latin Extended, and Vietnamese.
One weight is the design's biggest practical limit. There is no Light for understated covers and no Black for louder posters; hierarchy has to come from size and colour rather than weight. The GitHub repository distributes both compiled TTF/OTF builds and the .glyphs source file, so studios with a type budget can commission modifications under the OFL.
## How to download Chonburi
**Chonburi is a free download from Google Fonts: one ZIP, one weight, no registration.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Chonburi specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Chonburi), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Chonburi&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Chonburi', serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/chonburi repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/chonburi) carries TTF, OTF, and .glyphs source under OFL-1.1.
## Best use cases
**Chonburi belongs in headlines at 40px and above — magazine covers, posters, packaging, and event identities that want formal Thai drama.** Strong briefs:
- Editorial mastheads and feature openers for Thai magazines
- Premium packaging: chocolate, spirits, cosmetics, hotel collateral
- Wedding and event identities in a formal Thai register
- Restaurant and café signage where a looped serif signals tradition with polish
Where it fails: body text of any kind — the hairline horizontals collapse below roughly 20px — plus UI work and any system that needs more than one weight. Long-form editorial setting belongs to a text serif like [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) or [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/).
## Pairings
**Chonburi needs a quiet text family underneath it; the contrast is the headline's job alone.** Three combinations:
- **Sarabun** — the default neutral Thai body under a Chonburi headline; see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)
- **Bai Jamjuree** — a crisper, more contemporary body for branding systems; see [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/)
- **Anuphan** — loopless engineered body text when the layout mixes heavy Thai display with bilingual UI; see [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)
Sizing and hierarchy guidance is in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Licensing
**Chonburi is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, and embedding, with the OFL notice required to travel with the files.** The copyright line reads "Copyright (c) 2015, Cadson Demak". Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Chonburi) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/chonburi). A packaging run or a paid event identity needs no additional licence.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/cordia-new.mdx
Cordia New (คอร์เดียนิว) is the looped Thai sans Microsoft bundles with Windows and Office. If you searched "download Cordia New" because a Windows 11 or 10 machine does not have it, the first section is the answer — there is nothing to download, only a feature to switch back on. Its origins, the CordiaUPC difference, the licence and the free substitutes follow.
## Can't download Cordia New? How to restore it in Windows 11 and 10, and whether it works elsewhere
**There is no legitimate download of Cordia New anywhere, but it has not left your PC either. Microsoft moved it into an optional feature called Thai Supplemental Fonts, which you re-enable for free from Settings in five steps. Mac, iPhone and Android do not have the font in the operating system and there is no file to install, but Microsoft 365 subscribers get it inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint on those devices as a cloud font; outside Office, use a free looped Thai font such as Sarabun, which installs on every system.**
| Device | Has Cordia New? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 11 / 10 | Yes, but switched off | Settings → System → Optional features → Thai Supplemental Fonts |
| Windows XP to 8.1 | Yes, pre-installed | Nothing |
| Mac | Not in the OS | Available inside Office apps via Microsoft 365 cloud fonts; outside Office download Sarabun through Font Book |
| iPhone / iPad / Android | Not in the OS | Available inside Office apps via Microsoft 365 cloud fonts; system Thai fonts are Thonburi (Apple) and Noto Sans Thai (Android) |
### Restoring it on Windows 11
Steps per [Microsoft's documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-missing-fonts) (revised 27 February 2025):
1. Right-click **Start** → **Settings**
2. Left pane: **System** → right pane: **Optional features**
(Shortcut: right-click Start → **Run** → enter `ms-settings:optionalfeatures` → OK)
3. Select **View features** next to **Add an optional feature**
4. Find **Thai Supplemental Fonts** and tick its box
5. Select **Next**, review the list, then select **Add**
Microsoft notes that on some Windows 11 builds the Optional features pane sits under **Settings → Apps** instead; the `ms-settings:optionalfeatures` shortcut opens the same pane on every build.
### Restoring it on Windows 10
1. Right-click **Start** → **Settings** → **System** → left pane **Optional features**
2. Select the **+** button next to **Add a feature**
3. Tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts** and select **Add**
For Windows 10 builds before 22H2, Microsoft's [Windows 10 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_10_font_list) gives the older path: **Settings → Apps → Apps & features → Optional features**.
### The alternative: add Thai as a system language
The [Windows 10 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_10_font_list) explains that most script-specific font packages "are added automatically by Windows Update when the associated languages are enabled in language settings (for example, by enabling a keyboard)". If you want the Thai fonts plus full language support, go to **Settings → Time & language → Language & region** (Windows 11) or **Time & Language → Language** (Windows 10) and add Thai under Preferred languages. The shortcut to that pane is `ms-settings:regionlanguage`.
**Both routes pull the files through Windows Update, so the device must be online during installation.** If an organisation has Windows Update disabled, the optional feature will fail to install and needs either a temporary exception or a Features on Demand deployment.
### Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android
**Cordia New is not part of the Apple or Android operating systems and Microsoft has never released a file you could install yourself, but Microsoft 365 subscribers can use it inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac, iOS, Android and the web through Office's cloud fonts.** Apple's [Fonts included with macOS Sonoma](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) lists no Cordia New, CordiaUPC or any other Microsoft Thai font — the Thai face on Mac and iPhone is [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/), itself a looped sans, and Android uses Noto Sans Thai per the [Android system font configuration](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/main/data/fonts/fonts.xml). A Word file set in Cordia New opened on those devices without Microsoft 365 is substituted and reflows.
The one legitimate route outside Windows is **Office cloud fonts**. Microsoft's [Cloud fonts in Office](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb) page explains that cloud fonts are hosted in the cloud by Microsoft 365 and available in the latest Office apps on Windows, macOS, web, Android and iOS (availability varies by app); the list includes Cordia New, CordiaUPC, [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), AngsanaUPC, [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) and [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/). Picking the font in the menu downloads it, and Microsoft states that documents created with cloud fonts "will render the same when opened in the Office apps listed in the table—without you having to embed them". The scope is Office apps under a Microsoft 365 subscription only: the font does not appear in Font Book or other apps on the device, and it carries no webfont right. For anything outside Office, share a PDF or start from a free font that installs everywhere.
### The free looped Thai font that installs everywhere: Sarabun
**The closest substitute in the document-body role that installs on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android alike is [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — a looped Thai sans in eight weights with italics under the SIL Open Font License, [free from Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Sarabun).** Apple itself lists Sarabun in its [System Fonts table](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/) as "iOS downloadable" and "macOS downloadable", so on a Mac you can search for it in Font Book and download it straight from Apple. To install:
- **Windows** — right-click the .zip → **Extract**, then right-click the font files → **Install**, per [Microsoft's guide](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-font-b7c5f17c-4426-4b53-967f-455339c564c1)
- **Mac** — double-click the font file in Finder and click **Install**, per [Apple's Font Book guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/font-book/install-and-validate-fonts-fntbk1000/mac), or download it from Apple's list inside Font Book
- **iPhone / iPad** — install through a font-manager app from the App Store and manage under **Settings → General → Fonts**, per [Apple's guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-and-manage-fonts-iphb2517689c/ios); usable in document apps
- **Web** — embed with `@font-face` or load from Google Fonts directly
Other options, including [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) and [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/), are compared under "Free alternatives to Cordia New" below.
## What Cordia New is
**Cordia New is the looped Thai sans that Microsoft bundles with Windows and Office, designed by Unity Progress Corp in 1992. Microsoft's own typography documentation describes it as "a newer version of the same typeface [Cordia], with small adjustments."** That documentation states the family has two weights — Regular and Bold — each with a complementary slanted (italic) style, for four files in total.
Microsoft's design description is equally direct: Cordia is a "geometric" design combining simple straight strokes with round curves. **It has no contrast between thick and thin strokes, even in the loops** — the small circles at the extremes of some Thai letters — and Microsoft positions it as suitable for body text with a modern, futuristic appearance.
For a generation of Thai office workers, Cordia New was never a choice; it was the font that appeared. Its reach came from one channel only: Microsoft shipped it with the operating system. Its serif counterpart in the same bundle is [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), which carries the same designer credit and the same 1992 copyright line.
## Cordia New vs CordiaUPC
**They are the same typeface. Microsoft's page for [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) reproduces the Cordia New design description word for word, carries the identical "© 1992 Unity Progress" copyright, and differs only in file names and internal metrics.** Cordia New ships as `Cordia.ttf` / `Cordiab.ttf` / `Cordiaz.ttf` / `Cordiai.ttf`; CordiaUPC ships as `Cordiau.ttf` / `Cordiaub.ttf` / `Cordiauz.ttf` / `Cordiaui.ttf` — those are the file names on the font-family pages, while Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list) records the current build of both Cordia New and CordiaUPC inside one collection file, `Cordia.ttc` version 5.06.
"UPC" is the designer's own initials — Unity Progress Corporation. The UPC cut is the original, tied to earlier Thai document standards; the "New" cut is Microsoft's later adjustment for modern rendering. **Crucially, both still ship today.** Cordia New did not replace CordiaUPC, contrary to what is often assumed; the two sit side by side inside the same Windows optional-font feature.
The practical consequence: a legacy document laid out in CordiaUPC will reflow — different line breaks, different pagination — if opened on a machine that only has Cordia New, because the metrics differ. The fix is to install the whole supplemental set rather than substituting fonts one at a time. The other UPC families in that set are [DilleniaUPC](/fonts/dillenia-upc/), [EucrosiaUPC](/fonts/eucrosia-upc/), [FreesiaUPC](/fonts/freesia-upc/), [IrisUPC](/fonts/iris-upc/), [JasmineUPC](/fonts/jasmine-upc/), [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/) and [LilyUPC](/fonts/lily-upc/).
## Cordia New weights and styles (including Bold)
**Microsoft lists Cordia New in four styles: Cordia New, Cordia New Bold, Cordia New Bold Italic and Cordia New Italic — two real weights, Regular and Bold, plus an italic companion for each.** There is no Light, no Medium, no Black, and no variable-font version.
| Style | File | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Cordia New | `Cordia.ttf` | Document body text |
| Cordia New Bold | `Cordiab.ttf` | Headings and emphasis |
| Cordia New Italic | `Cordiai.ttf` | Citations, foreign terms |
| Cordia New Bold Italic | `Cordiaz.ttf` | Combined emphasis |
One thing to know about **Cordia New Bold**: because the design carries essentially no stroke contrast, the bold cut thickens uniformly rather than tapering. The loops on ก, ถ and ภ fill in easily below about 14pt on a standard laser printer. For heavy Thai headings that stay open, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) offers eight weights instead of two.
The font covers Thai and Latin — Microsoft's OpenType data lists code pages 1252 Latin and 1874 Thai — but the Latin set is a supporting player, not designed to lead a layout.
## Where to download Cordia New
**There is no download from Microsoft. The Download row on the official documentation reads "N/A – Exclusively included with Microsoft products and services where applicable."** If your machine runs a licensed copy of Windows or Office, you already have the right to use the font; there is nothing to buy, and the steps in the first section switch it back on.
So why do so many people find it missing? Because Microsoft moved the Thai families out of the default installation into an **optional feature** called **Thai Supplemental Fonts**. Microsoft gives three reasons: reduce the operating system footprint, improve performance, and optimise disk space usage. **After a clean install or a cross-version upgrade, optional fonts are not enabled by default** — that is the real cause of "Windows 10/11 has no Cordia New" — and Microsoft describes the change as permanent for future releases too. The only Thai font still in the default Windows 11 install is Leelawadee UI.
### What about free font download sites?
Search for "Cordia New free download" and you will find aggregator sites offering `Cordia.ttf`. **Those files were extracted from Windows installations and have no licence behind them**, because Microsoft has never published this font as a standalone file. Installing them on a machine without a Windows or Office licence, or self-hosting them as a webfont, sits outside the licence entirely. There are only two legitimate routes: the Windows optional feature in the first section, or one of the open-licensed alternatives below.
## Is Cordia New free? Can it be used commercially?
**It is free only in the sense that it is included in the price of the Windows or Office licence you already hold — not free in the open-source sense.** Commercial work on a licensed machine is fine: documents, quotations, print layouts, PDF export all sit inside the normal bundled-font licence.
What is not permitted: redistributing the font files, embedding the font in non-Microsoft products or applications, and self-hosting it as a webfont. Those three need separate licensing through the enterprise font-licensing route Microsoft links from its documentation. If the project is a website, skip the negotiation entirely — the open-licensed families below get you there faster.
## Free alternatives to Cordia New
**If the work has to live on the web, on someone else's machine, or in a file you hand off, start with an open-licensed looped Thai face instead of trying to make Cordia New portable.**
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped Thai sans under the SIL Open Font License, eight weights with italics, free to embed and free for commercial use. The closest replacement in the document-body role.
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — the family Thai government documents are built around. For anything going to a Thai public agency it is a better fit than Cordia New. See also the revised [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/).
- **[Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/)** — nine weights under the OFL with traditional circular loops, rendering consistently across platforms. Strong when Thai and English share a sentence.
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/)** — another OFL option, drawn as a matched Thai-Latin pair from the outset, which helps when both scripts must hold the same tone.
A note on [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/): it installs alongside Cordia New in the same Thai Supplemental Fonts feature, but it is bundled under the same system licence rather than an open one. It substitutes fine on a Windows machine; it does not solve the web or file-handoff problem.
Compare them against your own text in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/), or browse [Thai sans-serif fonts](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) and [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/).
## All 14 fonts in Thai Supplemental Fonts
**Installing the single optional feature delivers all fourteen of Microsoft's Thai families at once, not just Cordia New.** Microsoft's documentation lists them in full:
- [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/) · [AngsanaUPC](/fonts/angsana-upc/) — the paired Thai serifs
- [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) · [BrowalliaUPC](/fonts/browallia-upc/) — wider sans than Cordia
- [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) · [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) — this geometric sans
- [DilleniaUPC](/fonts/dillenia-upc/) — tied to several Thai official document formats
- [EucrosiaUPC](/fonts/eucrosia-upc/) · [FreesiaUPC](/fonts/freesia-upc/) · [IrisUPC](/fonts/iris-upc/)
- [JasmineUPC](/fonts/jasmine-upc/) · [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/) · [LilyUPC](/fonts/lily-upc/)
- [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/) — the only one in the set drawn fresh for screen
If an old document renders as garbled text or empty boxes, install the whole set rather than hunting individual files.
## Best use cases
**Cordia New fits work that begins and ends inside the Microsoft ecosystem, with recipients who are also on Windows.** Strong briefs:
- Thai business documents in Microsoft Word that the reader will print or convert to PDF
- Internal corporate templates that must match already-laid-out legacy files
- Outlook correspondence and Thai email signatures on Windows
- Legacy forms whose master file is a Word document with fixed metrics
Where it does not fit: websites (no webfont licence, invisible to Android and iOS readers), brand systems whose files go out to suppliers, print jobs that must ship fonts to a press, and any project where typography is a decision rather than a default. For those, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) and [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) give you far more room.
## Pairings
**Cordia New pairs inside Microsoft's own Thai bundle, where the families share a metric base and a design era.** Three pairings:
- **[Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/)** — same designer, same copyright year; use it for body text under Cordia New headings
- **[Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/)** — the wider sans in the set, useful for separating a secondary heading level
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — when files leave the Windows world, move the body text to this open licence
The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers Thai-Latin pairing in more depth; the [fonts directory](/fonts/) has the full catalogue.
## Licensing
**Cordia New is proprietary software with Microsoft Corp. listed as the font vendor. The copyright line reads "© 1992 Unity Progress. Portions © 2004 The Monotype Corporation. Portions © 2019 Microsoft Corporation."** Usage rights attach to that machine's Windows or Office licence. There is no standalone sale, no public webfont licence, and no redistribution right.
Organisations that need more — embedding in shipped software, server installation, or webfont use — must negotiate separately through the enterprise route Microsoft links from the [Cordia New documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/cordia-new). For everyday work that should not involve licence negotiation at all, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) deliver comparable looped Thai character under the SIL Open Font License with no conditions attached.
## Frequently asked questions about Cordia New
**The common questions about Cordia New circle around downloads and Windows 11 — whether it can be downloaded free, why Word lacks it, and whether it works on a Mac — and the short, sourced answers are below.**
### Can I download the Thai Cordia New font for free?
**There is no legitimate download, and none is needed.** On a properly licensed Windows PC the font is already present as an optional feature: enable it at **Settings → System → Optional features → View features → Thai Supplemental Fonts → Next → Add**, per [Microsoft's documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-missing-fonts). The `Cordia.ttf` copies on free-font sites carry no licence. If you want a font that is genuinely free, use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/).
### Why do Word and Excel on Windows 11 have no Cordia New?
**Because Microsoft moved all fourteen Thai families into an optional feature that is not enabled after a clean install or upgrade.** Microsoft describes the change as permanent, so Office apps substitute another font. Enabling Thai Supplemental Fonts once brings back Cordia New, [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) and every UPC family. The PC must be online because Windows Update delivers the files.
### Can I use Cordia New on a Mac?
**Only inside Microsoft 365's Office apps.** Apple's [macOS Sonoma font list](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) has no Cordia New and Microsoft distributes no standalone file, but Microsoft's [Cloud fonts in Office](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb) page lists Cordia New as a cloud font that Microsoft 365 subscribers can use in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac, iOS, Android and the web. The Mac's system looped Thai font is [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/). For one looped Thai body font that is identical on Mac and Windows outside Office, use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), which Apple lists as downloadable through Font Book and which is on Google Fonts for Windows.
### Cordia New or Cordia UPC — which should I use?
**Whichever the original document was laid out in.** They are the same Unity Progress design with different internal metrics, and Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list) records both inside the same `Cordia.ttc` file, so enabling Thai Supplemental Fonts brings back both at once. Legacy files set in [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) regain their original line breaks once the cut they call is present. For new work, use Cordia New — or, better, an open-licensed family.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/cordia-upc.mdx
## What CordiaUPC is
**CordiaUPC (คอร์เดียยูพีซี) is the geometric looped Thai sans that Microsoft bundles with Windows and Office, designed by Unity Progress Corp in 1992.** Microsoft's own description is unusually specific for a system font: a "geometric" design "with simple, straight strokes combined with round curves", with "no contrast between thick and thin strokes, even in the loops (small circles at the extremes of some letters)", suitable for body text with a "modern, futuristic appearance".
Settle one thing before the rest. If the font your document actually names is the New cut rather than the UPC cut, the page you want is [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/); this page covers the UPC cut only. The distinction matters far less than it looks, and the next section explains why.
For a generation of Thai office workers this was never a choice. It arrived with the operating system, became the default in templates, and those templates outlived the machines. The rest of the set is catalogued under [Windows and Office Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/windows-fonts/).
## CordiaUPC and the New cut are the same font data
**Microsoft says it in writing on the CordiaUPC page itself: "Cordia New is a newer version of the same typeface, with small adjustments." On current Windows, that difference has been reduced to nothing — both names now come out of one file.** The Windows 11 font list gives all four CordiaUPC styles and all four New-cut styles the same file, `Cordia.ttc`, at the same version, 5.06.
We opened the file rather than assume. `Cordia.ttc` on Windows 11 is a TrueType Collection of eight faces, four under each family name. For every matching style, the two faces point at the **identical byte ranges** for the glyph outlines (`glyf`, `loca`), the advance widths (`hmtx`), the character map (`cmap`), the vertical metrics (`hhea`, `OS/2`) and the OpenType layout tables (`GSUB`, `GPOS`, `GDEF`). The only tables that differ are `name`, which carries the family name, and the modified timestamp in `head`. Both report 4096 units per em, 362 glyphs, and in Regular an ascender of 3658 against a descender of −1040.
Michael S. Kaplan, then a Microsoft internationalization engineer, reached the same conclusion in 2007 without the file dump. He listed "Cordia New ≈ Cordia UPC" among Windows' duplicate families and wrote: "The only difference I can see between the UPC and the New versions is the name."
**The consequence for anyone choosing between them: there is nothing to choose.** They install together, they render identically, and switching a paragraph from one to the other changes the name stored in the document and not one line break.
Two limits on that. It describes the file Windows ships today, not the version 2.20 that shipped with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — we have not inspected those binaries and claim nothing about them. And it says nothing about third-party files carrying these names, which cannot be audited from here.
## Where `Cordiau.ttf` went
**Microsoft's CordiaUPC page still lists four separate file names — `Cordiau.ttf`, `Cordiaub.ttf`, `Cordiauz.ttf` and `Cordiaui.ttf` — while its Windows 11 font list gives `Cordia.ttc` for the same four styles. On a current Windows 11 machine the collection is what is actually installed; no `Cordiau.ttf` was present when we checked.**
This trips up anyone copying fonts between machines by dragging files. People go looking for four `.ttf` files that are not there and conclude the font is missing. It is not missing; it is inside a collection, together with the New cut.
Most of the family did keep the one-file-per-style scheme. Microsoft's Windows 11 list ships DilleniaUPC as `Upcdl.ttf`, EucrosiaUPC as `Upcel.ttf`, FreesiaUPC as `Upcfl.ttf`, IrisUPC as `Upcil.ttf`, JasmineUPC as `Upcjl.ttf`, KodchiangUPC as `Upckl.ttf` and LilyUPC as `Upcll.ttf`. Cordia and [Browallia](/fonts/browallia-upc/) are the two exceptions — see [DilleniaUPC](/fonts/dillenia-upc/) for the older pattern.
## What "UPC" stands for
**Microsoft's CordiaUPC page names the designer as "Unity Progress Corp" — the initials the UPC suffix matches. Kaplan's 2007 post gives the licensor in a third form, "Unity Progress Co., Ltd."**
We stop short of presenting the expansion as documented fact. **No Microsoft page we could find writes the abbreviation out in full.** The company name sits in Microsoft's own sentence, every UPC-suffixed Thai family in Windows carries the same 1992 Unity Progress copyright, and the reading is a strong one — but it is a reading rather than a quotation, and this site marks that line.
The suffix is a family marker, nothing technical. It runs across the whole Microsoft Thai set: BrowalliaUPC, DilleniaUPC, EucrosiaUPC, FreesiaUPC, IrisUPC, JasmineUPC, KodchiangUPC and LilyUPC.
## Every CordiaUPC style
**Microsoft is explicit: "It has two weights, Regular and Bold, with complementary slanted (italic) styles for each." Four styles, two real weights. No Light, no Medium, no Black, no variable version.**
| Style | PostScript name | File on Windows 11 | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|---|
| CordiaUPC | `CordiaUPC` | `Cordia.ttc` | Document body text |
| CordiaUPC Bold | `CordiaUPC-Bold` | `Cordia.ttc` | Headings and emphasis |
| CordiaUPC Italic | `CordiaUPC-Italic` | `Cordia.ttc` | Cited titles, foreign terms |
| CordiaUPC Bold Italic | `CordiaUPC-BoldItalic` | `Cordia.ttc` | Combined emphasis |
The PostScript names matter in prepress. A PDF reports the font it wants by PostScript name, so if a print house says a file is asking for `CordiaUPC-Bold`, that is the Bold style of this family and nothing else.
One thing to expect from **CordiaUPC Bold** specifically. Because the design carries, in Microsoft's words, "no contrast between thick and thin strokes, even in the loops", the bold cut thickens uniformly instead of tapering. The loops on ก, ถ and ภ are the first thing to close up at small sizes on a laser printer. For Thai headings that stay open at weight, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) offers a far wider range than two.
The family covers Thai and Latin — code pages 1874 Thai and 1252 Latin — but Microsoft describes the Latin set as capitals and lowercase for the alphabet, which is a supporting role, not a lead one. Compare it against your own bilingual copy in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Is CordiaUPC free?
**It is free in the sense that it is covered by the Windows or Office licence you already hold. It is not free in the open-licence sense, and there is nothing to buy.** Microsoft's Download row reads, in full: "N/A – Exclusively included with Microsoft products and services where applicable."
Ordinary commercial work on a licensed machine sits inside that: quotations, reports, print layouts, PDF export. Outside it are three things — redistributing the font files, embedding the font in non-Microsoft products or applications, and self-hosting it as a webfont. Each needs separate terms through Microsoft's enterprise licensing route.
Aggregator sites offering `Cordiau.ttf` are distributing files extracted from Windows installations. Microsoft has never published this font as a standalone download, so nothing licenses those copies. The [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out how bundled system fonts differ from OFL faces.
## How to get CordiaUPC without paying for it
**There is no price and no purchase. On Windows 10 and 11 it arrives through an optional feature called Thai Supplemental Fonts, which installs fourteen Thai families in a single action — CordiaUPC among them.**
Microsoft moved these families out of the default install to reduce the operating system footprint, improve performance and optimize disk space usage. After a fresh install or an upgrade, in Microsoft's words, "optional fonts aren't enabled by default" — that, not a corrupted profile, is why a new Windows 11 machine has no CordiaUPC. Microsoft also states the removal is a permanent change in behaviour that will remain in future releases.
Two routes, both straight from Microsoft's documentation:
- **Optional features.** Run `ms-settings:optionalfeatures`, choose **View features** next to **Add an optional feature**, tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts**, then **Next** and **Add**. On Windows 10 the pane is **System → Optional features** and the button is **+ Add a feature**.
- **Add Thai as a language.** Run `ms-settings:regionlanguage`, add Thai under **Preferred languages** and pick the language features you want. This brings the fonts plus full Thai language support.
Both install through Windows Update, so the device must be online. Where an organisation blocks Windows Update the feature will not install, and it needs an exception or a Features on Demand deployment instead.
Note what you cannot do: install the UPC cut on its own. The optional feature delivers `Cordia.ttc`, and both family names appear in the font menu together.
## What happens when CordiaUPC is substituted
**Swapping it for the New cut on a current Windows machine changes nothing measurable — same outlines, same widths, same line metrics. Swapping it for a genuinely different family is what wrecks a layout.**
Microsoft states the second case without hedging: "In most cases, font substitution causes the text to flow differently. Line breaks, column breaks, page breaks, line spacing, and hyphenation will likely change, even if the substitute font is similar to the missing font." When a font is neither installed nor embedded, Windows supplies a default substitute automatically — nobody asks you which one.
That is why a Thai document can look correct in the office and wrong at the print house. The cause is not the two names and not the printer; it is the file arriving on a machine that has neither cut, usually a Mac, a phone, or a Linux print server. Three things follow:
- **A document that names CordiaUPC names it permanently.** The file records a typeface name, not the typeface. Nothing you do in your own font menu changes what an old file asks for.
- **Page counts move.** Reflowed line breaks cascade, so a substituted document can gain or lose pages — a real problem for numbered clauses, tables and fixed forms.
- **Embedding is the fix Microsoft names.** Its Office guidance is to embed fonts to preserve the layout when sharing with people on other versions. That protects the file; it does not hand the recipient a licence to use the font in their own work.
If the document has to survive leaving Windows, set it in an open-licensed Thai sans from the start instead of betting on a system font being installed.
## Why you still have UPC files in 2026
**Because Windows still ships them, Office still lists them, and Thai templates written in the 1990s are still in daily use.** All three at once, each producing a different kind of user.
- **The optional feature.** CordiaUPC is one of the fourteen families in the current Thai Supplemental Fonts feature on Windows 10 and 11. Anyone who has added Thai to a Windows machine has it.
- **Office.** The family is on Microsoft's cloud fonts list for Office applications, which is why a document can render correctly in a current Office app on a machine with nothing installed locally.
- **Inherited documents.** Microsoft's product table for this font starts at Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 at font version 2.20. Forms, letterheads and university templates from that era still specify the UPC name, and every copy since has carried it forward.
None of that recommends it for new design work. It makes it the correct choice for old documents, which is a different job entirely.
## Name variants and spellings
**All of these point at the same typeface:**
- **CordiaUPC** — the family name Microsoft publishes, one word
- **Cordia UPC** — the spaced form
- **cordiaupc** — the lower-case form typed into a search box
- **คอร์เดียยูพีซี** — the Thai transliteration of the full name
- **คอร์เดีย** — the Thai form of Cordia alone; on a Windows machine it means this family or its New sibling
- **`Cordiau.ttf`, `Cordiaub.ttf`, `Cordiauz.ttf`, `Cordiaui.ttf`** — the file names Microsoft's documentation still lists
- **`CordiaUPC-Bold`, `CordiaUPC-Italic`, `CordiaUPC-BoldItalic`** — the PostScript names, as reported by PDF and prepress tools
One correction worth making plainly. **There is no font called "Cordia New UPC".** Microsoft publishes two separate family names and neither combines the suffixes. Anyone searching that phrase is reading a font menu that lists both names next to each other as if it were one entry. On a current Windows machine either name sets the same text identically.
## Free alternatives to CordiaUPC
**If the work has to live on the web, go to a supplier, or open on a Mac, start from an open-licensed looped Thai sans instead of trying to make a bundled system font portable.**
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped Thai sans under the SIL Open Font License, free to embed and free for commercial use, with a far wider weight range than two. The closest replacement in the document-body role.
- **[Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/)** — OFL, with traditional circular loops and consistent rendering across platforms. Strong when Thai and English share a sentence.
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/)** — another OFL option, drawn as a matched Thai-Latin pair from the start, which helps when both scripts have to hold the same tone.
- **[The full free Thai font list](/fonts/categories/free/)** — every family with its licence checked individually.
A note on [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/): it installs in the same Thai Supplemental Fonts feature, so it substitutes cleanly on a Windows machine, but it sits under the same bundled system licence rather than an open one. It does not solve the web or file-handoff problem.
The same caveat applies to every option here — none is a metric-compatible twin, so dropping one into a layout already set in CordiaUPC will move the line breaks, for exactly the reason Microsoft gives above. Pick the replacement before the layout is built. Compare them in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/), or browse [Thai sans-serif fonts](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) and the full [fonts directory](/fonts/).
## Licensing
**CordiaUPC is proprietary. The copyright line reads "© 1992 Unity Progress. Portions © 2004 The Monotype Corporation. Portions © 2019 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved." Usage rights attach to the Windows or Office licence on the machine. There is no standalone sale, no public webfont licence, and no redistribution right.**
One documentation detail for anyone chasing the vendor of record: Microsoft's CordiaUPC page leaves the **Font vendor** row blank, while the same row on its page for the New cut is filled in. The copyright lines are identical, so we read the blank as an omission rather than a different rights position — and we say so rather than assert it.
Organisations needing more than the bundled scope — embedding in shipped software, server installation, or webfont use — must negotiate through the enterprise route Microsoft links from the [CordiaUPC documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/cordiaupc). For work that should not involve licence negotiation at all, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) deliver comparable looped Thai character under the SIL Open Font License with no conditions attached. The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers where this looped tradition sits against the loopless families now dominant in Thai branding.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-adman-x.mdx
## What DB Adman X is
**DB Adman X is a commercial display geometric Thai sans from DB Fonts, drawn specifically for advertising, packaging, and promotional display work where the type needs confidence and clean geometry.** It ships in multiple weights under commercial per-user licensing.
The name (ดีบี แอดแมน) signals the intended market: advertising design. DB Fonts has positioned the font as a display workhorse for Thai agencies producing OOH, in-store, and packaging work where clean modern Thai display typography is non-negotiable and budget supports commercial licensing.
In the commercial Thai catalogue, DB Adman X sits alongside [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) as one of the foundry's most widely deployed display releases. Where DB Helvethaica X slots into corporate identity, DB Adman X is the display counterpart for advertising and pack design.
## Character design and tone
**DB Adman X uses geometric loopless consonants, high x-height, and clean right-angle terminals tuned for high-impact advertising display at 40-120pt.** The silhouette is squarer and more commercial-pop than Cadson Demak's catalogue — built to carry big, to photograph well on OOH, and to stand up on crowded retail shelves.
Consonants like ก, ถ, ภ get clean geometric openings with no ornament. Terminals are cut horizontally at stem ends, echoing a Helvetica-school sensibility but with wider, more display-calibrated proportions. Stroke weight at Black pushes aggressively thick, which is where the font earns its keep for pack and poster work.
Tone marks are drawn proportionally heavy to stay readable on small-print pack callouts like "1+1 ฟรี" or "ราคาพิเศษ" against dense background photography. The Latin companion is a display geometric sans with proportions that match the Thai rhythm more than classical Latin cadence.
## Weights and availability
**DB Adman X typically ships five weights from Light to Black, with optional italic cuts depending on licence tier.** Purchase from [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-adman) under commercial per-user, per-agency, or site-wide licensing.
The font is not available on Google Fonts or any free CDN. Thai advertising agencies licence it under ongoing catalogue subscriptions that cover the full DB Fonts range for all concurrent creative work.
## Best use cases
**DB Adman X is the correct choice for Thai advertising and packaging design where budget supports a commercial licence.** Strong briefs:
- Thai FMCG pack design — food, beverage, personal care, household
- Out-of-home advertising — billboards, bus-stop posters, transit wraps
- Retail in-store signage — sale callouts, shelf talkers, endcap displays
- Promotional print and leaflet design for supermarket chains and retail
- TV commercial end-frames and digital ad creative for Thai consumer brands
Where it doesn't fit: open-source projects (use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), or [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/) for geometric loopless character under an open licence), body text use, and projects without commercial licence budget. And if the brief specifically needs a free condensed loopless option for tight headline setting, [ThaiGraph Condensed](/fonts/thaigraph-condensed/) covers it in four weights under the OFL.
## Pairings
**DB Adman X pairs with DB Fonts body fonts or with external open-licensed Thai body sans.** Three pairings:
- **DB Helvethaica X** — corporate-sibling body sans from the same DB Fonts catalogue
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for body copy when display is DB Adman X
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric Thai sans for secondary hierarchy, when a full DB catalogue licence isn't available
## Licensing
**DB Adman X is commercial proprietary software from DB Fonts, licensed per-user, per-application, or under agency / corporate site agreements.** Web-font deployment, product embedding, and redistribution all require separate commercial terms. Verify current licence pricing and terms directly with [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase). For similar geometric Thai display character under an open licence, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-airy.mdx
## What DB Airy is
**DB Airy is a large humanist Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book) that ships 24 styles across two subfamilies — DB Airy Caps and DB Airy Std — spanning Thin to Black with matching italics.** It is positioned as a formal workhorse that can read either strong or soft depending on weight.
The catalogue tagline pairs "STRONG อย่างเป็นทางการ" with "Soft อย่างเป็นทางการ" — formal either way, but tunable in tone. That range is why DB Airy sits in the same tier of everyday DB workhorses as [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/): a big family you can build a whole system on.
The name (ดีบี แอรี่) points at the design's open, airy counters. DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry.
## Character design and tone
**DB Airy uses open counters, an even humanist rhythm, and a two-track system where the Caps subfamily and the Std subfamily give slightly different voices from the same skeleton.** The wide weight ladder from Thin to Black lets a single family carry both delicate captions and heavy headlines.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ are drawn with generous aperture so the type stays legible when set light and airy. At Black the same forms close up and gain presence for headline use. Thai and Latin are drawn to sit together, since the family covers both ก-ฮ and A-Z.
The tone is contemporary-corporate but softer than a strict neo-grotesque — approachable rather than cold.
## Weights and availability
**DB Airy ships 24 styles in total — a full Thin-to-Black ladder with italics, split across DB Airy Caps and DB Airy Std.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-airy) under DB's commercial desktop and web-font terms.
It is not distributed free. The size of the family makes it a candidate for a complete brand type system rather than a single-weight accent.
## Best use cases
**DB Airy suits brands that need one flexible Thai sans across an entire identity, from fine print to headlines.** Strong briefs:
- Brand systems needing a full weight range in one family
- Editorial and UI text where a humanist tone beats a rigid grotesque
- Lifestyle, wellness, and service brands wanting an approachable formal voice
- Bilingual Thai/English layouts requiring matched scripts
- Signage and wayfinding where the heavier weights carry
Where it doesn't fit: open-licence projects — use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) instead.
## Pairings
**DB Airy can run solo across a whole system, or pair with a DB text face for long copy.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — a compact DB workhorse sans for dense UI where Airy sets headlines
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for teams mixing licensed and free type
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric Thai sans for a firmer display contrast
## Licensing
**DB Airy is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution and product embedding need separate terms. Confirm current pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-airy). For open-licensed humanist Thai sans alternatives, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and the full [font directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-bunjerd.mdx
## What DB Bunjerd is
**DB Bunjerd is a versatile everyday Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book), shipping ten styles from Light to Heavy with matching italics for confident, flexible layout work.** It is one of the foundry's general-purpose workhorses rather than a single-trick display face.
The Thai name (ดีบี บรรเจิด) plays on slang for "brilliant" or "splendid" — the catalogue line jokes that where people once said "เจ๋ง" or "จ๊าบ," now it is "บรรเจิด" again. It sits alongside [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/) in the tier of dependable DB sans families.
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Bunjerd is drawn on a clean contemporary sans skeleton with a broad Light-to-Heavy range, so it works for both body-adjacent text and confident headlines.** The Heavy cut in particular gives it strong display presence.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ are drawn with even, modern strokes and clear structure across the ladder. The lighter weights stay readable at smaller sizes; the Bold and Heavy cuts carry posters and packaging. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin A-Z are covered, so bilingual layouts stay consistent.
The tone is confident and general-purpose — a face that reads modern without demanding attention.
## Weights and availability
**DB Bunjerd ships ten styles — Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy, each with an italic.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-bunjerd) as a desktop font or inside DB Font Vol. 8.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. Its range makes it usable across a whole layout, from subheads to headlines.
## Best use cases
**DB Bunjerd suits general branding and layout work that wants one dependable Thai sans across weights.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate and commercial branding needing a flexible sans
- Editorial subheads and headlines
- Packaging and retail signage in the heavier cuts
- Bilingual Thai/English marketing layouts
- Presentation and report display type
Where it doesn't fit: dense long-form body text, and open-licence projects — use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [KoHo](/fonts/koho/) there.
## Pairings
**DB Bunjerd handles headlines and subheads; pair it with a calmer body face.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — a compact DB workhorse for dense body text
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for long copy
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — a geometric Thai sans for a firmer display alternative
## Licensing
**DB Bunjerd is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution needs separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-bunjerd). For open-licensed Thai sans alternatives, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and the [font directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-ekkamai.mdx
## What DB Ekkamai is
**DB Ekkamai is a clean, curved minimalist Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book), drawn in ten styles from UltraLight to Bold with matching italics for contemporary, street-smart layouts.** The DB catalogue tags it clean, curved, graphic, minimalist, and sans.
The name (ดีบี เอกมัย) borrows from Ekkamai, the Bangkok neighbourhood, and the face carries that casual, urban-cool tone. It is offered individually and inside the DB Font Vol. 11 bundle, alongside the wider workhorse range that includes [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/).
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Ekkamai leans on soft curves and pared-back, minimalist letterforms — few sharp corners, an even weight, and a friendly modern rhythm.** The ten-step ladder from UltraLight to Bold gives fine control over how loud or quiet the type reads.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ are drawn with rounded, simplified transitions that keep the "curved" character the foundry advertises. At UltraLight the face reads delicate and editorial; at Bold it firms up for short headlines. The italics add a casual lean that suits lifestyle captions.
The tone is unfussy and approachable — a graphic-design sans rather than a corporate one.
## Weights and availability
**DB Ekkamai ships ten styles — UltraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold, each with an italic.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-ekkamai) as a desktop font or inside DB Font Vol. 11.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. Its specimens show both Thai and Latin, so it works in bilingual lifestyle layouts.
## Best use cases
**DB Ekkamai fits lifestyle, hospitality, and graphic-led work that wants a soft, minimalist Thai voice.** Strong briefs:
- Café, restaurant, and hospitality branding
- Lifestyle editorial and social-media graphics
- Fashion and retail campaigns with an urban-casual tone
- Poster and flyer work needing a clean modern sans
- Bilingual captions and short headlines
Where it doesn't fit: dense long-form body text, and open-licence projects — for those use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [KoHo](/fonts/koho/).
## Pairings
**DB Ekkamai works as a display and short-headline face over a calmer body sans.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — a compact DB workhorse for body copy beneath Ekkamai headlines
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for long text
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — geometric Thai sans for a firmer secondary hierarchy
## Licensing
**DB Ekkamai is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution needs separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-ekkamai). For open-licensed soft Thai sans alternatives, see [KoHo](/fonts/koho/) and the [font directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-erawan.mdx
## What DB Erawan is
**DB Erawan (ดีบี เอราวัณ) is a heavyweight Thai display sans designed by Parinya Rojarayanond, released in 1987 as part of the pioneering DB series from Dear Book — the Bangkok foundry now known as DB Designs.** For roughly a decade after its debut, it held the title of the heaviest Thai typeface ever made ([Typotheque](https://www.typotheque.com/articles/history-of-thai-typography)).
The DB series, created by Suraphol Vesaratchavej and Parinya Rojarayanond, marked the arrival of the first refined digital Thai typefaces from a dedicated type design company ([Wikipedia — Thai typography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography)). Thai design critic Pracha Suveeranunt places DB Erawan's debut in B.E. 2530 (1987) and credits the DB series with helping to drive Thailand's transition from phototypesetting to desktop publishing ([ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/thaitype/erawan/)).
Nearly four decades on, the font remains commercially available from the [official DB Font store](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-erawan), which now categorizes it as "Thai Sans, Informal" — a firm, thick, wide design built for headings. Within the modern DB catalogue it sits alongside newer display releases like [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/).
## Character design and tone
**DB Erawan is defined by extreme weight: Pracha Suveeranunt describes it as resembling Futura Extra Bold of the Roman alphabet, and as the thickest, heaviest typeface made up to that time ("ตัวพิมพ์ที่มีความหนาและน้ำหนักมากที่สุดเท่าที่เคยทำกันมา").** That Futura Extra Bold comparison, echoed by Typotheque, tells you the design's DNA — geometric construction pushed to maximum blackness.
The result is type that behaves like a graphic block. Counters compress, strokes dominate, and a headline set in DB Erawan reads at poster distance before the words themselves do. The foundry's own tags — firm, thick, wide — describe a face engineered for impact rather than nuance, and its official specimen shows the design carrying a full Latin A-Z set alongside the Thai, so bilingual headlines hold a consistent weight ([DB Font store](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-erawan)).
Its historical context matters, too. Arriving in 1987, DB Erawan gave Thai desktop publishing a level of display weight that phototypesetting-era headline faces had not delivered, which is a large part of why it became a landmark of the DB series ([ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/thaitype/erawan/)).
## Weights and availability
**DB Erawan ships as a 2-style family — Regular and Italic — sold by the official DB Font store for 1,070 THB.** There are no intermediate weights; the design's identity is its single, maximal heaviness ([DB Font store](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-erawan)).
The font is not on Google Fonts and has no legal free download. Purchase and current pricing run through [dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-erawan), the storefront of DB Designs Co., Ltd.
## Best use cases
**DB Erawan suits Thai display work where sheer typographic weight is the message: headlines, posters, covers, and packaging callouts that need to hit at maximum volume.** Strong briefs:
- Poster and cover headlines where one or two Thai words carry the composition
- Retro or heritage-flavoured Thai branding referencing 1980s-90s print culture
- Packaging and promotional callouts that must dominate crowded shelves
- Editorial display type where a Futura-Extra-Bold-class Thai block is the design intent
Where it doesn't fit: body text at any size, interfaces, and open-source or no-budget projects — for a free geometric Thai sans with heavy display weights, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/). For grounding in how Thai letter anatomy handles this kind of weight, start with the [typography pillar](/learn/typography/).
## Pairings
**DB Erawan needs quiet partners — its weight leaves no room for a second loud voice.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans that stays neutral under an ultra-heavy display
- **DB Helvethaica X** — same-foundry corporate sans for supporting hierarchy within a DB catalogue licence
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — geometric Google Fonts sans whose lighter weights echo Erawan's construction at text sizes
## Licensing
**DB Erawan is paid commercial software from DB Designs: the standard desktop license covers up to 5 computers, a webfont license covers 1 domain per license, and the foundry explicitly prohibits using DB fonts through AI tools without purchase ("ห้ามใช้ฟอนต์ DB ผ่าน AI โดยไม่ซื้อ").** Brand identity, packaging, and app embedding require separate Brand/Corporate licenses — verify current terms on the [DB Font FAQs](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) before deploying.
If the licence doesn't fit the budget, the closest open-licensed route to heavy geometric Thai display is [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) in its Black weight, with [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) as the lighter-handed alternative; both are free for commercial use under the SIL Open Font License.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-fongnam.mdx
## What DB Fongnam is
**DB Fongnam (ดีบี ฟองน้ำ) is a geometric looped Thai body typeface by Parinya Rojarayanond, sold commercially by DB Designs Co., Ltd. — and one of the first Thai body typefaces designed from scratch in the early digital type era.** The name means "bubble" or "sponge," and the letterforms live up to it: round, smooth, and light on the page.
DB Fongnam belongs to the DB series that Suraphol Vesaratchavej and Parinya Rojarayanond built at Dear Book (later DB Design), which Wikipedia's Thai typography article counts among the first refined Thai PostScript typefaces of the digital age. Where most early digital Thai fonts digitized existing metal or phototype models, DB Font's own history article singles out DB FongNam as a body face designed anew for the new medium.
A Thai font-community thread on f0nt.com traces the design's roots further back, to the Tom Lite prototype lettering drawn by Thongteum Saemsutt in the 1976–1987 period, and notes that DB Design later issued an updated version called DB NewFongnam. No documented release year for the original digital release is published by the foundry.
## Character design and tone
**DB Fongnam is drawn เกลี้ยงกลม เบา สบายตา — smooth, round, light, and easy on the eyes, in the foundry's own words — with looped terminals over a strictly geometric skeleton.** It reads as friendly without tipping into casual, which is why the foundry rates it for both official and informal use.
The DB Font history article points to the details that made it distinctive: geometric simplicity throughout, straight baselines on characters like บ, อ, and ย where earlier models curved, and a trademark diagonal-mouth ก. The loops stay small and consistent, so the texture at body sizes is even rather than busy — the classic mark of a Thai text face built for extended reading. A Latin companion is included, so mixed Thai-English copy sets in one family. For the anatomy behind looped versus loopless Thai letterforms, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Weights and availability
**DB Designs sells DB Fongnam as a four-style family — Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic — for 1,070 THB, covering two weights plus their italics.** The desktop license covers installation on 1–5 computers, and a separate webfont license covers 1 domain.
The family's DNA also lives on elsewhere in the DB catalogue: in 2009 the foundry released DB PuiMake, developed directly from DB FongNam — the original Regular and Bold were reworked as Light and Medium, and new Regular and Bold weights were added to form a four-weight family. DB Fongnam is not on Google Fonts or any free CDN; purchase directly from [DB Font](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-fongnam).
## Best use cases
**DB Fongnam is a Thai body-text workhorse: the foundry tags it for clean, modern body-copy applications and rates it suitable for official and government contexts as well as informal ones.** Strong briefs:
- Long-form editorial body text in magazines, reports, and books
- Government and corporate documents that need a looped, formal-legible Thai text face
- Brand body copy where a round, friendly-but-professional tone fits
- UI and web body text under the foundry's webfont license (1 domain)
Where it doesn't fit: display-first work at poster sizes — reach for a dedicated display face like [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/) — and zero-budget projects, where the open-licensed [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the natural free body-text alternative.
## Pairings
**Pair DB Fongnam's round looped body text with a firmer geometric display voice for hierarchy.** Three pairings that work:
- **[DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/)** — same-foundry display geometric for headlines over Fongnam body copy
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — open-licensed loopless geometric sans for headings when the budget covers only one commercial family
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — rounded loopless geometric whose curves echo Fongnam's at display sizes
## Licensing
**DB Fongnam is a paid commercial font: 1,070 THB for the four-style family, with a desktop license for 1–5 computers and a webfont license for 1 domain.** There is no legal free download; check current terms on the [DB Font licensing FAQ](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) before deploying.
If the project has no font budget, the closest open-licensed routes are [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for a modern Thai body-text standard, or the looped system faces [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) and [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/) that ship with Windows. Browse the full [Thai font library](/fonts/) for more body-text options at every license tier.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-heavent-rounded.mdx
## What DB Heavent Rounded is
**DB Heavent Rounded is the rounded-terminal cut of DB Fonts' Heavent family, shipping 14 styles that cover three condensed widths and four upright weights, each with a matching italic, at 5,350 THB per family.** The skeleton and proportions come straight from Heavent; what changes is that every stroke end is rounded ([dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent-rounded), accessed 5 August 2026).
One note before you read on: this page covers the **rounded** cut only. If you are looking for the standard, flat-terminal family — the one people mean when they type plain "DB Heavent" — go to [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/), which carries that family's weights, price and history in full.
The foundry introduces this one with the joke "ไม่ต้องศัลยกรรม เพราะหน้ามน โดยกำเนิด" — "no surgery needed, a naturally round face" — and tags it Thai Sans, Advertising, Agency, Corporate, Heading, Mega-Family, Modern and Rounded. DB Fonts (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s ([Luc Devroye](https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-28816.html), accessed 16 July 2026).
## How DB Heavent Rounded differs from DB Heavent
**Two things differ: the shape of the stroke terminals, and the set of cuts you get. Standard DB Heavent goes deep on weight — seven steps from UltraLight to Black — while DB Heavent Rounded drops the lightest weights and adds three condensed widths instead.**
| | [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/) | DB Heavent Rounded (this page) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Stroke terminals | Flat | Rounded throughout |
| Weights | UltraLight, Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black | Regular, Medium, Bold, Black |
| Condensed cuts | Not in this family (separate Condensed family) | Three, inside the same family |
| Styles | 14 | 14 |
| Price | 5,350 THB | 5,350 THB |
| Tone | Neutral, corporate | Warm, approachable |
How to choose: for corporate identity, annual reports or advertising that must look sharp, use [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/). For children's apps, healthcare communication, hospital wayfinding or any brand that wants a softer voice, use the rounded cut on this page. Both sit inside the same four-family, 56-style bundle at 5,885 THB — considerably cheaper than buying two families separately ([DB Fonts bundle page](https://dbfont.biz/bundle/20), accessed 5 August 2026).
## The 14 styles
**DB Heavent Rounded ships Condensed, Medium Condensed, Bold Condensed, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black, each with a matching italic** ([dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent-rounded), accessed 5 August 2026).
| Style | What it's for |
| --- | --- |
| DB HeaventRounded Condensed / Italic | Long labels, tables, space-constrained infographics |
| DB HeaventRounded Medium Condensed / Italic | Subheads in narrow layouts |
| DB HeaventRounded Bold Condensed / Italic | Headlines in narrow columns, wayfinding signs |
| DB HeaventRounded / Italic | Body copy, labels, general UI |
| DB HeaventRounded Medium / Italic | Buttons, subheads, light emphasis |
| DB HeaventRounded Bold / Italic | Primary headlines |
| DB HeaventRounded Black / Italic | Heavy headlines, book covers, posters |
Note that the font-menu name is written closed up as "DB HeaventRounded", with no space — which is why so many people search for "dbheaventrounded" as one word.
## Is DB Heavent Rounded free to download?
**No. DB Heavent Rounded is a paid font at 5,350 THB per family. It is not on Google Fonts and there is no foundry-authorised free version.** The correct route is to buy from [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent-rounded) directly, paying by bank transfer; the foundry states that once payment is transferred the order is final and cannot be cancelled.
The foundry also publishes the condition "ห้ามใช้ฟอนต์ DB ผ่าน AI โดยไม่ซื้อ" — DB fonts may not be used through AI without purchase — which covers feeding the font files to generative AI tools ([dbfont.biz how-to-purchase](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase), accessed 5 August 2026). Embedding as a webfont requires a separate per-domain licence.
Files circulating on international aggregator sites are not authorised distributions, and they tend to be older versions with misplaced vowel and tone marks — a defect that shows up especially badly in a rounded face, where the rounded forms already tighten the gap between mark and consonant.
## Free Thai alternatives
**Straight answer: there is no open-licensed Thai rounded family that substitutes for DB Heavent Rounded directly. A rounded Thai family with condensed cuts and full italics essentially does not exist in the free tier.** What you can do is pick a free face with a comparably warm tone and accept that the layout will shift:
- **[Itim](/fonts/itim/)** — a casual OFL Thai face from Cadson Demak with a playful, friendly tone. Single weight only, so it works for headlines and children's material but not for a multi-weight system
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — six-weight loopless Thai sans from Cadson Demak under the OFL, with softer letterforms than most geometric sans faces; the most practical free option when you need several weights
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — neutral loopless sans, nine weights with italics, for cases where the real requirement is weight range rather than rounded terminals
For long-form body text, hand the job to [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) whichever display face you choose. More options in the [sans-serif category](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/), and see the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how the licence types compare.
## Character design and tone
**DB Heavent Rounded takes Heavent's compact, space-efficient letterforms and rounds the stroke terminals, producing an approachable sans that still packs tightly into small UI and signage.** The three condensed cuts keep the family economical with horizontal space — the point where it separates itself from most rounded faces, which tend to bloom outwards and eat measure.
Consonants like ก, ถ and ภ carry Heavent's efficient structure with softened ends that read gentler and more casual. The Black cut gives enough presence for large headings, while the condensed cuts hold long labels to a measure. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin A-Z are covered, so bilingual work can be set from one family.
The overall register is warm and practical — a workhorse sans that feels friendly rather than formal, unlike [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/), which sets out to be a full corporate voice.
## Best use cases
**DB Heavent Rounded suits friendly interfaces, wayfinding and information design that needs a soft but space-efficient Thai sans.** Strong briefs:
- App and web UI wanting a warm tone — especially finance and health products that need to take the edge off dense numbers
- Signage and wayfinding, where the condensed cuts fit long strings onto one sign
- Children's, education and public-health communication
- Infographics and dense label layouts that must stay legible small
- Consumer packaging that wants an informal voice
Where it doesn't fit: formal corporate identity that wants sharpness — use [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/) — and open-licence or zero-budget projects.
## Pairings
**DB Heavent Rounded pairs with its own sharper sibling, or with a calmer open-licensed Thai body sans.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — the non-rounded Heavent for sharper contexts in the same system; the four-family bundle gets you both
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for long text, which keeps the number of paid licences down
- **[Itim](/fonts/itim/)** — an open-licensed casual Thai face for playful accents under DB Heavent Rounded headlines
## Licensing
**DB Heavent Rounded is commercial proprietary software from DB Fonts at 5,350 THB per family, or inside the four-family, 56-style bundle at 5,885 THB. Webfont use is licensed separately per domain, and redistribution needs separate terms.** Confirm current scope and pricing on the [foundry's catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent-rounded) and the [how-to-purchase page](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase) (accessed 5 August 2026).
If the budget isn't there, the nearest open-licensed options are [Itim](/fonts/itim/) and [Mitr](/fonts/mitr/). Every face in our [font library](/fonts/) carries its verified licensing notes.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-heavent.mdx
## What DB Heavent is
**DB Heavent (ดีบี เฮเว่นท์) is the commercial loopless Thai sans from DB Fonts that succeeded DB Helvethaica, shipping 14 styles from UltraLight to Black with a matching italic for every weight, at 5,350 THB per family.** In August 2015 the DB Helvethaica name vanished from the foundry's site and the family returned on 17 August 2015 rebranded as DB Heavent; users on the f0nt.com community forum suspected a foreign copyright issue around the Helvetica name ([f0nt.com forum thread](https://forum.f0nt.com/index.php?topic=22920.0), accessed 4 July 2026).
The font is often mistyped as "db heaven" or run together as "dbheavent". They all refer to this same family — the foundry's own spelling is DB Heavent, two words.
The lineage matters. The DB series was created by Suraphol Vesaratchavej and Parinya Rojarayanond of Dear Book — later DB Design — Thailand's first digital type foundry, and DB Heavent's embedded metadata (version 3.201, copyright 2015) credits "Prinya R. nont, Isaro Good-In and Thongchai Ariwong — Built by Ramita Plailek" ([OnlineWebFonts metadata listing](https://www.onlinewebfonts.com/fonts/DB_Heavent), accessed 4 July 2026). This is the same foundry bloodline as [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) and [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/), carrying Thailand's Helvetica-school tradition under a legally safer name.
DB Fonts files it under Thai Sans with the tags Advertising, Agency, Corporate, Heading, Mega-Family and Modern, and markets it with the tagline "ไม่ต้องทำอะไร เพราะเท่โดยกำเนิด" — roughly, "no need to do anything, it's cool by birth" ([dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent), accessed 5 August 2026).
## The four Heavent families, and which one you want
**Heavent is not one family but four, drawn on the same skeleton: DB Heavent (the standard cut), DB Heavent Condensed, DB Heavent Extended and DB Heavent Rounded — 56 styles together for 5,885 THB.** If you searched for plain "DB Heavent", the standard family on this page is what you are looking for ([DB Fonts bundle page](https://dbfont.biz/bundle/20), accessed 5 August 2026).
| Family | Character | Best for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **DB Heavent** (this page) | Standard proportions, flat stroke ends | Corporate identity, advertising, general headings |
| DB Heavent Condensed | Horizontally compressed | Signage, long headlines, narrow columns |
| DB Heavent Extended | Horizontally widened | Logotypes, short headlines needing optical weight |
| [DB Heavent Rounded](/fonts/db-heavent-rounded/) | Rounded stroke terminals | Friendly UI, children's and healthcare work |
If it is specifically the rounded cut you want, go to [DB Heavent Rounded](/fonts/db-heavent-rounded/), which carries that family's own weights and pricing. Each family sells separately at 5,350 THB, or all four together at 5,885 THB — clearly the better deal for anyone planning to use more than one.
## DB Heavent weights
**DB Heavent ships seven weights — UltraLight, Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black — each with a matching italic, for 14 styles in the family** ([dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent), accessed 5 August 2026).
| Weight | Name in the font menu | What it's for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| UltraLight | DB Heavent UltraLight / UltraLight Italic | Very large headlines, hairline editorial settings |
| Thin | DB Heavent Thin / Thin Italic | Airy headlines, fashion and lifestyle work |
| Light | DB Heavent Light / Light Italic | Standfirsts and large secondary text |
| Regular | DB Heavent / DB Heavent Italic | Body copy, labels, general text |
| Medium | DB Heavent Med / Medium Italic | Subheads, buttons, light emphasis |
| Bold | DB Heavent Bold / Bold Italic | Primary headlines, price points, emphasis |
| Black | DB Heavent Black / Black Italic | Heaviest headlines, posters, packaging |
The two most-searched cuts are **DB Heavent Bold** for headlines and **DB Heavent Med** (Medium) for subheads and UI. Both are included in the same family licence — one purchase covers all 14 styles, and the foundry does not sell individual weights.
Seven weights is an unusually deep range for a Thai commercial family, which is a large part of its agency appeal: one licence covers hairline editorial settings through heavy poster headlines.
## Is DB Heavent free to download?
**No. DB Heavent is a paid font. It is not on Google Fonts, there is no foundry-authorised free version, and the files circulating on international font-aggregator sites are not authorised distributions.** The only correct route is to buy from [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent) directly.
Orders are placed by bank transfer to Kasikornbank, Minburi branch, account 094-2-83326-3, and the foundry states that once payment is transferred the order is final and cannot be cancelled. It also publishes an additional condition — "ห้ามใช้ฟอนต์ DB ผ่าน AI โดยไม่ซื้อ", DB fonts may not be used through AI without purchase — which covers feeding the font files to generative AI tools ([dbfont.biz how-to-purchase](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase), accessed 5 August 2026).
What to know before downloading from a free-font site:
- Aggregator copies are usually older versions with incomplete Thai glyph coverage and misplaced vowel and tone marks
- Using an unlicensed font on client work is a legal exposure that sits with the agency, not the client
- Embedding as a webfont requires a separate per-domain licence, which the foundry offers at checkout
A common legitimate pattern is an organisation buying a licence and distributing the font internally to its own people. King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), for example, names DB Heavent Cond and TH Sarabun PSK as its corporate-identity fonts, with the notice "Do not apply to commercial use" ([KMUTT corporate identity page](https://www.kmutt.ac.th/en/corporate_identity/%E0%B8%9F%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%95%E0%B9%8C%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%95%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%A9%E0%B8%93%E0%B9%8C/), accessed 5 August 2026). That access is tied to membership of that institution — it is not a licence for your own work.
## Free alternatives to DB Heavent
**If 5,350 THB is out of budget, the honest route is a loopless Thai sans under the SIL Open Font License, which is free for full commercial use.** The three closest in character in our library:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless Thai sans, nine weights with italics; the deepest free weight range and the closest match to DB Heavent's system scope
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — a more neutral loopless sans than Kanit, well suited to corporate and UI work that wants a quieter voice
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — six-weight loopless sans from Cadson Demak with softer letterforms, good for headlines and signage
To be clear: none of these is a one-to-one substitute. Character widths, spacing and tone-mark positions all differ, so swapping fonts will move your layout. If artwork has to stay pixel-identical, buying the licence is the only route. Browse the full set in the [loopless Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/loopless/), and see our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how the licence types compare.
## Character design and tone
**DB Heavent is a loopless ("Roman-like") Thai sans: its consonants drop the traditional หัว loops so that Thai letterforms read with the same clean, geometric rhythm as a Latin sans-serif.** The style was introduced in the 1970s by Manop Srisomporn, whose [Manoptica](/fonts/manoptica/) deliberately invoked Helvetica — the school of Thai type design DB Heavent directly continues ([Wikipedia — Thai typography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography), accessed 4 July 2026).
The practical effect is a neutral, modern, corporate tone. Loopless consonants sit comfortably next to Latin capitals, and the official specimen page shows both the full Thai set and a Latin A–Z, confirming genuine bilingual coverage rather than a Thai-only cut ([dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent), accessed 5 August 2026).
A Thai design-industry roundup ranks DB Heavent at the top of its list of the ten most-used fonts in the country — listing "DB Helvethaica หรือ DB Heavent" as one and the same face — and notes it works in both Thai and English, looks modern, and is chosen by major brands for signage, advertising and product work ([JobMyWay](https://www.jobmyway.com/article/article_detail/43), accessed 4 July 2026). For the anatomy behind looped versus loopless Thai letterforms, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Best use cases
**DB Heavent is built for Thai corporate identity, advertising and heading work where a neutral loopless voice and a deep weight range justify a commercial licence.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate identity systems and brand guidelines for Thai companies and institutions
- Advertising campaigns — print, OOH and digital creative
- Editorial and presentation headings where Thai and Latin must share one voice
- Signage and product work that needs both Bold and Medium inside one system
Where it doesn't fit: open-source projects, work without a licensing budget, and anything that requires passing font files on to third parties.
## Pairings
**DB Heavent pairs best with an open-licensed Thai body sans carrying long-form text under its display and heading weights.** Three sensible combinations:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the standard open-licensed Thai body sans; lets DB Heavent handle identity and headings while body copy stays licence-free
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — a neutral, well-hinted body companion for screen-heavy corporate products
- **[DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/)** — a same-lineage display partner when a campaign needs a louder advertising voice above DB Heavent's corporate register
For more from the same tradition, see [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) for corporate work, [DB ThaiText](/fonts/db-thaitext/) for text setting and [DB Sathorn](/fonts/db-sathorn/) for display, or browse the whole [font library](/fonts/).
## Licensing and price
**DB Heavent is paid commercial software from DB Fonts: 5,350 THB for the 14-style family, or 5,885 THB for the four-family, 56-style bundle (Heavent + Condensed + Extended + Rounded). Webfont use is licensed separately, per domain** ([dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent) and the [bundle page](https://dbfont.biz/bundle/20), accessed 5 August 2026).
Confirm the exact scope with the foundry before ordering — the number of machines covered, embedding in apps or products, and the terms around AI tools are all points to settle directly with DB Fonts on the [how-to-purchase page](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase). If the budget isn't there, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) and [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) are OFL-licensed and free for commercial use.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-helvethaica-x.mdx
## What DB Helvethaica X is
**DB Helvethaica X (ดีบี เฮลเวไทก้า เอ็กซ์) is a paid Thai corporate sans from DB Fonts that no longer exists under that name. In 2015 the foundry withdrew it and brought the same family back as DB Heavent, which is the product you buy today.** It is not free, it has never been on Google Fonts, and every "DB Helvethaica X free download" page is distributing an unauthorised copy.
The foundry says this itself. The DB Heavent bundle page on dbfont.biz describes the set as "ฟอนต์อัพเกรดจาก ดีบี เฮลเวติก้า" — the upgraded font from DB Helvethaica. That one line is the clearest confirmation available that the two names are one typeface.
The name was always the tell: Helvetica plus Thai. That places the family in the loopless school of Thai type innovated by Manop Srisomporn, whose [Manoptica](/fonts/manoptica/) was released in 1973 and drawn to invoke Helvetica ([Wikipedia — Thai typography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography), accessed 22 August 2026). The same article names DB Design as Thailand's first digital type foundry, co-founded by Parinya Rojarayanond. For where DB sits against the other Thai foundries, see the [DB Fonts catalogue](/fonts/categories/db-fonts/).
## Is DB Helvethaica X free to download?
**No. It is commercial software from DB Fonts, it was commercial under the Helvethaica name, and it is commercial under the Heavent name. There is no free tier, no personal-use tier and no trial cut.**
This is not our reading alone. On f0nt.com, Thailand's oldest font community forum, a designer asked whether using DB HelvethaicaX for a banner or a logo required paying for a licence. The replies told him the family had been renamed DB Heavent, that it is not free, and that he should contact DB directly about his intended use. Nobody offered him a file.
The exposure lands on you, not on whoever uploaded the font. Using an unlicensed commercial Thai font in client work, packaging, or an embedded webfont is unlicensed commercial use, and the liability sits with the studio and the brand owner. Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out how the terms actually work.
There is a further wrinkle specific to logos. DB Font's own FAQ says a basic desktop licence explicitly excludes Identity use — logo, slogan, tagline — and excludes Application, Game and Software embedding. Only the Brand and Corporate licences cover identity work. If you are designing a wordmark, the cheap licence is the wrong licence.
## Every DB Helvethaica X weight, including Bold
**DB Helvethaica X shipped seven weights — UltraLight, Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black — in three widths (regular, Condensed, Extended), each with a matching italic: 42 styles in total.**
A third-party GitHub repository holding a complete set of the files lists exactly those 42 TTFs, which is the most direct surviving inventory of the family now that the foundry no longer sells it under this name. The menu names are abbreviated:
| Weight | Roman file name | Italic file name |
| --- | --- | --- |
| UltraLight | DB Helvethaica X UlLi | DB Helvethaica X UlLi It |
| Thin | DB Helvethaica X Thin | DB Helvethaica X Thin It |
| Light | DB Helvethaica X Li | DB Helvethaica X Li It |
| Regular | DB Helvethaica X | DB Helvethaica X It |
| Medium | DB Helvethaica X Med | DB Helvethaica X Med It |
| **Bold** | **DB Helvethaica X Bd** | DB Helvethaica X Bd It |
| Black | DB Helvethaica X Blk | DB Helvethaica X Blk It |
Every one of those seven also exists as a Cond (Condensed) and an Ext (Extended) cut, giving names like DB Helvethaica X Bd Cond and DB Helvethaica X Blk Ext It.
**If you are searching for "DB Helvethaica X Bold", the file is DB Helvethaica X Bd, and the font you can legally buy today is DB Heavent Bold** inside the 14-style [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/) family. DB Fonts does not sell single weights, so one purchase covers the whole family.
The family also borrowed Helvetica's numeric style grading. Embedded metadata records the trademark line "DB Helvethaica X 77 Bold Condensed is a trademark of Prinya R. nont" — the same two-digit convention Neue Helvetica employs, a numerical classification scheme similar to Univers. Wikipedia's Helvetica article prints only three of those designations, in its Neue Helvetica World section: 45 Light, 55 Roman and 75 Bold ([Wikipedia — Helvetica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica), accessed 22 August 2026). If your font menu shows numbers rather than words, that is why.
## Is there a DB Helvethaica X Rounded?
**Not under that name. DB Helvethaica X shipped in three widths and no rounded cut; the rounded version of this design is sold today as [DB Heavent Rounded](/fonts/db-heavent-rounded/), a separate 14-style family at 5,350 THB.**
The 42-file inventory above contains regular, Condensed and Extended cuts and no Rounded file at all, so a search for "DB Helvethaica X Rounded" is almost certainly a search for the current DB Heavent Rounded product. DB Fonts sells it with the tagline "ไม่ต้องศัลยกรรม เพราะหน้ามน โดยกำเนิด", roughly "no surgery needed, it was born round".
Worth knowing before you buy: DB Heavent Rounded's 14 styles are not a straight rounded copy of the standard family's weight ladder. The product page lists Regular, Medium, Bold and Black plus Condensed, Medium Condensed and Bold Condensed, each with an italic. It has no UltraLight, Thin or Light. If you need hairline rounded Thai, this family does not have it.
## Price and how to buy it
**The current family, DB Heavent, is 5,350.00 THB. All four Heavent families together — standard, Condensed, Extended and Rounded, 56 styles — are 5,885.00 THB from DB Fonts.** The bundle costs 535 baht more than one family, which makes buying a single family hard to justify.
| What you get | Styles | Price |
| --- | --- | --- |
| DB Heavent (standard family) | 14 | 5,350.00 THB |
| DB Heavent Rounded | 14 | 5,350.00 THB |
| Bundle: standard + Condensed + Extended + Rounded | 56 | 5,885.00 THB |
Licence scope, from DB Font's own FAQ: a Desktop 1-5 licence installs on five machines, the Desktop Unlimited, Brand and Corporate licences install on unlimited machines, and a webfont licence covers one domain name. A desktop licence cannot be converted to web use. Buy through the cart on [dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-heavent) and raise the seat count there if you need more than five installs.
One thing to settle before you pay: DB Font states that once payment is transferred the order cannot be cancelled. Confirm the licence tier covers your actual use — especially logo work and app embedding, which the basic desktop tier does not.
## Name variants and spellings
**This one typeface is searched for under a dozen names, all of which land here:**
- **DB Helvethaica X** — the name it sold under until 2015
- **DB Helvethaica** — the same family without the X
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — the current product name, and what you actually buy
- **ดีบี เฮลเวไทก้า เอ็กซ์** — the usual Thai transliteration
- **ดีบี เฮลเวติก้า** — the spelling DB Fonts itself uses on the bundle page
- **ฟอนต์ db helvethaica x** — "font" prefixed, the common Thai search shape
- **DB Helvethaica X font ไทย** — mixed-script search for the Thai character set
- **DBHelvethaicaX, dbhelvethaica** — run-together forms taken from the file names
- **DB Helvethaica X 77 Bold Condensed** — the numeric style naming inside the font files
- **DB Helvethaica X Rounded** — no such release; see [DB Heavent Rounded](/fonts/db-heavent-rounded/)
The designer's name is also spelled several ways in English. The font metadata records "Prinya Rojarayanont" and a trademark line reading "Prinya R. nont", while Thai press and conference listings use Parinya Rojarayanond. They are romanisations of one Thai name, not different people.
## Free alternatives to DB Helvethaica X
**If the brief is a clean Thai corporate sans and there is no licence budget, the lawful answer is a Thai family under the SIL Open Font License, which really is free for commercial use.** Four that cover different situations, each with its licence confirmed in the Google Fonts repository:
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — OFL, by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday, weights 100 to 700. The closest free equivalent for a corporate system that has to hold Thai and Latin at the same tone.
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — OFL, from Google, weights 100 to 900. The safest pick when coverage and hinting across devices matter more than personality.
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — OFL, by Cadson Demak, nine weights with an italic at every weight. The deepest free weight range, and the nearest match to Heavent's system scope.
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — OFL, by Cadson Demak, also nine weights with italics, in a quieter register than Kanit.
None of these is a drop-in twin. Widths, spacing and tone-mark positions all differ, so substituting one into an existing layout will move every line break. If artwork has to stay identical, buying the licence is the only route. The full set is in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/), and you can compare them against your own copy in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Best use cases
**DB Helvethaica X, meaning DB Heavent today, is built for Thai corporate identity where a neutral loopless voice and a deep weight range justify a commercial licence.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate identity systems for Thai companies, banks and institutions, licensed under the Brand or Corporate tier
- Advertising campaigns across print, out-of-home and digital
- Annual reports and investor material for SET-listed companies
- Signage and product work that needs Bold and Medium inside one licensed system
- Localising a global brand already set in Helvetica or Helvetica Neue
Where it does not fit: open-source projects, work without a licence budget, anything that requires passing font files to a third party, and logo design under a basic desktop licence. Use an OFL family for all four.
## Pairings
**DB Helvethaica X was built to sit beside a Latin grotesque, so the pairing question is really which Latin face carries the English.** Three combinations that work:
- **Helvetica Neue** — the Latin sibling the design was aimed at, for teams that already licence it
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — a free companion when Latin and Thai must both come from one open-licensed system
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL, by Suppakit Chalermlarp, weights 100 to 800; the standard Thai body sans to carry long copy under licensed headlines
For a louder advertising voice from the same foundry, see [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/), and for the mechanics of matching Thai to Latin, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Licensing
**DB Helvethaica X is proprietary software from DB Fonts, sold today as DB Heavent at 5,350.00 THB per family or 5,885.00 THB for the 56-style bundle. Redistribution is not permitted under any tier.**
The tiers that matter, from the foundry's FAQ: Desktop 1-5 installs on five machines; Desktop Unlimited, Brand and Corporate install on unlimited machines; webfont is licensed per domain and cannot be derived from a desktop licence; and Application, Game and Software embedding is excluded from desktop terms entirely. Identity work — logo, slogan, tagline — requires the Brand or Corporate tier.
Verify the current price and terms with [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase) before ordering, because the order is final once payment is transferred. If the budget is not there, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) and [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) are OFL and free for commercial use, and the whole [font library](/fonts/) lists the licence for every family we cover.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-mean.mdx
## What DB Mean is
**DB Mean (ดีบี มีน) is a commercial loopless Thai sans-serif from DB Fonts, sold in 10 styles — Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold, each with an italic companion — and named for what it is: a "mean" between traditional and modern Thai type.** The foundry's own positioning is that it reads "easy like standard Thai text fonts, yet fresh like Thai headline fonts" (ทั้งอ่านง่ายใกล้เคียงฟอนต์ตัวพื้นไทยมาตรฐาน และดูสดใหม่แบบฟอนต์ตัวพาดหัวไทย), which makes it one of the few DB releases explicitly pitched for both body text and headlines.
DB Mean evolved from the foundry's display typeface DB Mixtura, carrying its character-design ideas into a family with complete character sets and new proportions calibrated for continuous reading. The [full fonts library](/fonts/) covers where a dual-purpose family like this sits among Thai text and display releases; for the underlying anatomy vocabulary, see the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
The foundry behind it, DB Designs Co., Ltd., grew out of Dear Book Design — the first Thai digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s by Parinya Rojarayanond, whose typeface work was recognized by the Type Directors Club in 2005 and who received Thailand's Silpathorn Award in 2009. DB Fonts publishes no per-font designer credit for DB Mean itself.
## Character design and tone
**DB Mean inherits DB Mixtura's reworked Thai letterforms: the small-u shaped น is replaced with a rounded-dot version inspired by Thai architecture, and the small-n shaped ท is enlarged into a reversed-N form — changes that pull apart two of the most confusable letters in loopless Thai.** In DB Mixtura these moves are display gestures; in DB Mean they sit inside proportions close enough to standard Thai text type that the family holds up in running copy.
The Latin companion carries the same DNA: DB Mixtura adds rounded terminals referencing Bodoni to its Latin lowercase, and DB Mean inherits that detailing. The result is a Thai-Latin pairing with a consistent warmth across scripts rather than a neutral grotesque Latin bolted onto a Thai design.
The tone lands between a documentary text face and a personality headline face — more editorial character than a workhorse like [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), less geometric assertion than [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/).
## Weights and availability
**DB Mean ships 10 styles — Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold, each with a true italic — priced at 3,210 THB for the full family from [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-mean).** Two sibling variants extend the design in the same catalog: DB Mean Rounded (8 styles) and DB Mean Narrow (10 styles), for softer or space-tight settings.
The family is not on Google Fonts or any free CDN. Desktop and webfont licenses are purchased directly from dbfont.biz per the foundry's per-license model (see Licensing below).
## Best use cases
**DB Mean's strongest brief is any project that needs one Thai family to carry both body copy and headlines — the exact dual role the foundry designed it for.** Well-matched work:
- Editorial design — magazines, long-form web articles, and reports where headline and text should share one voice
- Brand and corporate sites that want fresher-than-Sarabun body text without buying a second display family
- Book and publication interiors that use weight contrast (Thin/Light display, Regular text, Bold emphasis) within one family
- Presentation and slide systems where a single family must scale from footnote to title
Where it doesn't fit: zero-budget and open-source projects — reach instead for OFL-licensed loopless Thai families like [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) for text or [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for geometric display, all free for commercial use.
## Pairings
**DB Mean's natural display companion is DB Mixtura, the typeface it evolved from — the foundry positions the two as a matched pair sharing the same letterform DNA.** Beyond that in-catalog pairing:
- **DB Mixtura** — the display parent; use it for the loudest headline tier while DB Mean handles text (sold separately at dbfont.biz)
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral open-licensed Thai body sans when DB Mean is reserved for headlines only
- **[DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/)** — a more neutral commercial Thai sans for corporate hierarchies alongside DB Mean's warmer editorial voice
## Licensing
**DB Mean is commercial proprietary type sold per-license: a desktop license covers installation on up to 5 computers, a webfont license covers a single domain, and standard licenses exclude logos, packaging, apps, and brand-identity use — those require separate Brand or Corporate licenses.** The full family is priced at 3,210 THB. Verify current terms and tiers directly on the [DB Fonts FAQ](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) before purchase.
If the license model doesn't fit the budget, the closest open alternatives are [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) for loopless Thai text, and [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for loopless headline work — all OFL-licensed and free for commercial deployment.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-merit.mdx
## What DB Merit is
**DB Merit is an informal Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book) that ships 12 styles from UltraLight to Black with italics, and is offered with separate Condensed and Extended width families for full typographic control.** The three-width system makes it a flexible display and headline toolkit.
The Thai name (ดีบี มีฤทธิ์) is a pun — "มีฤทธิ์" means "has power" — matching a face designed to flex from delicate to forceful. Standard, Condensed, and Extended cuts let a designer hold a headline to a fixed measure without resizing.
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Merit is built on a consistent contemporary sans skeleton that stays recognisable across three widths and a Thin-to-Black weight range.** The Condensed cut tightens the sidebearings for stacked headlines; the Extended cut opens them for banners and lockups.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ hold the same modern forms whether narrow or wide, which is what makes the width system usable — the type looks like one family, not three. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin A-Z are covered.
The tone is confident and graphic, aimed at posters, packaging, and identity work that needs width flexibility.
## Weights and availability
**DB Merit ships 12 styles per width — UltraLight to Black with italics — across DB Merit, DB Merit Condensed, and DB Merit Extended.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-merit) under DB's commercial desktop and web-font terms.
The family is commercial, not free. The width range makes it a strong choice for a display-led brand system.
## Best use cases
**DB Merit suits display and identity work that needs to fit type to space precisely.** Strong briefs:
- Poster and out-of-home headlines held to a fixed measure
- Packaging lockups needing condensed or extended cuts
- Brand identity systems requiring width flexibility
- Editorial display and cover typography
- Bilingual Thai/English display layouts
Where it doesn't fit: long body text, and open-licence projects — use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) there.
## Pairings
**DB Merit sets the display line; a calmer sans carries the copy.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — a compact DB workhorse for body text under Merit display
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a neutral Thai sans for secondary hierarchy
## Licensing
**DB Merit is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution and embedding need separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-merit). For open-licensed Thai sans alternatives, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and the [font directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-mixtura.mdx
## What DB Mixtura is
**DB Mixtura is a Thai display sans from DB (Dear Book), redrawn specifically for headline clarity on mobile screens, that ships 14 styles from Thin to ExtraBold with italics.** It blends contemporary display aesthetics with a classical structural backbone.
Its distinguishing move is legibility engineering: the DB catalogue describes modernising letterforms — such as น, ท, and the Latin r — to reduce confusion between similar shapes, while adding rounded terminals to letters like a, c, f, and y for visual cohesion. That makes it a screen-first display face.
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Mixtura disambiguates look-alike Thai and Latin glyphs and adds rounded terminals so headlines stay clear at the small, dense sizes mobile layouts demand.** It is a display face with a text-face discipline about clarity.
Where many display Thai sans let น and ท drift close in shape, DB Mixtura deliberately separates them, and the rounded terminals on selected Latin letters knit the bilingual set together. The result reads as modern and friendly without losing the classical proportions underneath. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin A-Z are covered across the 14 styles.
The tone is contemporary, clean, and engineered for interfaces and app headlines.
## Weights and availability
**DB Mixtura ships 14 styles — Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and ExtraBold, each with an italic.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-mixtura) as a desktop font or per web-font domain.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. Its mobile-legibility focus makes it a strong choice for app and web headline systems.
## Best use cases
**DB Mixtura suits digital-first products where headlines must stay legible on small screens.** Strong briefs:
- App and web headline and UI display type
- Digital campaign and social-media graphics
- Bilingual Thai/English interface typography
- Tech, fintech, and startup branding
- Editorial display that will be read mostly on phones
Where it doesn't fit: long body text, and open-licence projects — use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) there.
## Pairings
**DB Mixtura sets the headline; a neutral sans carries the body.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/)** — a DB display sibling for advertising-led layouts
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for long copy
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric Thai sans for a firmer display alternative
## Licensing
**DB Mixtura is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Web embedding needs a web-font licence. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-mixtura). For open-licensed Thai display alternatives, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-moment.mdx
## What DB Moment is
**DB Moment is an informal Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book) that ships 14 styles, running the full weight ladder from UltraLight and Thin up to Bold and Black with matching italics.** It is built for an expressive, gentle editorial voice rather than a rigid corporate one.
The catalogue frames each weight with a poetic Thai line — from "ขณะจิตของความอ่อนโยน" at UltraLight to "ยุคสมัยของความภาคภูมิ" at Black — signalling that the family is meant to carry mood, not just information.
The name (ดีบี โมเมนต์) captures that intent. DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Moment is drawn for a soft, contemporary feel across an unusually deep weight range, so the same voice can whisper at UltraLight and assert at Black.** The very light weights give it an editorial delicacy that most DB display faces lack.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ keep even, gentle transitions that hold their character even at hairline weights. The Thin and UltraLight cuts suit large, quiet headlines and layered editorial spreads; the heavier cuts anchor a page. Italics add a warm lean.
The tone is emotive and lifestyle-leaning — a face chosen when the design wants feeling as much as clarity.
## Weights and availability
**DB Moment ships 14 styles — UltraLight, Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black, each with an italic.** It is sold from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-moment), including a desktop bundle with the DB Metta family.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. Its wide ladder makes it usable as a complete headline-to-caption system on its own.
## Best use cases
**DB Moment suits emotive, editorial, and lifestyle work that leans on light weights and mood.** Strong briefs:
- Lifestyle and wellness editorial spreads
- Book, magazine, and campaign headlines set light and large
- Fashion and beauty branding with a soft voice
- Poster work layering multiple weights of one family
- Bilingual Thai/English editorial layouts
Where it doesn't fit: high-contrast advertising punch, and open-licence projects — use [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) or [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) there.
## Pairings
**DB Moment pairs its light display weights with a sturdier body sans.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — a compact DB workhorse for body copy under Moment headlines
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for long text
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a calm Thai sans for a neutral secondary voice
## Licensing
**DB Moment is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution and embedding need separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-moment). For open-licensed alternatives with a soft Thai voice, see [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) and the [font directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-narai.mdx
## 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](/learn/typography/) and the [serif Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/serif/).
## 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](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase) 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](/fonts/taviraj/) or [Trirong](/fonts/trirong/); for screen-first body text under an open licence, [Sarabun](/fonts/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](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed Thai body sans; set DB Narai for display and Sarabun for UI, captions, and small print
- **[DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/)** — a loopless modern sans counterpoint when the whole system stays within commercial DB-family typography
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/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](https://dbfont.biz/howpurchase), 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](/fonts/taviraj/) or [Trirong](/fonts/trirong/) for high-contrast looped serifs, with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) as the companion body face. Browse the full [Thai fonts library](/fonts/) for more.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-nongkhai.mdx
## What DB Nongkhai is
**DB Nongkhai is a cultural Thai display face from DB (Dear Book) that styles the Thai script to evoke the look of Lao letterforms, shipping in three weights from Regular to Bold.** The DB catalogue describes it plainly as "ฟอนต์ ไทย เสมือนลาว" — a Thai font resembling Lao.
The name (ดีบี หนองคาย) references Nong Khai, the Thai province on the Mekong across from Laos, and the face is built for regional, cultural, and heritage design that wants that cross-border identity. It sits in the decorative-display corner of the DB range rather than among the text workhorses.
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Nongkhai borrows the rounder, more looped and slanted rhythm associated with Lao writing and applies it to Thai consonants, giving the script a distinct regional, handcrafted flavour.** It is a display face for headlines and titling, not for body text.
The catalogue notes the strokes range "จากเส้นบางเบาจนถึงหนัก" — from light and thin to heavy — across the three weights, and tags the design with culture, serif-like detailing, and slant. Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ take on softened, tilted forms that read as warm and vernacular rather than modern-neutral. The face is Thai-focused; treat Latin support as absent unless a specimen confirms it.
The tone is cultural and evocative — a face chosen to signal Isan and Lao-Thai identity.
## Weights and availability
**DB Nongkhai ships three weights — Regular, Medium, and Bold — as a desktop font.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-nongkhai) under DB's commercial terms.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. As a display face, reserve it for titles, logos, and short cultural headlines.
## Best use cases
**DB Nongkhai suits regional, cultural, and heritage design that wants a Thai-Lao visual identity.** Strong briefs:
- Isan and Mekong-region tourism and festival branding
- Cultural event posters and titling
- Restaurant and product branding evoking Lao-Thai heritage
- Book covers and editorial headlines with a regional theme
- Logos needing a vernacular, handcrafted Thai voice
Where it doesn't fit: body text, corporate identity, and open-licence projects — use [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) or [Charm](/fonts/charm/) for decorative Thai character under other licences.
## Pairings
**DB Nongkhai is a titling face; pair it with a neutral Thai body font.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Soda](/fonts/db-soda/)** — a DB companion for playful supporting text
- **[Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/)** — an open-licensed decorative Thai display for a second accent
- **[Ayuthaya](/fonts/ayuthaya/)** — a traditional-flavoured Thai face for heritage layouts
## Licensing
**DB Nongkhai is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or under site agreements.** Redistribution needs separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-nongkhai). For open-licensed decorative Thai alternatives, see [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) and the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-ozone-x.mdx
## What DB Ozone X is
**DB Ozone X is a paid Thai display sans from DB Fonts (DB Designs Co., Ltd.) in Bangkok, drawn by Parinya Rojarayanond (ปริญญา โรจน์อารยานนท์) and sold as a ten-style family for 1,070 THB.** It is not on Google Fonts, the foundry publishes no free or trial tier, and the only legitimate source is DB's own shop.
The design brief is on the record. In the foundry's design-notes article of 15 May 2008, Rojarayanond writes that DB Ozone takes its DNA from DIN, the German industrial standard face, and that two DIN traits carry into Thai: geometric stroke construction and unusually open spacing. He also says he reused the "standard-ness" of [DB Sathorn](/fonts/db-sathorn/) — a face already proven by long use — and then held the geometry strictly.
DB is short for Dear Book Design. Luc Devroye's type reference records it as the first Thai digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s and founded by Rojarayanond. It is the same catalogue that produces [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/), [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/) and [DB ThaiText](/fonts/db-thaitext/); the whole set is indexed under [DB fonts](/fonts/categories/db-fonts/).
## Is DB Ozone X free to download?
**No. DB Ozone X is commercial software. DB Fonts sells it at 1,070 THB per family and publishes no free tier, no trial, and no personal-use exception.** Any page advertising a "DB Ozone free download" is distributing a file the foundry did not authorise.
One route confuses people often enough to name it. Kasetsart University publishes a file called DB Ozone.rar on its corporate-identity downloads page — 389 KB, posted 1 December 2022, and showing 2,502 downloads on the date we checked. That page carries no licence terms for the font and does not name DB Designs. It is an internal archive for the university's own identity work. Pulling it into a client job is unlicensed commercial use, and the liability sits with the studio, not with the university.
DB is not passive about this. On 25 November 2025 the foundry published a notice signed by Rojarayanond as managing director, stating that it does not permit images of DB fonts lacking proof of purchase from DB to be generated through AI and published in any media channel, that doing so infringes copyright, and that DB will pursue infringers. A banner repeating it — ห้ามใช้ฟอนต์ DB ผ่าน AI โดยไม่ซื้อ — sits at the top of every page on dbfont.biz.
If the budget is not there, the lawful route is a Thai font under the SIL Open Font License. We list every one we have verified under [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/), and the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out how the terms differ.
## Every DB Ozone X weight, including Bold
**DB Ozone X ships five weights — UltraLight, Light, Regular, Medium and Bold — each with an italic, for ten styles in one family.** The shop lists them under these exact names:
| Weight | Styles in the family | Typical job |
| --- | --- | --- |
| UltraLight | DB Ozone UltraLight / UltraLight Italic | very large headlines, editorial openers |
| Light | DB Ozone Light / Light Italic | display setting with air; not for small sizes |
| Regular | DB Ozone / DB Ozone Italic | subheads, captions, short blocks |
| Medium | DB Ozone Medium / Medium Italic | labels, secondary headlines, interface text |
| Bold | DB Ozone Bold / Bold Italic | main headlines, posters, packaging headlines |
**Anyone searching "DB Ozone X Bold" wants the style the shop calls DB Ozone Bold, and it is not sold on its own — the 1,070 THB price is for the whole family of ten.** DB does not break this family into single-weight purchases the way some Thai foundries do.
The five weights were not there at the start. The design notes record that DB Ozone launched as a single Regular and was expanded to five, with the two lighter cuts added in response to a design trend toward thinner setting. That history explains the family's balance: the light end is the newer, more fashion-driven half of the range, and it thins out fast at text sizes.
## Price, how to buy it, and what the licence excludes
**The shop shows a single-family price of 1,070 THB and requires you to pick a licence type before adding to cart: Desktop font 1-5 coms, or Webfont 1 domain.** Payment is by bank transfer to Kasikornbank, Minburi branch, account 094-2-83326-3; you upload the transfer slip through the "Add payment" menu, and DB delivers the files after verifying payment within 24 hours. There is no card checkout and no instant download.
**Read the exclusions before you assume 1,070 THB covers your job, because it very often does not.** DB's own FAQ states that the Desktop font 1-5 coms licence installs on five machines and covers general communications material, and then lists what falls outside it and needs an additional licence fee:
- magazines and journals with a publication cycle
- packaging
- applications, games and software
- signage
- webfont use
- any use aimed at establishing an identity — logo, slogan or tagline — whether the choice was recorded in writing or only agreed verbally
That last clause is the one studios trip over. Specifying DB Ozone X as a brand's standard face across its communications is identity use in DB's reading, and it is priced separately under the Brand licence (one product or service brand) or the Corporate licence (one organisation, brands excluded). Neither has a published price; both are quote-on-request.
Two more mechanical details from the same FAQ. A desktop licence is delivered as .ttf only — .otf, .woff and .woff2 come with the webfont, Brand and Corporate licences. And converting a desktop font into a webfont yourself is expressly not permitted, so a `@font-face` build needs the webfont licence bought as such. Licences do not expire.
If you want more than this one family, DB Ozone is also inside DB Font Vol. 4: ten families and 39 styles for 5,885 THB, alongside DB Ettaro, DB Green, DB Object, DB ObjectStroke, DB Pomma, DB PorPiang, DB TaGua, DB Urbanist and DB Xtype.
## DB Ozone X, DB Ozone, DB O3 Std and DB OzoneSiam
**Four names circulate and only two of them are this typeface.** Sorting them out saves buying the wrong file:
- **DB Ozone** — the product name in DB's shop today. This is the family on this page.
- **DB Ozone X** — the same family's OpenType release. Rojarayanond's design notes label the OpenType version DBOzoneX and contrast it with the earlier DB Ozone (PostScript), and DB serves the family's catalogue PDF at `/asset/catalog/DBOzoneX.pdf`. The X is a generation marker, not a different design.
- **DB O3 Std** (ดีบี โอทรี) — a separate product. O3 is the chemical formula for ozone, and DB lists it as a similar font, but it is twelve styles with a Heavy weight the Ozone family does not have, at 5,350 THB. Different licence, different money.
- **DB OzoneSiam** (ดีบี โอโซนสยาม) — a separate product again, and not even the same category: DB files it under Thai Serif. Ten styles at 5,350 THB, one member of a six-family group covering cut and rounded terminals, standard, narrow and space-saving widths.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and searching any of them should land you here:**
- **DB Ozone X** — the OpenType generation, the name most people type
- **DB Ozone** — the shop's product name; no separate purchase
- **db ozone x font** / **font db ozone x** — word order makes no difference
- **DBOzoneX** — the closed-up spelling the foundry's own design notes use
- **ฟอนต์ DB Ozone** — the Thai-language search
- **ดีบี โอโซน** — the Thai name DB uses in its shop
- **DB Ozone X Bold** — the heaviest of the five weights, listed as DB Ozone Bold
- **DB Ozone X font download** — there is no free download; the buy page is the download page
## Free alternatives to DB Ozone X
**If the brief is "engineered, DIN-flavoured Thai display but no licence budget", the lawful answer is a Thai family under the SIL Open Font License, which is genuinely free for commercial use.** Three that cover different situations:
- **[Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/)** — the closest substitute in register: a squared, technical loopless Thai sans with italics, covering the same engineered-display territory and pairing naturally with DIN-flavoured Latin.
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — a wider weight range for display systems that need heavier extremes than Chakra Petch reaches.
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — rounder and warmer, for briefs where DIN rigour would read cold.
For running Thai text under any of them, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the standard open-licence body face.
One caveat that matters more here than usual: none of these is a drop-in twin. Character widths, spacing and tone-mark positions all differ, so substituting one into a layout already set in DB Ozone X will move every line break. If you have to match an existing file exactly, buying the licence is the only route. Compare them against your own copy in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before deciding.
## What the letterforms actually do
**DB Ozone X carries DIN's geometry into Thai with even, engineered strokes and generous internal spacing, and the design notes are specific about which consonants were redrawn to keep the page open.** Rojarayanond names the decisions:
- ค and ต use the reduced-head form, without the diagonal neck stroke that ordinary Thai text faces carry
- พ, ฟ and ฬ use diagonal strokes rather than three verticals, because the vertical construction would have made them too wide for a DIN-derived skeleton
- ผ and ฝ are built from an inverted ต so the pair stays clearly distinguishable
- ห, ช and ซ keep their diagonals emphasised, as deliberate contrast in a face otherwise made of verticals and level curves
The X generation earns its letter in the tone marks. In the PostScript original there was a single mai ek to serve every context, so a mai ek over สระอิ sat higher than it needed to. The OpenType version selects a lowered variant automatically. DB's shop sums the result up in three Thai words: ปลอดโปร่ง โล่งสบาย อ่านง่าย — clear, unclouded, easy to read.
The face has a real usage history rather than a hypothetical one. The design notes name GM magazine covers, the free magazine SHE's Smart, the CAT Telecom "Clear" campaign, and the Ayudhya Allianz C.P. campaign. Where [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) was drawn to sit beside Helvetica, DB Ozone X answers the same question for the DIN family of forms — see the [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/) for how the catalogues divide that territory between them.
## Best use cases
**DB Ozone X is a display family, and the licence tier you need depends less on the design than on where the type will appear.** Under a Desktop 1-5 coms licence it fits:
- campaign headlines and print advertising
- editorial openers, covers and magazine-style layouts without a fixed publication cycle
- presentations and general communications material
- posters and one-off promotional work
Under a Brand or Corporate licence, and not otherwise: brand identity systems, logotypes, taglines, packaging, signage and wayfinding, apps and games, and periodicals with a publication cycle. Under a webfont licence, and not converted yourself: anything embedded with `@font-face`.
Where it does not fit at all: long Thai body text at small sizes — the UltraLight and Light cuts thin out quickly, and [DB ThaiText](/fonts/db-thaitext/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the right tool — and any deliverable that requires passing the font files on to someone else.
## Licensing
**DB Ozone X is proprietary software owned by DB Designs Co., Ltd. A licence must be bought before use, the listed single-family price is 1,070 THB, and no tier permits redistributing the files.** Desktop covers five machines and delivers .ttf; webfont covers one domain and delivers .ttf, .otf, .woff and .woff2; Brand and Corporate are quote-on-request and are what identity, packaging, signage and application use actually require. Confirm current terms on [DB's licensing and FAQ page](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) and buy from the [DB Ozone product page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-ozone).
Neither a font-aggregator download nor a university identity archive transfers any right to you. For work in the same register with none of the seat-counting, [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/) and [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) substitute under the SIL Open Font License; the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) compares the terms side by side.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-patpong.mdx
## What DB PatPong is
**DB PatPong (ดีบี พัฒน์พงษ์) is a narrow, tall loopless Thai headline sans sold by DB Designs Co., Ltd. (DB Fonts) as a four-style family — Regular, Italic, Extended, and Extended Italic — for 1,070 THB.** The foundry files it under Thai Sans and tags it "heading, narrow, sans, strong, tall".
The name is a deliberate pun. Patpong is the famously narrow but internationally famous Bangkok street, and the foundry's own tagline for the font runs ถึงจะแคบ แต่เป็นที่รู้จักอย่างกว้างขวาง — "though narrow, it is widely known". A condensed headline face named after a narrow street with a wide reputation is exactly the kind of naming Thai foundries do well.
Historically, this is one of the earliest display faces in the DB library. In a first-person foundry article on DB Sathorn, Parinya Rojarayanond — co-founder of DB Design, Thailand's first digital type foundry and a pioneer of Thai PostScript fonts in the early digital era — describes DB PatPong, together with DB Erawan, as one of only two headline fonts DB had in its early library, and says DB Sathorn's letterform DNA was inherited from both. For where fonts like this sit in the Thai type landscape, see the [Thai typography pillar](/learn/typography/).
## Character design and tone
**DB PatPong is a condensed loopless display sans: tall, tightly set, and drawn to hit hard in headlines rather than to read long.** The foundry's own tags — narrow, strong, tall — are an accurate one-line specimen review.
An unusually candid record of the original design's quirks exists in the foundry's own catalogue. In December 2007, Parinya Rojarayanond published DB PongPat X Compressed — the name a deliberate near-anagram of PatPong — as a "conservation through improvement" redesign of the old DB PatPong, documenting several letterform refinements: wider spacing, aligned baselines for อ and ย, a redesigned ผ, a lowered ง, and a V-shaped ข, among others. Read in reverse, that list tells you what the original DB PatPong is: tighter-spaced and more idiosyncratic in its consonant detailing than its 2007 descendant — period character, not polish.
The tone is urban and emphatic. Where a geometric like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) reads engineered and neutral, DB PatPong reads like a Bangkok headline: compressed, loud, and a little raw.
## Weights and availability
**DB PatPong ships as four styles — Regular, Italic, Extended, and Extended Italic — rather than a graded weight range, sold directly by [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-patpong) for 1,070 THB.** There is no Light-to-Black axis; the family's flexibility comes from the width and slant variants.
It is not on Google Fonts and has no legal free download. Be careful with copies circulating online: thaifaces.com documents that DSN PatPong / DSN PatPong Extend — attributed to a 1997 DSN font set — is the same font as DB PatPong X under a renamed code, and warns that it "is a copyrighted font — please exercise caution in using it". If you find a "free PatPong", it is an unauthorized rename of commercial software.
## Best use cases
**DB PatPong earns its licence fee wherever a Thai headline has to be tall, tight, and loud in limited horizontal space.** Strong briefs:
- Editorial and poster headlines where the Thai line must stay on one row
- Event graphics, gig posters, and street-culture campaigns that suit its Bangkok attitude
- Packaging fronts and shelf callouts with narrow panels
- Title cards and thumbnails where condensed display sells the message fast
Where it doesn't fit: body text (single-weight condensed display), UI work, and open-source or no-budget projects. For loopless display character under an open licence, reach for [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) instead — neither is condensed like DB PatPong, but both cover the modern loopless headline role for free. Browse more options in the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
## Pairings
**DB PatPong wants a quiet, wide-ranging body companion that stays out of the headline's way.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed Thai body workhorse; its even colour balances PatPong's compression
- **[DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/)** — same-foundry corporate sans for projects already inside the DB catalogue
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a lighter, airier open-licensed sans when the layout needs breathing room under a heavy headline
## Licensing
**DB PatPong is commercial proprietary software with no free-use tier: DB Designs sells desktop licences (1–5 computers or unlimited), webfont licences per single domain, and brand/corporate licences for identity use.** The foundry also explicitly prohibits reproducing DB fonts through AI image generation without a purchased licence — worth noting if your pipeline generates campaign imagery. Verify current terms on the [DB Font licensing FAQ](https://dbfont.biz/faqs).
If the budget doesn't stretch to a commercial licence, the honest move is an open alternative, not a DSN-renamed copy: [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), and the rest of the OFL loopless catalogue are free for any use. For DB's own display-advertising counterpart, compare [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-saikrok.mdx
## What DB SaiKrok is
**DB SaiKrok is a playful, rounded Thai display face from DB (Dear Book), drawn in six styles for children's design, food, and travel graphics where the type should feel warm and fun.** The name (ดีบี ไส้กรอก) literally means "sausage," and the letterforms have the plump, rounded look to match.
The DB catalogue tags it directly for "เด็กๆ, หนุกหนาน, อาหาร, ท่องเที่ยว" — kids, playful, food, travel — which is exactly the brief it is built for. It sits at the fun end of the DB range, near lighthearted faces like [DB Soda](/fonts/db-soda/).
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB SaiKrok is drawn with rounded, swollen strokes and soft terminals that give every letter a plump, sausage-like body — friendly, casual, and unmistakably informal.** It is a display face, meant for short, large text rather than paragraphs.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ take on rounded, chubby proportions that read as cheerful and approachable. The Bold cut fattens the strokes further for maximum bounce; the italics add a jaunty lean. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin A-Z are included, so playful bilingual packaging works.
The tone is squarely playful — a face chosen to make a design smile.
## Weights and availability
**DB SaiKrok ships six styles — Light, Regular, and Bold, each with an italic.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-saikrok) as a desktop font or inside the DB Font Vol. 2 bundle.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. As a display face, it is best reserved for headlines, logos, and packaging call-outs.
## Best use cases
**DB SaiKrok is the correct choice for cheerful, informal Thai design aimed at families and food.** Strong briefs:
- Children's products, books, and educational materials
- Snack, confectionery, and casual food packaging
- Travel, festival, and event branding
- Playful logos and short headlines
- Bilingual packaging call-outs with a fun tone
Where it doesn't fit: body text, corporate work, and open-licence projects — use [Itim](/fonts/itim/) or [Mali](/fonts/mali/) there.
## Pairings
**DB SaiKrok is a display face; pair it with a simple, calm body font.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Soda](/fonts/db-soda/)** — another light-hearted DB face for playful systems
- **[Itim](/fonts/itim/)** — an open-licensed casual Thai handwriting sans for body support
- **[Mali](/fonts/mali/)** — a soft rounded Thai sans for gentle body copy
## Licensing
**DB SaiKrok is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution needs separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-saikrok). For open-licensed playful Thai alternatives, see [Itim](/fonts/itim/) and the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-sathorn.mdx
## What DB Sathorn is
**DB Sathorn (ดีบี สาธร) is a commercial loopless Thai corporate sans from DB Designs Co., Ltd. (DB Font), sold as a 6-style family — Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic — at 1,070 THB.** The foundry tags it "Thai Sans" with Corporate and Heading as its intended use cases.
The name references Sathorn, Bangkok's banking and office-tower district, and the positioning matches: this is corporate identity type. DB Font's own Thai description reads "ลูกครึ่งไทยฝรั่ง พูดไทยได้ชัด เข้าใจง่าย" — a Thai-Western hybrid that "speaks Thai clearly and is easy to understand." That one line is the whole design brief: Latin-influenced loopless structure carrying unambiguous Thai.
The DB catalogue behind it is foundational to Thai type history. DB stands for Dear Book Design, described as the first Thai digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s by Parinya Rojarayanond — who co-created the DB typeface series with Suraphol Vesaratchavej in the desktop publishing era that followed the Macintosh's 1985 arrival in Thailand. Rojarayanond received the Silpathorn Award in 2009, and his DB Santipap was recognized by the Type Directors Club in 2005. Within that catalogue, DB Sathorn sits beside display and identity siblings like [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) and [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/).
## Character design and tone
**DB Sathorn belongs to the [loopless (modern) Thai](/fonts/categories/loopless/) school: consonants drop the traditional loop heads in favour of clean, Latin-influenced strokes, which is exactly what the foundry's "Thai-Western hybrid" description promises.** The specimen shows full Latin A–Z alongside the Thai, so bilingual corporate lockups stay in one family.
The register is composed rather than loud. Where geometric display cuts push weight and squareness for shelf impact, DB Sathorn reads as office-tower typography: even stroke rhythm, restrained contrast, and letterforms built to stay legible in annual reports, wayfinding, and slide decks rather than to shout from a billboard. The Corporate and Heading tags on the foundry page describe its natural habitat — brand headlines and organizational text where a looped traditional face would feel too bookish and a hard geometric would feel too promotional. For background on the looped-versus-loopless divide, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
The true italics across all three weights are worth noting: matched italic cuts are not a given in Thai commercial families, and they matter for editorial hierarchy in bilingual corporate documents.
## Weights and availability
**DB Sathorn ships six styles — Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic — purchased directly from [DB Font](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-sathorn) at 1,070 THB.** Three weights, each with a matching italic.
The family is not on Google Fonts or any free CDN, and free-download sites hosting DB Sathorn X files are unauthorized — licence it from the foundry. An updated "X" generation exists in the DB library: DB Sathorn X carries version 3.000 dated 2006 in its font metadata, placing the family's modernized cut in the mid-2000s DB Font X refresh. The original release year is not documented on the foundry page, so we do not state one.
## Best use cases
**DB Sathorn fits Thai corporate identity work where the brief calls for clear, contemporary, bilingual text and the budget covers a commercial licence.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate identity systems — logotype support, stationery, internal templates
- Annual reports and investor communications with mixed Thai/Latin text
- Headline and subhead hierarchy in corporate brochures and presentations
- Office and campus signage where loopless clarity aids fast reading
- Financial, legal, and professional-services branding in the Sathorn mould
Where it doesn't fit: open-source or zero-budget projects. For loopless corporate character under the SIL OFL, reach for [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) instead; for long-form body text, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) remains the open-licence default.
## Pairings
**DB Sathorn pairs with an open-licensed Thai body sans, or with its own DB catalogue siblings when the licence covers the full library.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed looped body sans for long text under DB Sathorn headings
- **[DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/)** — same-catalogue display counterpart when a campaign needs promotional punch above corporate text
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — open-licensed loopless sans for digital surfaces where the desktop licence doesn't extend
## Licensing
**DB Sathorn is commercial proprietary type: DB Font licenses per installation, with desktop licences covering 1–5 computers (an unlimited tier is quoted individually), webfont licences covering one domain, and brand/corporate licences quoted case by case.** Desktop fonts may not be converted to webfonts without the appropriate licence — a common trap when a print identity moves to the web. Verify current terms on the [DB Font FAQs](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) before deploying.
Free alternatives: if the licence cost or webfont restriction rules DB Sathorn out, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) deliver loopless corporate-grade Thai under the SIL OFL, and [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) covers body text — all self-hostable on any number of domains.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-soda.mdx
## What DB Soda is
**DB Soda (ดีบี โซดา) is a commercial looped Thai sans-serif family from DB Fonts, shipping in 14 styles — seven weights from UltraLight to Black, each with a matching italic — and positioned by the foundry to work from body text through headlines.** The foundry files it under its "Thai Sans / Formal" category, which tells you the intended register: clean, contemporary, and businesslike rather than decorative.
DB Fonts (Dear Book Design, operating as DB Designs Co., Ltd.) is documented by type historian Luc Devroye as the first Thai digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s by Parinya Rojarayanond — a Silapathorn Award recipient whose typeface DB Santipap earned Type Directors Club recognition in 2005. DB Soda sits in that catalogue as one of the foundry's formal sans workhorses; the foundry itself lists DB ThaiText, DB JariyaTham, and DB ChuanPim as related text faces.
For where a looped formal sans like this fits in the broader Thai type landscape, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) and the full [Thai fonts library](/fonts/).
## Character design and tone
**DB Soda pairs traditional looped (hua) Thai consonants with a rounded geometric sans Latin, giving it a formal Thai voice that still reads as modern and friendly rather than bureaucratic.** The official specimens show conventional looped letterforms — the classic terminal loops Thai readers process fastest in running text — set against a Latin companion the foundry describes as newly drawn specifically to harmonize with the Thai.
That purpose-built Latin matters more than it sounds. Many older commercial Thai families bolted on a mismatched system Latin; DB Soda's English character set was designed to match the Thai letterforms' rhythm and weight, so bilingual settings — a Thai paragraph with an English brand name, product term, or URL dropped in — hold a consistent color across the line.
The "Formal" classification plus the loops places DB Soda in the same functional territory as looped text sans faces like [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/): faces you reach for when the content is serious and the reader is there to read, not to be dazzled.
## Weights and availability
**DB Soda ships seven weights — UltraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, DemiBold, Bold, and Black — each with an italic, for 14 styles total, sold directly by DB Fonts at [dbfont.biz](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-soda).** The foundry markets the range explicitly as covering both Text and Display duty: the middle weights carry paragraphs, while UltraLight and Black bookend the family for editorial and headline work.
The full family costs 5,350 THB. It is not on Google Fonts and there is no legal free download; licensing runs through the foundry's own store (see the Licensing section below for the desktop-versus-webfont split).
## Best use cases
**DB Soda suits Thai corporate communication, editorial systems, and product UI where a looped formal sans must scale from small body text to Black display headlines within one family.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate identity and annual-report typography that needs a formal looped voice
- Bilingual Thai-English marketing collateral, where the harmonized Latin earns its price
- Editorial hierarchies — UltraLight feature openers down to Regular body text
- Websites and apps under the foundry's webfont license, when the domain scope fits
- Packaging and brochure body copy that a loopless display face can't carry
Where it doesn't fit: zero-budget and open-source projects. For a free looped Thai text sans, use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/); for open-licensed loopless geometric display, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/).
## Pairings
**DB Soda works as the text layer under a louder loopless display face, or carries an entire identity alone thanks to its 14-style range.** Three pairings:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — open-licensed loopless geometric for display, with DB Soda handling running text
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — rounder loopless sans for headlines over DB Soda body copy in friendlier brand contexts
- **[DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/)** — a commercial loopless counterpart when the budget already covers foundry licensing
## Licensing
**DB Soda is commercial proprietary type: the full 14-style family sells for 5,350 THB, under either a desktop license covering 1-5 computers (Mac and Windows) or a webfont license limited to one domain.** DB licenses have no expiry date, but the terms are strict about scope — desktop licenses explicitly prohibit converting the fonts to webfont formats, and brand or corporate licensing is quoted on request. The foundry also states on its storefront that using its fonts through AI tools or in AI-generated content requires a purchased license. Verify current terms on the [DB Font licensing FAQ](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) before deploying.
If the licensing budget isn't there, the closest open-licensed routes are [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for a looped formal text sans and [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) for geometric display — both free for commercial use under the SIL Open Font License.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-surawong.mdx
## What DB Surawong is
**DB Surawong is a formal, traditional Thai serif from DB Fonts — the foundry that grew out of Dear Book, Thailand's first digital type foundry — sold in six styles under a commercial per-computer licence.** The foundry itself files it under "ThaiSerif" and "ThaiClassic" on the [official product page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-surawong).
The name (ดีบี สุรวงศ์) points to Surawong Road, one of Bangkok's old commercial streets — and like DB Sathorn and DB Silom in the same catalogue, the street name sets an establishment tone. DB Fonts places it in its Vol. 1 bundle of eleven families it describes as "popular typefaces so familiar they have become foundational fonts", alongside catalogue classics like DB Erawan, DB PatPong, DB Sathorn, DB Silom and DB ThaiText.
That pedigree matters. DB (Dear Book Design) was established in the late 1980s as the first Thai digital type foundry, co-founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, and — together with PSL Fonts and Behaviour — dominated Thailand's transition to digital typesetting. DB Surawong belongs to that first generation of Thai digital serifs, the layer of the catalogue publishers reached for before open-licensed alternatives such as [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) existed.
## Character design and tone
**DB Surawong is drawn in the traditional looped Thai convention: the foundry tags it "tradition" and "culture", and it reads as formal book-and-document typography rather than display work.** It is the register of official letterheads, ceremonial print, and long-form Thai text set with classical manners.
As a traditional Thai serif, it keeps the full looped consonant heads (หัว) that signal correctness and readability in formal Thai text — the opposite end of the spectrum from loopless modernism like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/). The three-weight structure (Light, Regular, Bold, each with an italic) is a classic text-family architecture: Regular for running text, Bold for headings and emphasis, Light for large formal settings.
The family ships with Latin coverage alongside Thai — the Unicode-era DBSurawongX-Bold file (version 2.600, 2006) contains 259 characters spanning the Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement and Thai blocks, so mixed Thai–English documents set in a single face are practical. For a deeper primer on looped versus loopless Thai letterforms, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Weights and availability
**DB Surawong ships in six styles — Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic — sold directly by [DB Fonts](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-surawong) at 1,070 THB per family.** The desktop licence covers installation on 1–5 computers; webfont use is licensed separately per domain.
The family is also included in [DB Font Vol. 1](https://dbfont.biz/bundle/5), an 11-family, 44-style bundle at 5,885 THB that collects the foundry's foundational catalogue. It is not on Google Fonts and there is no legal free download — treat any free "DB Surawong" file circulating online as unlicensed.
## Best use cases
**DB Surawong fits formal Thai editorial and institutional work where a traditional serif voice is the brief and the budget supports a commercial licence.** Strong briefs:
- Book interiors and long-form Thai editorial with a classical register
- Government, legal, and institutional documents and reports
- Ceremonial and cultural print — invitations, programmes, plaques
- Heritage, museum, and cultural-sector branding that needs "ThaiClassic" tone
- Newspaper and magazine text hierarchies built on traditional looped forms
Where it doesn't fit: open-source and zero-budget projects (use [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/), [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/), or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for open-licensed formal Thai text), loopless modern branding, and UI work at small screen sizes.
## Pairings
**DB Surawong pairs best with a neutral open-licensed Thai sans handling UI and captions while the serif owns the text voice.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the Thai-government-standard open sans for captions, tables, and forms under a DB Surawong text setting
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — a neutral system-safe companion for web UI around DB Surawong editorial content
- **[Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/)** — the Windows-bundled traditional serif for fallback stacks when the licensed face isn't available on a reader's machine
## Licensing
**DB Surawong is commercial proprietary software from DB Fonts: 1,070 THB buys a desktop family licence for 1–5 computers, and webfont deployment requires a separate per-domain licence.** Embedding and redistribution are not covered by the desktop licence — verify current terms on the foundry's [FAQ and licensing page](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) before deploying.
If the licence doesn't fit the project, the open-licensed route to a similar formal Thai serif voice is [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/) or [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/), with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) as the open standard when the brief allows a sans. Browse the full [serif Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/serif/) for more.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-thaitext.mdx
## What DB ThaiText is
**DB ThaiText (ดีบี ไทยเท็กซ์) is a paid Thai body-text typeface from DB Fonts, sold as a six-style family — Light, Regular and Bold, each with an italic — for 1,070 THB.** It is not free, it is not on Google Fonts, and DB publishes no trial or personal-use tier.
The name states the job. This is the quiet face for documents, publishing and long-form Thai reading, and the foundry files it under the tags bodytext, official and text. It is the unshowy sibling to display faces like [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/), [DB Ozone X](/fonts/db-ozone-x/) and [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) in the same catalogue.
DB is short for Dear Book Design, which Luc Devroye's type reference records as the first Thai digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s and founded by Parinya Rojarayanond. The whole catalogue is indexed under [DB fonts](/fonts/categories/db-fonts/).
## Where DB ThaiText came from
**DB ThaiText was DB's first Thai PostScript text font, and it is a redrawing of an existing face rather than an invention: the phototypesetting face พิมาย (Phimai), which itself preserved the metal type โมโนไทพ์กลาง cut by พีระ ต. สุวรรณ around B.E. 2500.** Rojarayanond published the whole chain in his design notes of 1 September 2013.
His account of the changes is specific rather than atmospheric. He straightened the tail of ง, which in Phimai curled forward. He ran the necks of จ and ฐ straight to the back stroke. He flattened the curved middle zigzag of ผ and พ. He simplified the base corner of ม to match น, which then forced matching changes to ฆ and ฌ. ฌ was the only consonant in Phimai with a semicircular head, so it was made round like the rest. He shortened the front stroke of ธ so it no longer ran to the top line and read as a blot.
Two people other than the designer are named in the file. สุรพล เวสารัชเวศย์ built the Regular in Fontographer from Rojarayanond's drawings and added a Bold and an Italic in the same pass, making four styles; he is also the one who put the DB prefix on the family, short for Dear Book. ปราสาท วีรกุล gave the face its name. Rojarayanond describes ThaiText as a very ordinary name that suits a face built to be read rather than shown off.
For where DB sits against the other Thai catalogues, see the [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/).
## Is DB ThaiText free to download?
**No. DB ThaiText is commercial software at 1,070 THB per family, and the free TTFs circulating under this name are not a licensed release — they are the pre-commercial set, which the designer states was infringed for around sixteen years before DB put the family on sale.**
That history has a practical consequence, and it is the strongest reason not to use a scavenged file even if you are unbothered by the legal one. Rojarayanond writes that the set sold commercially differs from the infringed set in two glyphs: ร was corrected so it no longer leans forward, and ไม้โท was corrected so it is not confused with สระอะ at very small sizes. Any copy predating the commercial release is therefore, by the designer's own description, the older and worse drawing — and the tone-mark defect lands exactly where a body-text face has to work hardest, at small sizes in dense paragraphs.
The rest of the picture is the ordinary one for a paid Thai family. Installing an unlicensed file and then using it in client work, print, or an embedded webfont is unlicensed commercial use, and the liability sits with the agency and the brand owner. DB is also explicit about AI: a notice of 25 November 2025 signed by Rojarayanond as managing director states that images of DB fonts without proof of purchase may not be generated through AI and published, and that DB will pursue infringers.
If the budget is not there, use a Thai text face under the SIL Open Font License, which really is free for commercial work. Every one we have verified is listed under [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/), and the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) explains what each licence actually permits.
## Every DB ThaiText weight and style
**DB ThaiText is three weights — Light, Regular and Bold — each with an italic, for six styles in one family. There is no Medium, no Black, and no condensed or extended width.** The shop lists them under these names:
| Weight | Styles in the family | Typical job |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Light | DB ThaiText Light / Light Italic | large-format body text, captions on light grounds, airy settings |
| Regular | DB ThaiText / DB ThaiText Italic | the default: running Thai paragraphs, reports, book and magazine text |
| Bold | DB ThaiText Bold / Bold Italic | run-in headings, emphasis inside paragraphs, table headers |
Three weights is a narrow range by modern standards, and it is worth knowing before you commit a document system to it: there is no intermediate weight between Regular and Bold for subheads. The design notes explain why the range is what it is — the family shipped with four styles at the DTP-era release and grew to six when the Light and its italic were added for the 2005 commercial launch. It was never expanded further.
## Is there a DB ThaiText Extra?
**No. DB does not sell a style called Extra. The DB ThaiText product page lists six styles and Extra is not among them, and the foundry's design notes account for the family's entire history — four styles at first, six at the August 2005 commercial release — without naming an Extra cut.**
If you are holding a file called DB ThaiText Extra or DB Thai Text Extra, it did not come from DB's current catalogue. We could not find any documentation published by DB describing what such a file contains, so we are not going to guess at it, and we would not recommend building a document on a file whose provenance you cannot establish. Buy the six-style family from the foundry and you know exactly what you have.
## Name variants and spellings
**All of these refer to the same typeface:**
- **DB ThaiText** — the product name in DB's shop
- **DB Thai Text** — the same name written as three words; DB writes ThaiText closed up
- **thaitext** — the family name on its own; in a Thai type context it still means this face
- **DB ThaiText X** — the OpenType generation, sold from April 2006; Luc Devroye's reference lists the family under this name, and DB serves the catalogue PDF at `/asset/catalog/DBThaitextX.pdf`. Same design, newer file format.
- **ดีบี ไทยเท็กซ์** — the Thai name DB uses in its shop
- **DB Thai Text Extra** — not a DB product; see the section above
## Price and how to buy it
**The shop shows a single-family price of 1,070 THB and requires you to choose a licence type before adding to cart: Desktop font 1-5 coms, or Webfont 1 domain.** Payment is by bank transfer to Kasikornbank, Minburi branch, account 094-2-83326-3; you upload the transfer slip through the "Add payment" menu, and DB delivers the files after verifying payment within 24 hours. There is no card checkout and no instant download.
Check the scope before assuming 1,070 THB covers the job. DB's FAQ states the Desktop font 1-5 coms licence installs on five machines and covers general communications material, and that magazines and journals with a publication cycle, packaging, applications, games, software, signage, webfont use, and any use aimed at establishing an identity — logo, slogan or tagline — each require an additional licence fee. For a body-text face this bites harder than it looks: a periodical with a publication cycle is one of the most natural jobs for DB ThaiText, and it is explicitly outside the desktop tier. Brand (one product or service brand) and Corporate (one organisation) licences are quote-on-request with no published price.
Two mechanical points from the same FAQ: a desktop licence is delivered as .ttf only, with .otf, .woff and .woff2 reserved for the webfont, Brand and Corporate tiers, and converting a desktop font into a webfont yourself is not permitted. Licences do not expire.
DB ThaiText also sits inside DB Font Vol. 1: eleven families, 44 styles, 5,885 THB, alongside [DB Erawan](/fonts/db-erawan/), [DB Fongnam](/fonts/db-fongnam/), [DB PatPong](/fonts/db-patpong/), DB Pradit, DB Private, [DB Sathorn](/fonts/db-sathorn/), DB SiamSquareText, DB Silom, [DB Surawong](/fonts/db-surawong/) and DB Template. If you need more than one of those, the bundle is the cheaper route by a wide margin.
## What the letterforms actually do
**DB ThaiText is a looped Thai text face built for continuous reading: even stroke weight, round consonant heads, and a neutral colour on the page.** Rojarayanond's stated aim was for the face to have no presence at all while someone is reading it.
There is one comparison worth correcting, because readers make it constantly. People tell the designer that DB ThaiText is the Thai Helvetica. He says that is not what the drawing does: the top terminals of จ, ล and ว are cut on a diagonal, like the a, c and s of Trade Gothic, where Helvetica cuts those terminals horizontally. If you are picking a Latin companion for bilingual setting, that detail is the useful one — Trade Gothic and its relatives sit closer to this face than Helvetica does.
The designer is also candid about his own share of the work. He writes that he is prouder of [DB Fongnam](/fonts/db-fongnam/) as an original PostScript-era text face, and that with DB ThaiText he mostly preserved a good design philosophy that was already fully present in โมโนไทพ์กลาง. He credits the family's success to พีระ ต. สุวรรณ, the engineer who cut that metal face.
## Free alternatives to DB ThaiText
**If you need a looped Thai body face and cannot licence this one, the open-licence options are genuinely good — Thai text type is the one category where the free field is as strong as the paid field.** Three that cover different situations:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the standard open-licence Thai text sans, with a wide weight range and italics; the closest working substitute for DB ThaiText Regular in a document system.
- **[TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)** — the Thai government document standard, and the right choice when a file has to open correctly on someone else's official machine.
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — the best-hinted option for screen and product work, with a full weight range.
None of them is a metric-compatible replacement. Character widths and tone-mark positions differ, so dropping one into a layout already set in DB ThaiText will reflow every paragraph. If an existing file has to match line for line, buying the licence is the only route. Compare all three against your own copy in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Best use cases
**DB ThaiText is a body-text face, and the licence tier you need depends on where the text will be published.** Under a Desktop 1-5 coms licence it fits:
- long-form Thai documents — reports, manuals, proposals, white papers
- book body text and one-off publications without a fixed publication cycle
- corporate collateral where a DB display face sets the headline
- bilingual Thai and Latin running text at small sizes
Requiring a Brand or Corporate licence instead: magazines and journals with a publication cycle, packaging copy including back-of-pack legal text, apps and software, signage, and any use that makes DB ThaiText a brand's standard face. Requiring a webfont licence, bought as such: anything embedded with `@font-face`.
Where it does not fit at all: high-impact display work — use [DB Ozone X](/fonts/db-ozone-x/) or [DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/) above it — and open-source projects, where [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) is the correct answer.
## Licensing
**DB ThaiText is proprietary software owned by DB Designs Co., Ltd. A licence must be bought before use, the listed single-family price is 1,070 THB for six styles, and no tier permits redistributing the files.** Desktop covers five machines and delivers .ttf; webfont covers one domain and delivers .ttf, .otf, .woff and .woff2; Brand and Corporate are quote-on-request and are what periodical, packaging, signage, application and identity use actually require. Confirm current terms on [DB's licensing and FAQ page](https://dbfont.biz/faqs) and buy from the [DB ThaiText product page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-thaitext).
A file from a font-aggregator site transfers no rights, and by the designer's own account it is also the older drawing with the uncorrected ร and ไม้โท. For an open-licence Thai body face with none of these constraints, see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-urbanist.mdx
## What DB Urbanist is
**DB Urbanist is a square, graphic contemporary Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book), drawn in three weights around a hard-edged, architectural aesthetic of buildings and concrete.** The DB catalogue themes it explicitly as "อาคาร, คอนกรีต, ผังชีวิตคนเมือง" — buildings, concrete, plans for urban life.
The name (ดีบี เออร์บันนิสต์) and the squared construction put it in the display-leaning, structural corner of the DB range, near geometric faces used for confident modern branding. It is a focused three-weight family rather than a large system.
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Urbanist is built on squared, geometric forms with straightened curves and firm corners, giving the Thai script a structural, architectural presence.** The square construction is what carries the "urban, concrete" theme the foundry advertises.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ are drawn with flattened arcs and squared joints that read as modern and industrial. The Bold weight gives strong headline presence for signage and lockups; the Light weight keeps the structural character while reading calmer. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin are shown in specimens.
The tone is graphic and urban — a display sans for city-branded, architectural, and streetwear-adjacent design.
## Weights and availability
**DB Urbanist ships three weights — Light, Regular, and Bold — as a desktop font, and is also offered in the DB Font Vol. 4 bundle.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-urbanist) under DB's commercial terms.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. As a compact display family, it is best for headlines, logos, and signage rather than long text.
## Best use cases
**DB Urbanist suits urban, architectural, and graphic branding that wants a squared modern Thai voice.** Strong briefs:
- Real-estate, architecture, and construction branding
- Streetwear and urban lifestyle graphics
- Event and exhibition signage
- Logos and lockups needing a structural geometric look
- Bilingual Thai/English display headlines
Where it doesn't fit: body text, soft lifestyle brands, and open-licence projects — use [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/) or [K2D](/fonts/k2d/) for squared Thai character under an open licence.
## Pairings
**DB Urbanist sets a structural headline; pair it with a neutral body sans.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Adman X](/fonts/db-adman-x/)** — a DB display sibling for advertising layouts
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for copy
- **[Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/)** — an open-licensed squared Thai sans for a related look
## Licensing
**DB Urbanist is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution needs separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-urbanist). For open-licensed squared Thai alternatives, see [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/) and the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/db-yord.mdx
## What DB Yord is
**DB Yord is a formal Thai sans-serif from DB (Dear Book), shipping ten styles from Light to Black with matching italics as a polished, professional workhorse for corporate and editorial use.** The catalogue positions it firmly on the formal side of the DB range.
The Thai name (ดีบี ยอด) means "peak" or "top," and DB plays the pun across weights — "ตัวบาง ยอดไม่เบา" (thin, but the peak is not light), "ตัวมีเดี้ยม ยอดเยี่ยม" (medium, excellent). It sits alongside dependable DB sans families like [DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/).
DB (Dear Book), founded by Parinya Rojarayanond, is credited as Thailand's first digital type foundry, established in the late 1980s.
## Character design and tone
**DB Yord is drawn on a clean, formal sans skeleton with even proportions and a full Light-to-Black ladder, tuned for professional layouts that need range without loudness.** It reads polished rather than playful.
Consonants like ก, ถ, and ภ are drawn with clear, restrained modern forms that stay legible from captions to headlines. The lighter weights suit refined editorial text; the Black cut anchors a page or a cover. Both Thai ก-ฮ and Latin A-Z are covered, so bilingual corporate work stays consistent.
The tone is formal and confident — a professional Thai sans for serious brands.
## Weights and availability
**DB Yord ships ten styles — Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black, each with an italic.** Licence it from the [DB Font catalogue](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-yord) under DB's commercial desktop and web-font terms.
The font is commercial and not distributed free. Its full weight range makes it usable across a complete identity, from fine print to headlines.
## Best use cases
**DB Yord suits corporate and editorial work that wants a formal, flexible Thai sans across weights.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate identity and brand guidelines
- Annual reports and formal editorial layouts
- Professional services and finance branding
- Bilingual Thai/English corporate collateral
- Presentations and signage needing a polished tone
Where it doesn't fit: casual or playful contexts, and open-licence projects — use [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) or [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) there.
## Pairings
**DB Yord can headline and subhead; pair it with a calm body face for long copy.** Three pairings:
- **[DB Heavent](/fonts/db-heavent/)** — a compact DB workhorse for dense body text
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans for long copy
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a neutral Thai sans for a quiet secondary voice
## Licensing
**DB Yord is commercial proprietary software from DB (Dear Book), licensed per-user, per-application, or per web-font domain.** Redistribution needs separate terms. Confirm pricing on the [DB Font catalogue page](https://dbfont.biz/fonts/db-yord). For open-licensed formal Thai sans alternatives, see [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) and the [font directory](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/dillenia-upc.mdx
## What DilleniaUPC is
**DilleniaUPC is a looped Thai serif designed by Unity Progress and licensed to Microsoft, bundled with Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic — covering both the Thai and Latin scripts.** Microsoft records the embedded copyright line as "© 1992 Unity Progress. Portions © 2004 The Monotype Corporation. Portions © 2015 Microsoft Corporation." ([Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/dilleniaupc), accessed 5 August 2026).
Most people search for it closed up as "dilleniaupc"; some write "dillenia upc" as two words. Both mean this font — the registered menu name is DilleniaUPC, written closed up.
For most Thai computer users DilleniaUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it arrived with the operating system and was quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly", a UPC-family font is often why.
## Where to download DilleniaUPC
**DilleniaUPC is not available as a separate download. It ships bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, so the correct route is to enable the Thai Supplemental Fonts feature on your own machine — not to grab a .ttf from a font-aggregator site** ([Microsoft — Cloud fonts in Office](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb), accessed 16 July 2026).
Microsoft moved this group of fonts out of the default install and into optional features to reduce the operating system footprint, improve performance and optimize disk space. The consequence is that a machine freshly installed or upgraded from an older Windows version often does **not** have DilleniaUPC at all ([Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-missing-fonts), accessed 5 August 2026).
### How to add DilleniaUPC on Windows 11 and Windows 10
1. Right-click Start, choose **Run**, type `ms-settings:optionalfeatures` and click OK (or go to Settings → System → Optional features)
2. Click **View features** next to "Add an optional feature"
3. Find and tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts**
4. Click **Next**, then **Add** — the machine must be online, because Windows Update is what downloads the font package
Thai Supplemental Fonts installs DilleniaUPC along with the rest of the Microsoft Thai system set: [AngsanaUPC](/fonts/angsana-upc/), [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), [BrowalliaUPC](/fonts/browallia-upc/), [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/), [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/), [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), [EucrosiaUPC](/fonts/eucrosia-upc/), [FreesiaUPC](/fonts/freesia-upc/), [IrisUPC](/fonts/iris-upc/), [JasmineUPC](/fonts/jasmine-upc/), [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/), [LilyUPC](/fonts/lily-upc/) and [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/) ([Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list), accessed 5 August 2026).
The alternative is to add Thai as a system language under Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a language, which pulls the same font package. At deployment scale this is the capability `Language.Fonts.Thai~~~und-THAI~0.0.1.0`, which administrators add with DISM ([Microsoft Learn — Language FOD](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/features-on-demand-language-fod), accessed 5 August 2026).
### How to check whether you already have it
Open the font menu in Microsoft Word and type "Dillenia", or open `C:\Windows\Fonts` and look for these four files:
| Style | File name | Version on Windows 11 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| DilleniaUPC (Regular) | `Upcdl.ttf` | 5.05 |
| DilleniaUPC Italic | `Upcdi.ttf` | 5.05 |
| DilleniaUPC Bold | `Upcdb.ttf` | 5.05 |
| DilleniaUPC Bold Italic | `Upcdbi.ttf` | 5.05 |
### What about macOS and Linux?
DilleniaUPC is not bundled with macOS or Linux, and there is no legitimate free download. Two options: install Microsoft Office on that machine, where the font arrives with the suite, or switch to one of the free Thai faces listed further down this page. The copies distributed on international aggregator sites are not authorised by Microsoft, and are usually older than version 5.05 with incomplete glyph coverage.
## The four DilleniaUPC styles
**DilleniaUPC ships four styles only — Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. There is no Light, Medium or Black weight, and no variable version** ([Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/dilleniaupc), accessed 5 August 2026).
That limit matters when planning a type system: if the work needs more than two levels of hierarchy (regular and bold), the UPC families cannot deliver it alone — you either mix in another family or move to a modern family with a full weight range.
The font covers Thai and Latin, with Microsoft recording the script tags as `dlng:'Thai'` and `slng:'Thai', 'Latn'`, plus code pages 874 Thai and 1252 Latin 1. Mixed Thai–English lines in office documents can therefore be set from a single family.
## DilleniaUPC, the UPC family, and the "New" question
**DilleniaUPC is one of Microsoft's Thai system faces named after flowers and Thai words, and among all the UPC families only Angsana, Browallia and Cordia have "New" counterparts — there is no "Dillenia New" in the Windows font list** ([Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list), accessed 5 August 2026).
The difference between the UPC and New cuts is that the New versions adjust spacing and metrics for modern line layout, while the UPC versions preserve the original metrics so old documents open without reflowing. Because Dillenia has no New counterpart, DilleniaUPC is the only version of this design in the system.
Neighbouring families that get swapped for it in Thai office documents:
- [AngsanaUPC](/fonts/angsana-upc/) and [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/) — the Thai serif most often seen in government paperwork
- [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) — the sans counterpart to Angsana, used for headings and tables
- [EucrosiaUPC](/fonts/eucrosia-upc/) and [JasmineUPC](/fonts/jasmine-upc/) — Thai serifs with wider skeletons than Dillenia
- [KodchiangUPC](/fonts/kodchiang-upc/) — a book-toned Thai serif for sustained reading
- [LilyUPC](/fonts/lily-upc/), [IrisUPC](/fonts/iris-upc/) and [FreesiaUPC](/fonts/freesia-upc/) — the remaining members of the same set
## Character and best use cases
**DilleniaUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface with modulated serif strokes, drawn for continuous body text in 1990s office documents rather than for brand work.** It sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/).
Strong fits:
- Opening, editing and reprinting older Thai documents that specified a UPC family in the file
- Government, academic and office files that must render line-for-line identically to the original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts, where files move between machines
- Cases needing a widely-installed Thai serif at no extra cost to the user
Where it doesn't fit: new brand identity work, websites (which need a separate webfont licence), and anything needing more than two weights.
## Free Thai fonts that replace DilleniaUPC
**If the machine doesn't have DilleniaUPC and you would rather not touch optional features, the licensed-and-free route is an openly published Thai face that installs on any operating system and can be used commercially.** Four that cover the same body-text role:
- **[TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)** — the national font Thai government agencies mandate for official correspondence. If the goal is Thai official paperwork, this is the face to standardise on, not DilleniaUPC
- **[Kinnari](/fonts/kinnari/)** — a looped Thai serif from the TLWG free font project, free to use and to redistribute, with a register close to the system fonts of the same era
- **[Norasi](/fonts/norasi/)** — a looped Thai serif from the National Font Project, suited to long body text in print
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — a modern Thai serif with nine weights under the OFL, for when the brief needs more than two levels of hierarchy
One caution: swapping fonts in an existing document shifts line counts and page breaks, because character widths differ. If the file has to go to another organisation for review, enable Thai Supplemental Fonts using the steps above rather than changing the font. More options in the [serif category](/fonts/categories/serif/).
## Licensing
**DilleniaUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft. Your right to use it comes with your licensed copy of Windows or Office, and it cannot be redistributed or hosted as a webfont without a separate Microsoft licence.** Microsoft directs anyone needing rights for enterprises, web developers, hardware or software redistribution, or server installations to its font licensing channel ([Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/dilleniaupc), accessed 5 August 2026).
In plain terms: setting documents on a machine with licensed Windows or Office is fine, but do not upload the `.ttf` to a web server, do not embed it in a distributed app or product, and do not pass font files to other people. See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/eucrosia-upc.mdx
## What EucrosiaUPC is
**EucrosiaUPC is a looped Thai serif drawn for sustained reading in documents and print, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users EucrosiaUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**EucrosiaUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with the later Eucrosia New revision, a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**EucrosiaUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "EucrosiaUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**EucrosiaUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [serif category](/fonts/categories/serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**EucrosiaUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/eucrosiaupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/fahkwang.mdx
## What Fahkwang is
**Fahkwang is a humanist display Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak with a soft, open character — the name (ฟ้ากว้าง) translates loosely as "wide sky" and the design follows through with spacious, airy letterforms.** It ships six weights with matching italics under the SIL Open Font License.
The design sits in the same family of humanist loopless Thai sans as [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) and [Mitr](/fonts/mitr/), but pushes the proportions wider and the terminals softer. At display sizes, Fahkwang feels almost editorial — the wider counters and rounded terminals carry a magazine-quality warmth that narrower display faces like [Athiti](/fonts/athiti/) cannot match.
The font is used widely in Thai editorial, lifestyle publishing, and mid-premium consumer brands that want "modern with warmth" as their typographic tone.
## Character design and tone
**Fahkwang uses wide proportions, soft curved terminals, and open loopless consonant heads that together produce an airy, editorial tone at display sizes.** The head of ก is an open curve with a subtle inward roll; ถ, ภ, and ร have generously wide bowls.
Stroke modulation is subtle — more than Kanit, less than a serif. Where Bai Jamjuree leans into pen-drawn contrast, Fahkwang keeps the modulation minimal and lets the width and softness carry the character. At Bold weight, the rounded terminals become more prominent and the font gains a confident, grounded display presence.
Italic cuts rotate at a gentle angle and preserve the same rounded terminals. The Latin companion is a humanist sans with slightly flared stems — reminiscent of Mr Eaves or Museo Sans, with lower contrast than both. Numerals are lining and align to cap height.
## Weights and availability
**Fahkwang ships six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700) with matching italics across the full range.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fahkwang) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fahkwang).
File sizes are around 45-60KB per weight in WOFF2. A production loadout typically uses Light for display headlines and Medium for mid-size editorial subheadings; the italics earn their place in magazine-style pull quotes and captions.
## Best use cases
**Fahkwang is a reliable default for editorial and lifestyle brands that want warmth and openness in their display type.** Strong briefs:
- Lifestyle and travel magazine design — covers, features, section dividers
- Wellness, yoga, and retreat branding where openness reads as calm
- Interior design and homeware branding — catalogues, lookbooks, collateral
- Editorial blog design for long-form Thai content with a magazine aesthetic
- Co-working space, boutique gym, and studio branding
Where it doesn't fit: corporate fintech and enterprise UI (too warm, use [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)), government documents, and heavy UI work where narrower faces save horizontal space.
## Pairings
**Fahkwang pairs with transitional serifs and humanist sans that share its editorial warmth.** Three pairings:
- **Lora** — transitional Latin serif for body copy under Fahkwang display
- **Source Serif Pro** — editorial Latin serif for longer-form reading under Fahkwang titles
- **Sarabun** — neutral looped Thai for long-form Thai body when Fahkwang carries display
## Licensing
**Fahkwang is released under the SIL Open Font License and can be used commercially, modified, and bundled in products provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fahkwang) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fahkwang). All weights and italics are included in the free licence.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/freesia-upc.mdx
## What FreesiaUPC is
**FreesiaUPC is a monoline looped Thai sans-serif for body copy and interface text, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users FreesiaUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**FreesiaUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with the later Freesia New revision, a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a sans-serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**FreesiaUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "FreesiaUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**FreesiaUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai sans-serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [sans-serif category](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**FreesiaUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/freesiaupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/garuda.mdx
## What Garuda is
**Garuda is a free, GPL-licensed looped Thai sans-serif — one of the three original National Fonts that NECTEC released in 2001 to give Thailand a public, licence-free alternative to the commercial system fonts of the era.** It ships four styles and remains a default Thai face across Linux distributions.
Garuda, Kinnari and Norasi formed the first National Fonts set, sponsored by the Thai government through NECTEC and later maintained by the Thai Linux Working Group (TLWG). According to [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Garuda was generated by NECTEC for the public domain and modified under the GNU General Public License by TLWG.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Garuda is the free workhorse Thai sans that predates Google Fonts — the face that shipped Thai text on a generation of Linux desktops and open-source documents.
## Character design and tone
**Garuda is a monoline looped (มีหัว) Thai sans with even stroke weight and conventional loop terminals, drawn for clear document and on-screen reading rather than display.** Its proportions are practical and neutral, which is exactly the brief a National Font had to answer.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ stay clean and unambiguous at text sizes, the classic legibility argument for looped Thai covered in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). Because the stroke is close to monolinear, Garuda carries little weight contrast, so it reads as utilitarian rather than expressive when set large.
The Latin companion is a plain functional sans covering the basic Latin alphabet, numerals and punctuation, which is enough for mixed Thai–English documents, dates and figures without any bilingual styling ambition.
## Weights and availability
**Garuda ships in Regular and Bold, each with an oblique companion — four TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), where the TLWG National Fonts are packaged together.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is preinstalled on most Linux distributions and bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package, so it is one of the most widely deployed free Thai faces in the world despite its low profile among brand designers.
## Best use cases
**Garuda is the right choice when a Thai layout needs a free, neutral, legible sans for body and interface text.** Strong briefs:
- Thai-language documents, reports and forms where a licence-free body face is required
- Linux and open-source software localisation, where Garuda is already the default
- Long-form Thai reading text that benefits from looped, unambiguous letterforms
- Budget or non-profit projects that cannot license commercial Thai type
- Archival and government-adjacent work referencing the National Fonts heritage
Where it doesn't fit: branding and display work — for expressive [sans-serif Thai](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) with modern weight ranges, reach for a Google Fonts release instead.
## Pairings
**Garuda pairs cleanly with other quiet, document-grade Thai faces or with a stronger display face for hierarchy.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the OFL government-standard body sans, a modern stand-in or companion for the same document role
- **TH Sarabun New** — the official Thai document face for formal report layouts
- **Cordia New** — the legacy Windows Thai sans for cross-platform office workflows
## Licensing
**Garuda is free software: NECTEC generated it for the public domain and TLWG maintains it under the GNU General Public License, so you can use, modify and redistribute it freely.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL body sans in the same role, see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-cow.mdx
## What iannnnn-COW is
**iannnnn-COW (วัว) is a Thai handwriting typeface released free for commercial use by Prachya Singhto in March 2026, with three free weights: Regular, Bold and Black.** It is the newest entry in the designer's animal series and the one he positions in the middle of it.
That middle position is stated on the release page itself: COW is "less refined than the Dog font but more legible than the Monkey font". Read across the series, that makes it the compromise hand — looser than [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/)'s careful penmanship, tighter than [iannnnn-MONKEY](/fonts/iannnnn-monkey/)'s rush.
A Black weight is unusual in this category. Free Thai handwriting faces rarely go past Bold, which caps how loud they can get — see [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) for the comparison.
## Character design and tone
**iannnnn-COW reproduces the designer's own casual penmanship, with subtly irregular stroke edges that mimic the way a pen lays ink on paper.** The irregularity is deliberate and small: enough to break the mechanical evenness that gives away a synthetic hand, not enough to look ragged.
The designer's own claim is that despite reading as informal and slightly chaotic, the face stays readable and flows smoothly through extended passages. That is the trade COW is built around, and it is why it earns the middle slot rather than the display slot.
Tonally it is everyday and unforced — the register of a note left on a desk rather than a card written for an occasion.
## Weights and availability
**All three weights — Regular, Bold and Black — are free, distributed together from the f0nt.com release page.** The Black is the practical addition here: it gives the family a genuine display register without switching to another face.
Download it from the [iannnnn-COW release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnn-cow/).
## Best use cases
**iannnnn-COW suits work that wants believable everyday handwriting with enough weight range to build hierarchy.** Strong briefs:
- Casual branding, menus and packaging with a personal voice
- Posters and social layouts that need a loud handwritten headline (use the Black)
- Notes, quotes and pull-outs inside editorial layouts
- Product and campaign lettering aiming at warmth rather than polish
Where it does not fit: formal documents, forms and dense UI. If the brief needs handwriting that runs even longer and calmer, [iannnnn-RABBIT](/fonts/iannnnn-rabbit/) is the wider-spaced option; pair either with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for neutral text.
## Licensing
**iannnnn-COW is free for commercial use: the release page states all three weights are free and downloadable for both personal and commercial work, and every release on the designer's f0nt.com page carries the site's free-for-commercial badge.** No permission request, no fee. Compare the rest of the commercial-safe set in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) and read the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-dog.mdx
## What iannnnn-DOG is
**iannnnn-DOG (หมา) is a Thai handwriting typeface released free for commercial use by Prachya Singhto on f0nt.com in August 2021, in three weights: Light, Regular and Bold.** It is the neatest hand in the designer's animal series, and the one to reach for when a handwriting face still has to behave.
The animal naming is the designer's own convention — DOG, RABBIT, MONKEY, COW, HEN, OWL and others, each a different handwriting register rather than a different family member. DOG sits at the tidy end. On his own COW release page the designer positions that later font as "less refined than the Dog font", which is a useful calibration: DOG is the controlled one.
Three weights is generous for a free Thai handwriting face. Most ship a single Regular, which is why they cannot build hierarchy — see [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) for the comparison across the category.
## Character design and tone
**iannnnn-DOG reproduces careful everyday Thai penmanship — even spacing, consistent stroke weight, and letterforms disciplined enough to hold together in a paragraph.** It is handwriting written slowly, not handwriting dashed off.
That discipline is what makes the three weights usable. Because the Light, Regular and Bold share a stable skeleton, you can set a heading in Bold and running text in Regular without the two reading as different hands — an ordinary expectation for a text family, and an unusual one for a free handwriting face.
The tone is friendly and unpretentious without tipping into cartoon. Against [BoonJot](/fonts/boonjot/) it is warmer and more clearly hand-drawn; against [iannnnn-MONKEY](/fonts/iannnnn-monkey/) it is far more composed.
## Weights and availability
**All three weights — Light, Regular and Bold — are free, distributed together as a zip from the f0nt.com release page.** There is no paid tier and no supporter-only weight on this release, unlike some of the designer's later animal fonts.
Download it from the [iannnnn-DOG release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnn-dog/) on f0nt.com, which is the designer's own distribution channel for the whole series.
## Best use cases
**iannnnn-DOG is the family's workhorse hand — use it where you want handwriting that reads cleanly at length.** Strong briefs:
- Note-taking and study material, including iPad handwriting apps
- Educational and children's material where legibility is non-negotiable
- Informal branding, menus and packaging with a personal register
- Any handwriting brief that needs a real weight hierarchy rather than one style
Where it does not fit: formal documents, government forms and dense UI. For those, set a looped body face and keep DOG for the human layer. If you want a wider-spaced hand instead, look at [iannnnn-RABBIT](/fonts/iannnnn-rabbit/).
## Licensing
**iannnnn-DOG is free for commercial use: the release page states plainly that the font is free and usable for both personal and commercial work at no cost, and every release on the designer's f0nt.com page carries the site's free-for-commercial badge.** No permission request or payment is required. That makes it one of the genuinely commercial-safe options in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) — a distinction that matters, because many Thai handwriting fonts circulate as personal-use-only. See the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-dvd.mdx
## What iannnnnDVD is
**iannnnnDVD is a free Thai handwriting typeface listed on f0nt.com on 19 January 2005 by Prachya Singhto — the designer behind the iannnnn handle — and it ships one Regular weight covering the full Thai alphabet plus Latin.** It is a thin, wide, looped hand with a deliberately loose rhythm, and on the day we checked its release-page counter had recorded 479,963 downloads.
The face belongs to the [iannnnn 2005 series](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), the seventeen-font run that was f0nt.com's own first year of output by the person who founded the site. Nothing about it is institutional. It is a hand that was drawn quickly, released the same month, and then downloaded roughly half a million times over twenty-one years.
f0nt.com's own tags for the page are the fastest summary of its register: ชุ่ย (slapdash), น่ารัก (cute), ลายมือ (handwriting), วัยรุ่น (teen), อนุบาล (kindergarten) and เด็ก (childlike). Only one of those six is a compliment about craft, and the designer would be the first to agree.
## The five-minute font, in the designer's own words
**The most useful thing anyone can say about iannnnnDVD is what its designer says on the release page: he drew it in about five minutes, as a conscript soldier, after morning PT, paying no attention to spacing or size — and it became the most popular font on his old site.** The passage in full:
> ฟอนต์ลายมืออย่างด่วน ที่ใช้เวลาทำเร็วที่สุดในโลก! ทำตอนเป็นทหารเกณฑ์ในกองร้อยครับ ตื่นมาวิ่งออกกำลังกายเสร็จก็เปิดเครื่องมาเขียนๆ เสร็จแล้ว ใช้เวลาทำแค่ประมาณ 5 นาที ไม่สนใจช่องไฟหรือขนาดอะไรทั้งสิ้น แต่ดันเป็นฟอนต์ยอดนิยมของเว็บ ฟอนต์.ไอ้แอนนนนน.คอม (เว็บเก่า) ซะงั้น
("An emergency handwriting font, the fastest-made font in the world! I made it while I was a conscript in the company. I woke up, went for the morning run, then opened the machine and just wrote. Done. It took about five minutes. I paid no attention to spacing or size whatsoever. But somehow it ended up the most popular font on the ฟอนต์.ไอ้แอนนนนน.คอม site — the old one.")
Two claims sit inside that. The five minutes is unverifiable and always will be; we report it as his statement, not as fact. The popularity is not. Reading the counters on all twelve January 2005 release pages on the same day, DVD ranks fifth — behind [iannnnnJPG](/fonts/iannnnn-jpg/) at 928,658, [iannnnnGMO](/fonts/iannnnn-gmo/) at 830,409, [iannnnnSOS](/fonts/iannnnn-sos/) at 607,198 and [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/) at 555,277, and ahead of its tidier twin [iannnnnHBO](/fonts/iannnnn-hbo/) at 425,023. These are live meters and will have moved since.
The ไม่สนใจช่องไฟ — no attention to spacing — is the part you can actually check, and the file agrees with him. See the measurements below.
## What the letterforms actually do
**iannnnnDVD is a monoline looped hand with an unusually wide set and a stroke about three per cent of the em, drawn with heavily curved outlines: across the 46 base consonants the file uses 6,308 points in 115 contours, and 73.8 per cent of those points are off-curve control points.** That last number is the technical signature of a fluid, traced pen stroke rather than a constructed letterform, and it is what separates DVD from its sibling [iannnnnHBO](/fonts/iannnnn-hbo/), which uses barely a third as many curve points.
The measurements below all come from the shipped TTF, read with fontTools, at the file's own 2048 units per em:
| Property | iannnnnDVD | What it means on the page |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mean consonant advance | 838 units | Wide. A line of Thai set in DVD runs about 5 per cent longer than the same line in HBO |
| Advance spread | 680–1140, s.d. 106 | Genuinely irregular widths — the "no attention to spacing" is visible in the data |
| Word space | 690 units | Very wide for a text-sized face; words float apart |
| Stroke weight | roughly 3 per cent of the em | Thin. Hairline at small sizes |
| Cap height / x-height | 953 / 715 | Latin caps sit low relative to the em |
| Default line box | 1709 up, 618 down = 1.14 em | Set solid, DVD still leads itself loosely |
The practical consequence of that last row catches people out. Set iannnnnDVD and [iannnnnHBO](/fonts/iannnnn-hbo/) at the same point size in the same text frame and DVD will occupy about 17 per cent more vertical space by default, because its ascent and descent values are drawn to clear a much taller mark stack. If you are swapping one for the other in an existing layout, expect every line break to move.
The Latin is not an afterthought — 26 uppercase, 26 lowercase and 10 Western digits are drawn as separate outlines rather than borrowed — but it is a casual, slightly backslanted hand, and the capitals in particular read as sketch lettering. Test your own bilingual string in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before committing.
## How iannnnnDVD handles Thai script
**iannnnnDVD is a looped face: every consonant that should carry a หัว carries one, drawn as a small tight circle rather than an open curl, which puts it in the [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/) set alongside the rest of the 2005 handwriting run.** Coverage is complete — every assigned Unicode codepoint from U+0E01 to U+0E5B is in the character map with no gaps, including the Thai digits ๐๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙, which many free handwriting faces of this era skipped.
Mark placement is where a 2005 file behaves like a 2005 file, and it needs saying plainly. **iannnnnDVD declares no thai OpenType script at all.** Its GSUB table registers only latn with a liga feature and its GPOS registers only latn with kern. There is no Thai mark-positioning feature and there are no alternate low-form tone marks. Every above-mark is a zero-advance glyph sitting at one fixed height, inherited from the NP Naipol template the file was built on.
That works for the common case and fails predictably in two places. Type ป่ ฝ่ ฟ้ ฬ๊ and the tone mark lands on the ascender of the tall consonant rather than clearing it; type ญุ ฐู and the below-vowel overlaps the เชิง, the descending foot. We rendered both strings from the shipped file to confirm it rather than assuming. It is not a defect to be fixed by an update — it is what the whole series does, and any page telling you these fonts have modern Thai shaping has not opened the file.
One more thing the binary shows: the GDEF table is present but its glyph class definition uses ClassDef format 0, which is not a valid OpenType format. Font tooling reports it as unknown and ignores it. In practice nothing depends on it here, because there is no Thai positioning to drive.
## What "DVD" means — and what it does not
**There is no published explanation for the name iannnnnDVD, and this page is not going to invent one.** Across the release page, the designer's index and the interviews he has given, we found no statement connecting any of these three-letter names to the media brands they resemble.
What can be said accurately is that the whole 2005 run uses one naming device: the handle, closed up, plus a three-letter uppercase acronym borrowed from the technology-and-broadcast vocabulary of mid-2000s Thailand. Some are semantically apt — iannnnnBMX is described as the handwriting of a kindergarten child วัยกำลังหัดขี่จักรยาน, at the age of learning to ride a bicycle; iannnnnTKO is ฟอนต์เจ็บ!, a face for comic impact sounds. At least one is arbitrary by the designer's own admission: on the iannnnnSME page he writes "นึกชื่อไม่ออกเลยเอาชื่อคล้ายๆ กันนี่แหละ" — he could not think of a name, so he reused one close to its twin's. And iannnnnITV is named for a letterform, not a broadcaster: "ตั้วชื่อว่า I เพราะตัว I มันยาวดี", named I because the letter I is nicely long.
DVD is in neither of those groups. It has no gloss anywhere. Treat listicles that confidently explain it as fabrication.
## The file you download today is not the January 2005 original
**The release page lists iannnnnDVD as 19 January 2005, but the TTF inside the current archive reports head.created 21 September 2005 and head.modified 22 September 2005 — eight months after the listing date.** The version string in the file reads Version 2.000 2005 initial release, and every other file in the 2005 run except [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/) shows the same autumn clustering — all eighteen of them created between 20 September and 4 November 2005.
The designer accounts for a revision pass himself. On the iannnnnISO page, his first release of 2006, he adds:
> ป.ล. ใครเคยโหลดฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน (2005) ไป ผมอัปเกรดและแก้ไขตำหนิมันเมื่อ 20 พ.ย.48 ครับ ดังนั้นตัวไหนที่โหลดไปก่อนอาจจะมีไม่สมบูรณ์อยู่บ้าง ยังไงลบของเก่าทิ้งไปแล้วดูดของใหม่เข้าไปแทนโลด !!
("PS: anyone who downloaded the iannnnn 2005 fonts — I upgraded them and fixed their flaws on 20 November 2548. So whichever ones you took earlier may be somewhat incomplete. Delete the old ones and suck down the new ones instead.")
**We are stating both dates rather than merging them, because they do not match.** พ.ศ. 2548 is 2005, so his announced fix-up is 20 November 2005; the DVD file's own timestamps are September 2005. Either the file was rebuilt more than once that autumn, or a later timestamp was not written. What is certain is the thing that matters to a user: the archive served today is a rebuilt file, not the one posted in January 2005, and if you have an old copy sitting in a font folder the designer's own instruction is to delete it and take the current one.
## The licence, in plain terms
**iannnnnDVD is free to download and free to use commercially. The release page carries f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge — free for commercial use — twice, and the site licence answers the commercial question directly: "ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย", go right ahead.** The grant on the licence page reads:
> คุณสามารถดาวน์โหลดฟอนต์ไปใช้งานได้ฟรี ไม่ต้องเสียค่าใช้จ่ายแต่อย่างใด แต่ถ้ามีการระบุข้อตกลงอื่นใดจากเจ้าของฟอนต์ ดังที่แสดงไว้ในหน้าดาวน์โหลดฟอนต์ หรือเป็นไฟล์เอกสารแสดงข้อตกลงที่แนบไปกับฟอนต์นั้นๆ ให้ยึดข้อตกลงดังกล่าวเป็นสำคัญ
("You may download the fonts and use them free of charge. But where the font's owner sets out any other terms — shown on the font's download page, or as a document file attached to the font — those terms take precedence.")
That precedence rule matters here, so we checked it: **the download page sets no additional terms beyond the badge, and the zip contains no licence document at all.** The archive is 67,353 bytes and holds exactly one file, 2005_iannnnnDVD.ttf. There is no LICENSE, no readme, nothing. So the site default governs.
Three restrictions are real, and they are stricter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
- **You may not sell the font file.** Bundling it with a deliverable so the thing renders correctly is expressly allowed; selling the font as the product is not.
- **You may not re-host it.** The FAQ answers that with a flat "ไม่ได้จ้ะ". Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back to the download page — which is why every download button on ThaiGraph points at f0nt.com and never at a copy.
- **Modifying for redistribution needs permission.** Private modification is fine. Modifying it to hand on to someone else is not, without the owner's consent.
One honest wrinkle you should know about before a client's legal team finds it. The embedded nameID 13 licence string inside the TTF reads For educations used only. — which contradicts the site's commercial grant. That string is template boilerplate: nameID 10 in the same file credits NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000, and the string travels with the template rather than with this designer's intent. The rights holder is also the person who operates the distribution channel, and his current bio on every release page says "ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ" — iannnnn fonts are free forever, go ahead and use them to earn a living. The publisher's current explicit grant governs; the embedded string is stale 2005 metadata. For how Thai licence tiers differ generally, read the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
The file's embedding permission is not ambiguous: fsType is 8, editable embedding, so document embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level.
## Where to download iannnnnDVD
**Take it from the [iannnnnDVD release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnndvd/). That page is the only source the licence permits, and it is the only one that serves the rebuilt file.** Click the download button on the page rather than trying to hot-link the archive. Not because the endpoint stops you — we checked on 29 August 2026 and it serves the zip to a bare request with no `Referer` and no browser User-Agent — but because the f0nt.com licence forbids re-hosting the files, and the redirect target is an undocumented path that can move without notice.
You get a single zip containing one TrueType file. There is no OTF, no variable version, no webfont build and no second weight — the family is one Regular and always has been. If you need .woff2 for a site, you are converting it yourself, which fsType 8 permits.
Mirrors of this font exist on font-aggregator sites. Two reasons not to use them: the licence expressly forbids re-hosting, and the copies in circulation are frequently the pre-rebuild January 2005 file the designer told people to delete.
## What to pair with iannnnnDVD
**iannnnnDVD is a title and accent face, not a text face — pair it with a neutral looped or loopless Thai family that carries the reading load.** The spacing irregularity that gives it charm at 40 pt makes it tiring at 11 pt, and the hairline stroke starts breaking up in print well before that.
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the default open-licence Thai body face, with a weight range wide enough to build a whole hierarchy underneath a DVD headline.
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a cleaner, more contemporary loopless sans if you want the contrast between hand and machine to be obvious.
- **[iannnnnHBO](/fonts/iannnnn-hbo/)** — from the same designer, the same month, and the same template. HBO is the tidy version of the same handwriting and holds together at small sizes where DVD does not, so the pair works as display-plus-caption within one voice.
For the wider field it competes in, see [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) — DVD sits at the loosest end of it.
Briefs it suits: student and youth-facing material, kids' and kindergarten graphics, informal social posts, packaging that wants to look drawn rather than set, and anything nostalgic about the mid-2000s Thai web. Briefs it does not: long body text, UI, official documents, and anything that needs to look considered — the whole point of the face is that it is not.
## iannnnnDVD, the other iannnnn fonts, and the 2005 context
**The 2005 series is not the same thing as the animal series most people meet first, and the two look nothing alike.** ThaiGraph publishes [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) and [iannnnn-COW](/fonts/iannnnn-cow/) from the later run — multi-weight faces from 2021 onward, drawn with modern tools and modern licences. The 2005 fonts are single-weight, template-built, and in a different technical era entirely.
The connective tissue between the two is documented rather than assumed. On the [iannnnnGMO](/fonts/iannnnn-gmo/) page the designer states he was trying to make something as good as [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) Bold and that GMO's 2025 successor is iannnnn-HEN — so the animal series is a direct continuation of this work, twenty years later, by the same hand. The whole record, all seventeen releases with dates, counts and licence terms, sits on the [iannnnn foundry hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/).
For where independent publishing sits against the commercial Thai foundries, see the [Thai type foundries guide](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/). If iannnnnDVD makes you think a five-minute handwriting font is within reach, it is — [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/) covers the routes, including the ones that take rather longer than five minutes.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and any of them should land you here:**
- **iannnnnDVD** — the name on the release page and in the font's own name table
- **iannnnn DVD** / **iannnnn-DVD** — spaced and hyphenated forms; the 2005 series is closed up, the later animal series is hyphenated
- **2005_iannnnnDVD** — the filename, and the family name stored inside the TTF
- **ฟอนต์ iannnnnDVD** — the Thai-language search
- **ไอ้แอนนนนน DVD** — the Thai reading of the handle, from the designer's old site name
- **iannnnnDVD font download** / **โหลดฟอนต์ iannnnnDVD** — the release page is the download page
- **iannnnn 5** / **iannnnn5** — a common miscount of the five n's; the handle has exactly five
There is no bold, italic, condensed or variable cut of this face. If a download promises "iannnnnDVD Bold", it is not from the designer.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-gmo.mdx
## What iannnnnGMO is
**iannnnnGMO is a free-for-commercial-use Thai looped display typeface listed on f0nt.com on 19 January 2005, drawn by Prachya Singhto under the handle iannnnn, and it exists because he tried to draw something as good as CordiaUPC Bold and produced something wobblier and better instead.** It ships one weight, covers Thai and Latin completely, and had been downloaded 830,409 times when we read the counter on 29 August 2026.
It is the third most downloaded font in the [iannnnn 2005 series](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), behind iannnnnMTV and iannnnnJPG, and it is the best-connected one. It points backwards at a Microsoft-bundled system face from 1992 and forwards at a 2025 family the same designer still maintains. No other font in the run does both.
The release page tags it display, fun, ล้อเลียน (pastiche), เด็ก (childlike) and เบี้ยว (crooked). Notably, f0nt.com does not tag it ลายมือ — handwriting. That is correct, and it is the first thing most write-ups get wrong: GMO is a drawn text face that came out irregular, not a handwriting font.
## Why iannnnnGMO exists: a 2005 attempt at CordiaUPC Bold
**The designer states the brief himself on the release page, and it is unusually specific for an amateur font of this era: he wanted to make something as good as CordiaUPC Bold, could not get there, and shipped what came out.** His words:
> ผมชอบฟอนต์ CordiaUPC (ตัวหนา) เป็นการส่วนตัวครับ มันสวยและดูมาตรฐานใช้งานง่ายดี วันนึงก็เลยอยากจะทำฟอนต์ให้ได้ดีแบบนั้นมั่ง แต่ทำไปทำมาก็ไปไม่เป็น ออกมาโยกเยกเอยอย่างที่เห็น สนุกดีเหมือนกันแฮะ
"I personally like the CordiaUPC font (the bold). It is handsome, it looks standard, it is easy to use. So one day I wanted to make a font that good myself, but it went nowhere and came out wobbly, as you can see. It was fun all the same."
That names a real target. [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) is the geometric looped Thai sans that Microsoft has bundled with Windows and Office since Windows XP; Microsoft's own description calls it "a geometric design, with simple, straight strokes combined with round curves", with "no contrast between thick and thin strokes, even in the loops", and credits Unity Progress Corp in 1992. In 2005 it was, for most Thai computer users, simply what type looked like. Choosing it as a model is choosing the default — and then missing.
The miss is the point. Where CordiaUPC's strokes are ruled, GMO's lean fractionally off vertical and its curves close at slightly different rates from letter to letter. It reads as the system font redrawn by hand from memory. That is a category f0nt.com had a tag for — เบี้ยว — and Cordia did not.
## What the letterforms actually do
**Measured from the shipped file, iannnnnGMO is an upright monoline with almost no stroke contrast, small closed round loops, wide even proportions, and a set of advance widths that vary far more than a machine-drawn face would allow.** Reading the outlines at 2048 units per em:
| Feature | Measurement | What it means on the page |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Consonant body height | about 800 units (ก spans −2 to 798) | A generous body; Thai fills the line rather than sitting low in it |
| Latin cap height | 884 units | Thai bodies read at roughly 90% of the Latin capitals |
| Latin x-height | 634 units | Lowercase sits well below the Thai body; mixed setting looks Thai-led |
| Advance width spread | ว 680 to ฒ 1134 | A 1.67× spread across the alphabet — the widths were drawn, not fitted |
| Ascenders | ป 1034, ฝ 992, ฟ 984 | Tall consonants rise only about 29% above the body: a short, tidy ascender |
| Descenders | ญ −288, ฏ −297, ฐ −279 | Shallow tails; the face does not need much leading |
The loops decide the character. On ด, บ and ผ the head closes into a small, perfectly round dot; on ก and ถ it is an open curl that stops just short of closing. Because there is no thick-to-thin modulation, those loops stay open at small sizes instead of filling in, which is the failure mode of most 2005 amateur Thai display faces.
The Latin is not an afterthought. Twenty-six capitals, twenty-six lowercase and ten Western digits are drawn as their own outlines rather than borrowed from the Thai, and they set with the same wide, even rhythm — closer to a geometric typewriter face than to anything Cordia's Latin does.
## How iannnnnGMO handles Thai script
**Thai coverage is complete — all 87 assigned codepoints in the Thai block U+0E01 to U+0E5B are in the cmap with no gaps, Thai digits ๐ to ๙ included — and mark placement is handled by fixed glyph geometry rather than by shaping, which has one visible consequence.** Every tone mark sits at the same height no matter what is underneath it.
Mai ek begins at y 1259, mai tho at 1227, mai tri at 1232 and mai chattawa at 1228. The tallest consonant in the face, ป, tops out at 1034. So a tone mark always clears a tall consonant with roughly 190 units to spare — and always floats about 430 units, a fifth of the em, above an ordinary one. Set ก่ or น่ and you can see the gap; set ปี่ or ที่, where an upper vowel fills the space, and it reads correctly.
That trade is not a bug the designer failed to notice. It is what the shared community template these fonts were built on does, and it is why the fonts worked identically in Photoshop and in Microsoft Word at a time when almost nothing did. The name table records the template by name: This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000. On the sequel, iannnnnGTO, the designer names the practical gain from a later template revision outright — เลยสระวรรณยุกต์ไม่ลอยในโปรแกรม Photoshop, so the vowels and tone marks stop floating in Photoshop.
Below-line vowels behave normally: สระอุ and สระอู both sit in a −358 to −47 band, clear of the baseline and clear of the descending tails.
## What is inside the file, and what it will not do
**The shipped file declares no Thai OpenType script at all: GSUB and GPOS both register only `latn`, with `liga` and `kern`, so every piece of Thai typography in this font is drawn geometry rather than shaping logic.** There are no Thai mark-positioning rules and no alternate tone-mark forms for tall consonants. Anyone converting it to a webfont should know that before they ship it.
The rest of the technical picture, read with fontTools:
- **unitsPerEm** 2048; **238 glyphs**; **fsType 8**, Editable embedding, so document embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level.
- **head.created** is 22 September 2005 — eight months after the 19 January listing date. The file you download today is the late-2005 rebuild the designer announced, not the January original. Every file in the run except [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/) was created between 20 September and 4 November 2005; the [full chronology is on the iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/).
- A legacy **`kern` table** is present alongside GPOS. That makes GMO better fitted than its sibling [iannnnnUBC](/fonts/iannnnn-ubc/), which has no GPOS and no `kern` at all.
- Five glyphs are drawn but unmapped: `lochula.short`, `lulakkhangyao`, `rulakkhangyao`, `saraamleft` and `yamakkanleftthai`. They are in the file and unreachable from any codepoint.
- **nameID 13 reads `For educations used only.`** — which contradicts the licence on the page it is served from. That is dealt with below.
If you want to see how a Thai face is put together from the other end, the [guide to making a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/) covers the modern equivalent of what a 2005 template did by hand.
## Is iannnnnGMO free for commercial use?
**Yes. The release page carries f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge — free for commercial use — twice, and the site's licence page answers the commercial question directly. The contradicting string inside the font file is inherited template metadata, and f0nt.com's own precedence rule is what settles it.**
Every term that exists for this font, and the weight each one carries:
| Where the term lives | What it says | Weight |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Release page badge | ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี, linking to the category defined as ฟอนต์ที่ผู้สร้างสรรค์อนุญาตให้นำไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้ | The publisher's current, explicit grant |
| Site licence FAQ | Asked about designing for income, for clients or inside an organisation: ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย | Same source, stated as an answer |
| Designer bio, on the page | ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ | The rights holder in the first person |
| A licence file in the archive | There is none. The zip contains one .ttf and nothing else | The channel that could override the default is empty |
| nameID 13 inside the .ttf | `For educations used only.` | Binary metadata; nameID 10 credits the NP Naipol template it came from |
The licence page, published 28 กรกฎาคม 2552 (28 July 2009), sets the precedence rule in one sentence: you may download and use the fonts free of charge, *but if any other agreement is stated by the font's owner, as shown on the font's download page or as a document file attached to the font, that agreement governs*. The download page states the grant. No document is attached. So the release-page grant is what applies, and the name-table string — which travels with the template, not with the author — is neither of the two things that could displace it.
Three real restrictions do apply, and they are stricter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
1. **You may not sell the font file.** Bundling it with a deliverable so the thing renders is fine; selling the font as the product is not.
2. **You may not re-host it.** Asked whether the files may be copied and offered for download elsewhere, the FAQ answers ไม่ได้จ้ะ. Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back. That is why the download link below points at f0nt.com and never at a mirror.
3. **Modifying to redistribute needs permission.** Private modification is allowed; modifying in order to sell or hand on requires the owner's consent.
This is our reading of published terms, not legal advice. For a high-value use, ask through the f0nt.com forum the licence page points to. The [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) walks the whole decision.
## Where to download iannnnnGMO
**The only authorised source is the [iannnnnGMO release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnngmo/).** Clicking the download button is what accepts the licence — the page says so in as many words: ข้อตกลง: คลิกดาวน์โหลด = ยอมรับสัญญาอนุญาต.
The archive is `2005_iannnnnGMO.zip` and contains exactly one file, `2005_iannnnnGMO.ttf`. There is no OTF, no variable version, no webfont build and no second weight. Anything advertising an "iannnnnGMO Bold" is not from this designer.
Two practical notes. Save the file from the release page rather than hot-linking the archive — not because the endpoint stops you (we checked on 29 August 2026: it serves the zip to a bare request with no `Referer` and no browser User-Agent) but because the f0nt.com licence forbids re-hosting the files, and the redirect target is an undocumented path that can move without notice. And because the file is a 2005 TrueType with no Thai OpenType script, test it in the actual application you intend to set it in before committing — the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) will show you the mark placement with your own text.
## GMO, GTO and iannnnn-HEN: the same idea three times
**The designer went back to this brief twice more, and both sequels are documented on the site in his own words.** GMO is the middle of a twenty-year thread:
- **iannnnnGTO**, listed 18 September 2005, is described on its own page as ฟอนต์ภาคต่อจาก iannnnnGMO — a sequel to GMO — saluting the face "we know as Cordia", and this time เบี้ยวบิดเละเทะกว่าเดิม, more warped and messier than before. It is tagged grunge where GMO is tagged fun. Same reference, opposite restraint. It had 508,250 downloads on 29 August 2026.
- **[iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/)**, from 2025, is named on the GMO page as GMO's successor: มีการออกแบบใหม่ทั้งหมดตั้งแต่เริ่มยันจบ แต่ยังเหลือกลิ่นของ GMO อยู่นิดๆ แถมยังมีหลายน้ำหนักด้วย — redesigned start to finish, with a trace of GMO still in it, and this time with several weights. If you want the idea with a usable weight range and modern shaping, that is where to go.
One caution about the GTO page worth stating plainly: the designer there attributes Cordia's design to ลุงทองเติม, "Uncle Thongterm". Microsoft credits Unity Progress Corp, 1992, and names no individual designer. We report his phrasing as his; we do not repeat the attribution as fact. The related bundled variant is [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), and the wider map of who draws Thai type is in [Thai type foundries](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/).
## What to pair iannnnnGMO with, and where it fails
**Use GMO where a friendly, slightly irregular Thai voice helps and where the line is short — it is a [display face](/fonts/categories/display/) with one weight and no shaping, and it will not carry a document.** It fits:
- Packaging and menu headlines for small food, café and craft brands
- Children's material, school and community print, and anything wanting warmth without being cute
- Posters, social cards and titles up to a few lines
- Bilingual lockups where the Latin needs to feel drawn rather than set
Where it fails: long body text at small sizes, any interface, and any layout that needs a bold. There is no bold — and faking one by stroking the outline will fill those small round loops immediately. Set the running text in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) and give GMO only the headline. For more faces in the same construction, browse [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/).
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same 2005 typeface, and searching any of them should land here:**
- **iannnnnGMO** — the name in the file's name table and on the release page
- **2005_iannnnnGMO** — the family name inside the .ttf and the archive name
- **iannnnn GMO**, **ianGMO**, **iannnGMO** — spacing and n-count variants; the handle has exactly five n's
- ฟอนต์ iannnnnGMO — the standard Thai query
- ฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน — the designer's handle written in Thai
- ฟอนต์ 2005 — the query for the whole series, which resolves at the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/)
- **iannnnn-HEN**, แม่ไก่ — the 2025 successor, a different font with a different file
There is no published explanation anywhere for what the three letters GMO stand for. The designer explains the naming of some fonts in this series and not this one, and we are not going to invent one.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-hbo.mdx
## What iannnnnHBO is
**iannnnnHBO is a free Thai handwriting typeface listed on f0nt.com on 19 January 2005 by Prachya Singhto, and it is the neat one — the designer's own hand written carefully rather than quickly, in a single Regular weight covering the full Thai alphabet plus Latin.** On the day we checked, its release-page counter read 425,023 downloads.
f0nt.com files it under four tags and every one of them is about restraint: คัดลายมือ (penmanship practice), บรรจง (carefully formed), ลายมือ (handwriting) and เรียบร้อย (tidy). That is a different proposition from most of the [iannnnn 2005 series](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), which trades on looseness. HBO is the member of the run you can set a paragraph in.
The designer's description says exactly that, and adds a confession:
> ฟอนต์ลายมือผมเองในเวอร์ชันเรียบร้อย ถ้าเอามาเขียนข้อความเป็นตัวเล็กๆ จิ๋วๆ เวลาพรนินต์ออกมาเป็นกระดาษแล้วสวยดี แต่ความจริงคือเป็นลายมือที่เกร็งมั่กๆ ขอบอก (ฟอนต์ตัวที่สองในชีวิตครับ)
("My own handwriting in a tidy version. If you set small, tiny text in it and print it on paper it looks good. But the truth is it is very tense handwriting, I have to say. It is the second font of my life.")
## "The second font of my life" — where HBO sits in the sequence
**That parenthesis is the most useful dating evidence in the whole 2005 series, because it fixes the order from inside the posts rather than from a listing page.** [iannnnnUBC](/fonts/iannnnn-ubc/), listed 12 January 2005, is described on its own page as the first font he ever made — taught to himself for a thesis submission, which led to the fonts.iannnnn site and then to f0nt.com. HBO is listed seven days later and calls itself the second. The two statements corroborate each other and the index's ordering at once.
That matters because f0nt.com moved to WordPress in 2009 and no release page exposes a machine-readable publication date. Anywhere else on this cluster we describe a date as "listed", because that is all it is. Here the sequence is independently confirmed by the designer's own words.
It also frames what HBO is. It is a beginner's second font, made by a self-taught architecture student a week after his first, on a shared community template — and it has been downloaded more than four hundred thousand times. That combination is the whole argument for taking the 2005 series seriously.
## What the letterforms actually do
**iannnnnHBO is a monoline looped hand drawn almost entirely with straight segments: across the 46 base consonants the file uses 3,534 points in 113 contours and only 25.8 per cent of them are off-curve control points.** Its sibling [iannnnnDVD](/fonts/iannnnn-dvd/), listed the same day by the same designer on the same template, uses 6,308 points at 73.8 per cent off-curve for the same 46 letters. The two files are built in opposite ways.
You can see that in the rendering. HBO's curves are polygonal approximations, its baseline is level, its stroke barely modulates, and the loops are drawn as small even circles. It reads less like handwriting than like a careful upright sans that happens to have been drawn by hand — which is what คัดลายมือ, copybook penmanship, actually means. The designer's word for it, เกร็ง (tensed up), is a fair description of the geometry as well as the mood.
Measured from the shipped TTF at its 2048 units per em, next to DVD for scale:
| Property | iannnnnHBO | iannnnnDVD |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Outline points, 46 consonants | 3,534 (25.8% off-curve) | 6,308 (73.8% off-curve) |
| Mean consonant advance | 799 units | 838 units |
| Advance spread | 614–1174, s.d. 113 | 680–1140, s.d. 106 |
| Word space | 500 units | 690 units |
| Stroke weight | roughly 4 per cent of the em | roughly 3 per cent of the em |
| Default line box | 1416 up, 580 down = 0.97 em | 1709 up, 618 down = 1.14 em |
| Kerning pairs | 72 | 5 |
Two rows there decide real layouts. **The word space is 500 units against DVD's 690**, so HBO sets noticeably tighter and looks composed rather than scattered. And **the default line box is under one em**, which means HBO set solid at 16 pt takes less vertical space than most Thai text faces — you will usually want to add leading manually rather than trusting the font's own metrics.
The 72 kerning pairs against DVD's 5 is the clearest evidence that HBO was finished rather than dashed off. It is still a small kern table by any modern standard, and it only applies to Latin, but somebody sat down with it.
## Can you really set small text in iannnnnHBO?
**Largely yes, and that is unusual for a 2005 free handwriting face — we set the same Thai line in both faces from 11 pt upward and HBO's loops stayed open and its rhythm stayed even where DVD went spidery and irregular.** The designer's claim about printing small holds up better than most designer claims do.
The honest limits are worth stating anyway:
- **The stroke is still a hairline.** At roughly 4 per cent of the em it is thinner than a text face like [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) Regular. On coated stock or a laser printer it survives; on newsprint or a low-resolution screen it will thin out.
- **There is one weight.** No bold, so emphasis inside a paragraph has to come from another family. The designer solved this himself later: [iannnnnMTV](/fonts/iannnnn-mtv/), from October 2005, is explicitly his handwriting drawn bold เผื่อใครเอาไปย่อเล็กๆ แล้วเส้นจะได้ไม่บางเกินไป — so the strokes would not get too thin when scaled down.
- **The mark positioning is fixed geometry**, and at small sizes over tall consonants that shows. See the next section.
So: captions, short paragraphs, quotations, worksheet text, packaging copy. Not a novel. Compare it against your own copy in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before deciding.
## How iannnnnHBO handles Thai script
**iannnnnHBO is a looped face — every consonant that should carry a หัว has one, drawn as a small even circle — and its Thai coverage is complete, with every assigned codepoint from U+0E01 to U+0E5B in the character map and no gaps, including the Thai digits ๐๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙.** That puts it in the [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/) set, and the complete digit set is more than many free handwriting faces of the period bothered with.
Mark placement is 2005 technology and needs stating plainly. **No thai OpenType script is declared anywhere in the file.** GSUB registers only latn with liga; GPOS registers only latn with kern. There is no Thai mark-positioning feature, and no alternate lowered forms of the tone marks. Every above-mark is a zero-advance glyph parked at one fixed height, inherited from the NP Naipol template credited in the file's own name table.
The result is correct for the common case and predictably wrong in two places, which we rendered from the shipped file rather than assumed:
- Over a tall consonant — ป่ ฝ่ ฟ้ ฬ๊ — the tone mark lands on the ascender instead of clearing it. With ป๋ the mark and the stem cross.
- Under a consonant with a เชิง — ญุ ฐู — the below-vowel overlaps the descending foot.
This is the state of the art for a Thai font in January 2005, not a bug introduced later, and it is uniform across the series. It is also the single most useful thing to know before using one of these files as a webfont: nothing in the layout tables will fix the stacks for you.
One more finding from the binary, for completeness. GDEF is present but its glyph class definition uses ClassDef format 0, which is not a valid OpenType format; font tooling reports it as unknown and skips it. Nothing here depends on it, because there is no Thai positioning to drive.
## What "HBO" means — and what it does not
**There is no published explanation for the name iannnnnHBO, and this page will not manufacture one.** Nothing on the release page, the designer's index or the interviews he has given connects it to the broadcaster it resembles.
What is documented is the naming device the whole run uses: the handle, closed up, plus a three-letter uppercase acronym out of the technology-and-broadcast vocabulary of mid-2000s Thailand. A few have an explanation. iannnnnBMX is ฟอนต์ลายมือเด็กอนุบาล วัยกำลังหัดขี่จักรยานเลย, kindergarten handwriting at bicycle-learning age. iannnnnTKO is ฟอนต์เจ็บ!, a comic impact face. On iannnnnSME the designer admits the name is arbitrary — "นึกชื่อไม่ออกเลยเอาชื่อคล้ายๆ กันนี่แหละ", he could not think of one so he reused something close. And iannnnnITV is named for a letterform: "ตั้วชื่อว่า I เพราะตัว I มันยาวดี".
HBO has none of that. It is a gap in the record, and a page that fills it with a confident story about cable television is guessing.
## The file you download today is not the January 2005 original
**The release page lists iannnnnHBO as 19 January 2005, but the TTF in the current archive reports head.created 25 September 2005 and head.modified 28 September 2005 — eight months after the listing.** The version string reads Version 2.000 2005 initial release, and every other file in the 2005 run except [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/) shows the same autumn timestamps — all eighteen of them created between 20 September and 4 November 2005.
The designer confirms a revision pass, on the iannnnnISO page from the following year:
> ป.ล. ใครเคยโหลดฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน (2005) ไป ผมอัปเกรดและแก้ไขตำหนิมันเมื่อ 20 พ.ย.48 ครับ ดังนั้นตัวไหนที่โหลดไปก่อนอาจจะมีไม่สมบูรณ์อยู่บ้าง ยังไงลบของเก่าทิ้งไปแล้วดูดของใหม่เข้าไปแทนโลด !!
("PS: anyone who downloaded the iannnnn 2005 fonts — I upgraded them and fixed their flaws on 20 November 2548. So whichever ones you took earlier may be somewhat incomplete. Delete the old ones and suck down the new ones instead.")
**We publish both dates rather than reconciling them, because they do not agree.** พ.ศ. 2548 is 2005, so his announced fix-up is 20 November 2005, while the HBO file's own timestamps are late September. Either the files were rebuilt more than once that autumn, or a timestamp was not rewritten. The user-facing conclusion is unaffected: what f0nt.com serves today is a rebuilt file, not the January original, and if you are carrying an old copy in a font folder the designer's own instruction is to replace it.
## The licence, in plain terms
**iannnnnHBO is free to download and free to use commercially. The release page carries f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge twice, and the site licence answers the commercial question with "ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย" — go right ahead.** The grant itself reads:
> คุณสามารถดาวน์โหลดฟอนต์ไปใช้งานได้ฟรี ไม่ต้องเสียค่าใช้จ่ายแต่อย่างใด แต่ถ้ามีการระบุข้อตกลงอื่นใดจากเจ้าของฟอนต์ ดังที่แสดงไว้ในหน้าดาวน์โหลดฟอนต์ หรือเป็นไฟล์เอกสารแสดงข้อตกลงที่แนบไปกับฟอนต์นั้นๆ ให้ยึดข้อตกลงดังกล่าวเป็นสำคัญ
("You may download the fonts and use them free of charge. But where the font's owner sets out any other terms — shown on the font's download page, or as a document file attached to the font — those terms take precedence.")
We checked the precedence clause rather than assuming it was moot: **the download page states no extra terms beyond the badge, and the archive contains no licence document.** The zip is 49,089 bytes and holds one file, 2005_iannnnnHBO.ttf, and nothing else. So the site default governs.
Three restrictions are real, and they are tighter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
- **You may not sell the font file.** Bundling it with a deliverable so the work renders correctly is expressly permitted; selling the font as the product is not.
- **You may not re-host it.** The FAQ answers that "ไม่ได้จ้ะ". Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back to the download page — which is why our download button points at f0nt.com and never at a mirror.
- **Modifying for redistribution needs permission.** Private modification is allowed; modifying it to pass on to others requires the owner's consent.
There is a contradiction inside the file that you should know about before someone else finds it. The embedded nameID 13 licence string reads For educations used only., which is the opposite of the site's commercial grant. That string is template boilerplate — nameID 10 in the same file credits NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000, and the string travels with the template, not with this designer's intent. The rights holder is also the operator of the distribution channel, and his current bio on every release page reads "ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ" — iannnnn fonts are free forever, go ahead and use them to make a living. The publisher's current explicit grant governs; the embedded string is stale 2005 metadata. The [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out how the tiers differ across Thai type generally.
Embedding permission is unambiguous: fsType is 8, editable embedding, so document embedding and webfont conversion are allowed at the binary level.
## Where to download iannnnnHBO
**Take it from the [iannnnnHBO release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnnhbo/). That is the only source the licence permits and the only one serving the rebuilt file.** Use the download button on the page rather than a direct link to the archive. Not because the endpoint stops you — we checked on 29 August 2026 and it serves the zip to a bare request with no `Referer` and no browser User-Agent — but because the f0nt.com licence forbids re-hosting the files, and the redirect target is an undocumented path that can move without notice.
What you get is one zip holding one TrueType file. There is no OTF, no variable version, no webfont build and no second weight. If you need .woff2, you are converting it yourself, which fsType 8 permits.
Aggregator sites mirror this font. Two reasons to avoid them: re-hosting is expressly forbidden by the licence, and the copies in circulation are often the pre-rebuild January 2005 file the designer asked people to delete.
## What to pair with iannnnnHBO
**HBO is the rare handwriting face in this series that can carry short text, so pair it for contrast at the top of the page rather than for rescue at the bottom.** Three that work:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licence Thai body standard. Use it under HBO when the document needs a real weight range, or over it when HBO is doing captions and annotations.
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a contemporary loopless sans. Setting a loopless heading over HBO's looped hand makes the handwriting read as deliberate rather than default.
- **[iannnnnDVD](/fonts/iannnnn-dvd/)** — same designer, same day, same template, opposite temperament. DVD for the headline, HBO for the body, and the whole page still speaks in one person's hand.
Across the wider category — see [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) — HBO sits at the composed, legible end, which is a thinner field than the loose end.
Briefs it suits: worksheets and educational material, personal and craft branding, packaging with a handmade register, annotation layers on diagrams and maps, and anything where the handwriting has to be read rather than admired. Briefs it does not: long-form body text, interface type, and any layout that needs a bold — there isn't one.
## iannnnnHBO, the animal series, and the 2005 context
**The 2005 fonts and the animal series most people meet first are twenty years and one technical era apart.** ThaiGraph publishes [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) and [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/) from the later run: multi-weight families with modern outlines and clean release terms. The 2005 files are single-weight, template-built and carry the fixed mark geometry described above.
The link between the two eras is documented, not inferred. On the [iannnnnGMO](/fonts/iannnnn-gmo/) page the designer says he was trying to make something as good as [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) Bold, and adds that GMO's 2025 successor is iannnnn-HEN — so the animal series continues this work by the same hand. The full record of all seventeen 2005 releases, with listed dates, download counts and licence terms, is on the [iannnnn foundry hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/).
For where a one-man free catalogue sits against the commercial Thai foundries, see the [Thai type foundries guide](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/). And if a self-taught second font reaching 425,000 downloads makes the idea seem approachable — it is; [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/) covers the routes available now.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and any of them should land you here:**
- **iannnnnHBO** — the name on the release page and in the font's own name table
- **iannnnn HBO** / **iannnnn-HBO** — spaced and hyphenated forms; the 2005 series is closed up, the later animal series is hyphenated
- **2005_iannnnnHBO** — the filename, and the family name stored inside the TTF
- **ฟอนต์ iannnnnHBO** — the Thai-language search
- **ไอ้แอนนนนน HBO** — the Thai reading of the handle, from the designer's old site name
- **iannnnnHBO font download** / **โหลดฟอนต์ iannnnnHBO** — the release page is the download page
- **iannnnn 5** / **iannnnn5** — a common miscount; the handle has exactly five n's
There is no bold, italic, condensed or variable cut of this face. A download promising "iannnnnHBO Bold" did not come from the designer.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-hen.mdx
## What iannnnn-HEN is
**iannnnn-HEN (แม่ไก่) is a Thai handwriting typeface released free for commercial use by Prachya Singhto in June 2025, with three free weights: Thin, Regular and Bold.** The designer's own description of it is the most useful summary anyone could write: he set out to make something serious and ended up with something impish.
That gap between intent and result is the face's character. HEN has the structure of a composed hand — regular rhythm, controlled proportions — with details that keep undercutting the seriousness. He states it works for both headlines and body text, which is a claim most handwriting faces in this category cannot make.
Three soft styles are offered as a donation incentive, but the three standard weights carry no condition. See [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) for how it compares across the category.
## Character design and tone
**iannnnn-HEN reads as friendly and joyful without becoming a novelty face, which is the narrow band most children's and consumer handwriting briefs actually need.** The Thin weight is the interesting one: thin strokes in a Thai handwriting face usually break down around the tone marks, and having one at all widens the range considerably.
Because the skeleton stays consistent across Thin, Regular and Bold, the family builds hierarchy the way a text family does — you can set a Thin subhead over a Regular paragraph and the page still reads as one hand.
Against [Itim](/fonts/itim/) it is more clearly handwritten and less like a rounded display sans; against [iannnnn-MONKEY](/fonts/iannnnn-monkey/) it is far more composed.
## Weights and availability
**All three weights — Thin, Regular and Bold — are free, distributed together from the f0nt.com release page; the three 'soft' styles are the donor extra and are not required.** The Thin gives the family a light register that most free Thai handwriting fonts simply do not offer.
Download it from the [iannnnn-HEN release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnn-hen/).
## Best use cases
**iannnnn-HEN fits work aimed at a warm, cheerful audience where the type still has to be read properly.** Strong briefs:
- Children's books, educational material and classroom resources
- Consumer packaging, cafés and lifestyle branding
- Headlines and body text in the same layout, using the three weights
- Greeting cards, invitations and social graphics with a friendly register
Where it does not fit: corporate, financial or institutional communication, and anything wanting gravity. Pair it with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) when a neutral face has to carry the long text instead.
## Licensing
**iannnnn-HEN is free for commercial use: the release page states that every iannnnn font is free and usable for personal and commercial work at no cost, and each release on the designer's f0nt.com page carries the site's free-for-commercial badge.** No permission and no payment. Compare the rest in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/), and read the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) before shipping Thai type in client work.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-jpg.mdx
## What iannnnnJPG is
**iannnnnJPG is a free looped Thai handwriting typeface drawn specifically for comic and manga captions, listed on f0nt.com on 20 January 2005 by Prachya Singhto, and the second most downloaded font of his 2005 series — its counter read 928,658 downloads when we checked it on 29 August 2026.** One weight, Thai and Latin, free for commercial use.
Unlike almost everything else in the series, it exists to solve a stated problem rather than to be a doodle. The whole release note is an argument, and it is worth reading in full because there is nothing else like it in Thai freeware from this period. Its f0nt.com tags say the same thing in three words: manga, การ์ตูน (comics) and ลายมือ (handwriting).
It sits in the January cluster that opened the year. Of the sixteen releases f0nt.com lists under 2005, twelve are dated between 4 and 27 January — a three-week burst that produced three quarters of the year's output, with JPG in the middle of it. The complete record is at [iannnnn Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), and the designer is the person who founded that site: on the iannnnnUBC page he traces the line from his first font, made for a thesis, to "เว็บฟอนต์.ไอ้แอนนนนน และ ฟอนต์.คอมในที่สุด".
## The argument behind it: what Thai manga lettering lost
**iannnnnJPG was made out of irritation at a specific publishing decision — that Thai-localised Japanese manga had switched from hand-lettered captions to stiff computer type, and lost something in the process.** The designer's note reads:
> ฟอนต์สำหรับบรรยายการ์ตูนนี้ทำขึ้นมาเนื่องจากรำคาญการ์ตูนญี่ปุ่นในบ้านเราที่ใช้ฟอนต์คอมพิวเตอร์แข็งๆ มันไม่ได้อารมณ์ลายมือเหมือนการ์ตูนสมัยก่อน ที่ใช้ปากกาเขียนข้อความบรรยายภาษาไทยลงไปที่กระดาษโดยตรง อ่านแล้วได้อารมณ์กว่ากันเยอะเลย
In English: this caption font was made because he was annoyed that Japanese comics here were being set in stiff computer fonts, which do not carry the feeling of the hand the way older comics did, where the Thai captions were written straight onto the paper with a pen — and those read with far more feeling.
That is a piece of design criticism, published in 2005, by the person who then went and fixed it himself. It is also a precise brief. A caption face for comics has to do three things at once: hold in a speech balloon at small size, survive being scaled and rotated by a letterer, and read as if a person wrote it rather than as if a machine set it. Everything about the drawing follows from that.
The historical claim underneath it is one this page will not overstate. He describes what he remembers of older Thai manga editions; we have not verified the lettering practice of any specific publisher or title, and we are not going to assert it on his behalf. The verified fact is the motive, in his own words, on his own release page.
## What the letterforms actually do
**iannnnnJPG is a rounded, evenly weighted looped Thai hand with small closed loops and an unhurried, upright rhythm — closer to careful printing than to fast cursive, which is exactly what caption lettering needs.** Where [iannnnnMTV](/fonts/iannnnn-mtv/) is loud and mannered, JPG is quiet and consistent, and the difference is deliberate: one is a headline voice, the other is a reading voice inside a picture.
What a letterer notices:
- **Even colour.** The stroke weight barely varies, so a balloon set in it has no dark patches. That matters more in comics than in almost any other setting, because the balloon is a small white shape surrounded by drawn artwork and any weight change reads as a smudge.
- **Small, tidy loops.** The หัว is closed and modest rather than the large, dominant loop of MTV, so the counters do not fill in when the caption is reduced. That is the property that lets it work at balloon sizes.
- **Latin drawn to match.** 26 capitals, 26 lowercase and 10 Western digits with their own outlines, plus the Thai digits ๐–๙. Sound effects and numbers set in the same hand rather than dropping into a substitute face.
- **Upright, not sloped.** There is no italic and no oblique in this file. If your letterer wants an emphasis style, they have to fake it, and faking a slope on a looped Thai face distorts the loops before it distorts the stems.
Against modern equivalents: [Mali](/fonts/mali/), the Cadson Demak schoolchild hand, is the closest open-licence face in register and it is far better engineered. iannnnnJPG's advantage is that it is a rougher, more genuinely hand-drawn shape — which is the point of the brief — and its disadvantage is everything in the next section.
## What is actually inside the file
**One TTF, one weight, no documentation, and one detail that settles a question about this whole series: the version string reads 2.000, not 1.000.** Everything below was read from 2005_iannnnnJPG.ttf with fontTools 4.57.0, out of the archive the release page serves.
| Property | Value | Why it matters |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Files in the archive | `2005_iannnnnJPG.ttf` and nothing else | No LICENSE, README or OFL.txt — the licence lives on the web page, not in the zip |
| Style name (nameID 2) | Regular | No weight axis, no italic. One cut |
| Version string (nameID 5) | `Version 2.000 2005 initial release` | The served file is a rebuild — see below |
| Designer (nameID 9) | `Prachya Singhto` | The romanisation ThaiGraph uses across every iannnnn page |
| Template credit (nameID 10) | `This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000` | The shared community template that made 2005 Thai freeware work across programs |
| Embedded licence (nameID 13) | `For educations used only.` | Template boilerplate that contradicts the site's grant — resolved below |
| Units per em | 2048 | Standard TrueType grid |
| Glyph count | 238 | Small; no alternates, no stylistic sets |
| Thai coverage | All 87 assigned codepoints in U+0E01–U+0E5B, zero gaps | Includes Thai digits ๐–๙ |
| Latin coverage | 26 + 26 + 10, separately drawn | `supportsLatin: true` is literally true here |
| OpenType scripts | `latn` only — `liga` in GSUB, `kern` in GPOS | **No `thai` script is declared at all** |
| Embedding permission (fsType) | 8, Editable embedding | Document embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level |
**For a caption font, the OpenType line is not a footnote — it is the thing that will bite you.** No font in the 2005 series declares a Thai script, so there is no mark-positioning feature and no alternate tone-mark form for a tall consonant such as ป, ฝ, ฟ or ฬ. Placement comes from the fixed geometry of the NP Naipol template. In practice that means it behaves identically everywhere — which is precisely why it was built that way in 2005 — but it will never adjust a tone mark to avoid a collision, and comic dialogue is full of exclamations that stack marks. Set your worst line, not your best one, in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before you letter a whole chapter in it. For running Thai text at length, take a face from [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) instead.
## The file you download is not the January 2005 original
**iannnnnJPG was listed on 20 January 2005, but the file f0nt.com serves today was created on 25 September 2005 and carries the version string "Version 2.000 2005 initial release" — it is the rebuild the designer announced, not the original.** On the iannnnnISO page, posted at the start of 2006, he writes: "ป.ล. ใครเคยโหลดฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน (2005) ไป ผมอัปเกรดและแก้ไขตำหนิมันเมื่อ 20 พ.ย.48 ครับ … ยังไงลบของเก่าทิ้งไปแล้วดูดของใหม่เข้าไปแทนโลด !!" — he upgraded the 2005 fonts and fixed their flaws on 20 November 2548, so delete the old ones and take the new ones.
The binary agrees with him twice: the creation date is eight months after the listing date, and the version number has moved to 2.000. Compare it with the font that closed the same year:
| | iannnnnJPG | iannnnnMTV |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Listed on the designer index | 20 Jan 2005 | 20 Oct 2005 |
| Version string in the served file | **Version 2.000** | Version 1.000 |
| `head.created` | 25 Sep 2005 | 13 Oct 2005 |
| `head.modified` | 13 Oct 2005 | 14 Oct 2005 |
| Reading | Rebuilt roughly eight months after release | Original build, made a week before release |
Two honest caveats. The designer dated his announcement 20 November 2005, and neither file carries a head timestamp later than mid-October, so read his date as when he announced the pass rather than when each binary was written. And nothing on f0nt.com describes what changed inside JPG between 1.000 and 2.000 — the version bump is evidence that it changed, not evidence of what changed. If you are matching an old print job set in a pre-2006 copy of this font, do not assume the metrics are identical.
## Is iannnnnJPG free for commercial use?
**Yes. The release page files iannnnnJPG under f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี category — free for commercial use — and the site licence answers the client-work question directly with "ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย", go right ahead.** That includes lettering a comic you intend to sell. No payment, no permission, no attribution requirement. The download button is preceded by one line of agreement: "ข้อตกลง: คลิกดาวน์โหลด = ยอมรับสัญญาอนุญาต" — clicking download is accepting the licence.
The category is defined on f0nt.com in one sentence: "ฟอนต์ที่ผู้สร้างสรรค์อนุญาตให้นำไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้", fonts their creators permit to be used to earn a living. The designer says it in the first person in the bio that appears on every one of his release pages: "ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ".
Three restrictions are real, and they are tighter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
- **You may not sell the font file.** Bundling it with a deliverable so the thing renders correctly is expressly allowed; selling the `.ttf` as the product is not. Shipping a print-ready comic with the font embedded in the PDF is the first case, not the second.
- **You may not re-host it.** Copying the file and offering it for download elsewhere is answered "ไม่ได้จ้ะ". Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back to the download page — which is why every download link on this site points at f0nt.com and never at a mirror.
- **Modifying for redistribution needs permission.** Private modification is fine, and letterers do modify caption faces. Modifying in order to sell or distribute the font onward requires the owner's consent, with the NP Naipol Template named as the single exception.
The full comparison against OFL, Creative Commons and the Thai National Font terms is in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
### The licence inside the file says the opposite
**Open the TTF and its name table claims a restriction the website does not: nameID 13 reads "For educations used only." That string is stale template boilerplate, and f0nt.com's own precedence rule is what settles it.** Here is every place a term for this font lives, and what weight each carries:
| Where the term lives | What it says | Weight |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The release page and the f0nt.com site licence | ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี; FAQ answer "ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย" | The publisher's current, explicit grant — and here the rights holder *is* the site operator |
| A licence document inside the archive | There isn't one. `2005_iannnnnJPG.zip` contains a single `.ttf` | The one channel the site licence says can override the default is empty |
| nameID 13 in the TTF | `For educations used only.` | Binary metadata, not a bundled document. The same file's nameID 10 credits `NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000` |
The site licence gives other terms priority only when they appear **on the download page** or in **a document file attached to the font**. The download page states the grant; the archive contains no document. The embedded string is neither of the two things that could displace it, and it travels with the template rather than with the author's intent — the identical string sits in eighteen of the nineteen files in this series. On top of that, fsType is 8, so embedding a caption font in a print-ready PDF is permitted at the binary level too.
That is our reading of a genuine conflict, not legal advice. For a commercially published title, ask the designer through the f0nt.com forum, which the licence page points to.
## Where to download iannnnnJPG
**Download it from the [iannnnnJPG release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnnjpg/). That is the only source the licence permits, and the file you get is `2005_iannnnnJPG.zip`, roughly 76 KB, containing one TTF.**
Two practical notes for anyone scripting this:
- The button on the page points at `https://www.f0nt.com/?dl_name=iannnnn/2005_iannnnnJPG.zip`, which answers `302` and redirects to the stored archive under `/wp-content/files/iannnnn/`. **Verified negative, against the common assumption:** we requested that endpoint from a bare command line on 29 August 2026 with no `Referer` header and no browser User-Agent, and it served the full 75,979-byte zip. There is no hotlink protection to work around. Use the release page regardless — the redirect target is an undocumented implementation detail that can move without notice, and re-hosting or hot-linking the file breaks the licence in any case.
- There is no Google Fonts entry, no GitHub repository and no OFL text anywhere in this series. Any site offering an "iannnnnJPG free download" from its own server is re-hosting against the terms above.
To install: unzip, then right-click the `.ttf` and choose Install on Windows, or double-click and choose Install Font on macOS. For web use you would self-host and declare it with `@font-face` — permitted by fsType 8, but read the OpenType caveat above first, because a browser shaping Thai will get no help from this file.
## Using it for comics and manga today
**iannnnnJPG still does the job it was drawn for, provided you letter with it the way a letterer works — one balloon at a time, at final size, checking the marks.** Where it fits:
- Speech balloons and caption boxes in Thai comics, webtoons and fan translations
- Handwritten narration and margin notes over artwork
- Children's picture books and educational comics that want a written, informal voice
- Bilingual Thai/English lettering, since the Latin is drawn rather than substituted
Where it does not fit: long Thai body copy, UI, and any layout that leans on automatic tone-mark positioning. For a running text face under it, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the standard open-licence choice; [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) keeps the loops if you want the whole page to stay in one register. If you need the same feeling with real weights and a modern shaping table, the designer's own [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) from 2025 is the direct upgrade path, and [Mali](/fonts/mali/) is the open-licence alternative.
One workflow warning that is specific to comics. Because there is no `thai` OpenType script in this file, a tone mark over a tall consonant sits where the template put it and nowhere else. In a balloon set tight, that can collide with the balloon's own outline. Letter at final size, and if you rotate or skew the text — which letterers do — recheck the marks afterwards, because nothing in the font will re-place them for you.
## What "JPG" means — one of the few names in the series that fits
**iannnnnJPG is one of the handful of names in the 2005 run where the acronym plausibly matches the design: a picture-file format for a picture-lettering font.** But the designer never says so, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
The series uses one naming device throughout — the handle plus a three-letter uppercase acronym out of the media and technology vocabulary of 2005 Thailand. Some fit their designs: BMX is a child learning to ride a bicycle, TKO is a comic sound-effect face, CPU and AMD are both 8-bit. At least one is arbitrary and he admits it: on iannnnnSME he writes that he could not think of a name so he reused one like its twin's. One is named after a letterform rather than a broadcaster: on iannnnnITV he writes "ตั้วชื่อว่า I เพราะตัว I มันยาวดี", named I because the letter I is nicely long.
For JPG specifically there is no published statement of intent. The fit is obvious; the source is absent. Treat it as an inference, which is what it is.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and searching any of them should land here:**
- **iannnnnJPG** — the name on the release page, five n's, no space
- **iannnnn JPG**, **iannnnn-JPG**, **iannnnnjpg** — spaced, hyphenated and lowercase forms in common use
- **2005_iannnnnJPG** — the filename inside the archive, and the form people paste from a font menu
- **ฟอนต์การ์ตูน**, **ฟอนต์บรรยายการ์ตูน** — the Thai queries for a comic caption font
- **ฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน**, **ไอ้แอนนนนน** — the designer's handle written in Thai
- **ฟอนต์ 2005** — the query for the series this font belongs to
- **Thai manga font**, **Thai comic font**, **iannnnn font** — the English forms
- **Prachya Singhto**, **ปรัชญา สิงห์โต** — the designer's name in both scripts
For the rest of the run — all sixteen 2005 releases plus iannnnnITV, with dates, download counts and what is inside each file — see [iannnnn Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/). For where this face sits by style, see [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) and [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/). For how independent publishing on f0nt.com relates to the commercial Thai foundries, read the [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/); to draw a caption face of your own, start with [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-monkey.mdx
## What iannnnn-MONKEY is
**iannnnn-MONKEY (ลิง) is a fast, brush-pen Thai handwriting typeface released free for commercial use by Prachya Singhto in January 2026, with two free weights, Regular and Bold.** It is the loosest hand in the designer's animal series — handwriting at speed, with the lean and slur that implies.
The designer places it in a lineage rather than in isolation: MONKEY is described as related to his earlier iannnnnBKK (2006) and DUCK fonts, but with distinct brush-pen characteristics. That is a twenty-year arc of the same casual register, redrawn.
If MONKEY is too loose for the brief, the same designer's [iannnnn-COW](/fonts/iannnnn-cow/) sits one step more legible and [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/) one step further still — his own release pages rank them that way.
## Character design and tone
**iannnnn-MONKEY is drawn with quick, slightly hurried strokes carrying a subtle italic lean and brush-pen weight variation without strong contrast.** The lean is the defining feature. A rightward slant in Thai handwriting reads as speed, the way ลายมือหวัด — fast cursive — does on paper, and it is what gives the face its energy.
The brush-pen modulation is present but restrained: enough to suggest a marker or a felt tip, not enough to create the thick-thin drama of a calligraphic face like [Plaimanas07](/fonts/plaimanas07/). That keeps colour reasonably even despite the speed.
Tonally it is casual, young and slightly irreverent. It is the series' informal extreme.
## Weights and availability
**Two weights, Regular and Bold, are free; a third style called iannnnn-MONKEY BLACK is offered to donors.** The two free weights are a complete pairing for most display work — set the Bold for the line that shouts and the Regular for everything under it.
Download it from the [iannnnn-MONKEY release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnn-monkey/).
## Best use cases
**iannnnn-MONKEY is a display hand — reach for it when the brief wants energy and informality, and keep the line short.** Strong briefs:
- Social posts, stickers and youth-facing campaign lettering
- Street food, market and casual F&B branding
- Handwritten captions and annotations over photography
- Titles that want the look of a marker pen rather than a typeface
Where it does not fit: body copy of any length, anything formal, and dense UI. The lean and the speed that make it fun also make it tiring in a paragraph — use [iannnnn-RABBIT](/fonts/iannnnn-rabbit/) if you need handwriting that can run long.
## Licensing
**iannnnn-MONKEY is free for commercial use: the release page states it can be downloaded for both personal and commercial work with no permission required, and every release on the designer's f0nt.com page carries the site's free-for-commercial badge.** See more verified commercial-safe options in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) and check the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) before shipping.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-mtv.mdx
## What iannnnnMTV is
**iannnnnMTV is a bold, looped Thai handwriting typeface by Prachya Singhto, listed on f0nt.com on 20 October 2005, and it is the most downloaded font of his entire 2005 series — the counter on its release page read 1,345,578 downloads when we checked it on 29 August 2026.** One weight, Thai and Latin, free for commercial use.
The face is the designer's own handwriting, deliberately overplayed. His release note calls it "ฟอนต์ลายมือของตัวเองแบบดัดจริต" — a mannered, put-on version of his own hand — and then gives a reason for the weight that is unusually practical for this series: "โดยลองทำเป็นตัวหนาดูบ้าง เผื่อใครเอาไปย่อเล็กๆ แล้วเส้นจะได้ไม่บางเกินไปไงครับ", he tried making it bold in case someone scaled it down and the strokes came out too thin.
It also closed the year. On page 2 of the designer's index, which holds exactly sixteen releases and nothing but 2005 titles, iannnnnMTV sits at the top with the latest date of the run. The whole set is catalogued at [iannnnn Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), and the designer is the same person who founded the site it was published on — on the iannnnnUBC page he traces the line from his first font, made for a thesis, to "เว็บฟอนต์.ไอ้แอนนนนน และ ฟอนต์.คอมในที่สุด".
## Why it was drawn bold, and what that buys you
**The bold weight is a legibility decision rather than a style choice — the designer says so himself — and iannnnnMTV is also the most downloaded font in the series, running about 45 per cent ahead of the runner-up.** We are putting those two facts side by side, not claiming the first caused the second: nobody has published download data broken out by why people chose a face, and we have not tested the link. On 29 August 2026 the counters read 1,345,580 for MTV against 928,660 for [iannnnnJPG](/fonts/iannnnn-jpg/), the next-highest of the 2005 run; the lowest, iannnnnAMD, sat at 147,239. Most Thai handwriting faces are drawn at a comfortable display size and then fall apart when someone sets them at 14 or 16 px: the loops fill in, the tone marks turn to dust, and the hairline joints disappear into the paper or the screen.
iannnnnMTV starts heavier, so it has further to fall. That is the whole trick, and the designer states it as the brief rather than leaving it to be inferred.
f0nt.com's own tagging of the post reads the same way. The tags on the release page are น่ารัก (cute), ลายมือ (handwriting), วัยรุ่น (teen), หัวโต (big loop) and เด็ก (children). หัวโต is the load-bearing one: it names the single variable that does most of the emotional work in Thai type, and it tells you before you install anything that the loops here are large, round and the dominant feature of the face.
## What the letterforms actually do
**iannnnnMTV is looped Thai — every consonant that should carry a หัว carries a large, closed, deliberately rounded one — set on a wide, slightly tilted skeleton with an uneven baseline, which is what keeps it reading as a hand rather than as a bold sans.** The stroke weight is close to monolinear; the modulation you see is the wobble of the original writing, not contrast built into the drawing.
Three things a type designer notices:
- **The loops dominate the counters.** At display sizes this is the face's charm. At text sizes the loops start to close up before the stems do, which is the opposite of the failure mode you get in a loopless face like [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) and is worth testing before you commit.
- **The Latin is drawn, not borrowed.** The file carries 26 capitals, 26 lowercase and 10 Western digits with their own outlines, so bilingual lines set in one typeface rather than in two. It also carries the Thai digits ๐–๙, which plenty of 2005 freeware skipped.
- **Spacing is generous and irregular.** This is a hand, and the sidebearings were not optically corrected across the whole set. Long strings of Thai will show rhythm gaps. Set a real sentence in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) at your actual size before you sign off on it.
Compared with its own siblings: [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/), the designer's 2025 face, is the composed, modern equivalent with three weights and a consistent skeleton; iannnnnMTV is louder, heavier and less disciplined. Against [iannnnnJPG](/fonts/iannnnn-jpg/), the comic-caption hand from January of the same year, MTV is the one you set large and JPG is the one you set in a speech balloon.
## What is actually inside the file
**One TTF, one weight, no documentation, and a set of properties that explain both why this font works everywhere and why you should not treat it as a text face.** Everything below was read from 2005_iannnnnMTV.ttf with fontTools 4.57.0, out of the archive the release page serves.
| Property | Value | Why it matters |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Files in the archive | `2005_iannnnnMTV.ttf` and nothing else | No LICENSE, README or OFL.txt — the licence lives on the web page, not in the zip |
| Style name (nameID 2) | Regular | There is no weight axis and no italic. One cut, full stop |
| Version string (nameID 5) | `Version 1.000 2005 initial release` | This is still the first build — see the rebuild section below |
| Designer (nameID 9) | `Prachya Singhto` | The romanisation ThaiGraph uses across every iannnnn page |
| Template credit (nameID 10) | `This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000` | The shared community template that made 2005 Thai freeware work across programs |
| Embedded licence (nameID 13) | `For educations used only.` | Template boilerplate that contradicts the site's grant — resolved below |
| Units per em | 2048 | Standard TrueType grid |
| Glyph count | 238 | Small; there are no alternates and no stylistic sets |
| Thai coverage | All 87 assigned codepoints in U+0E01–U+0E5B, zero gaps | Includes Thai digits ๐–๙ |
| Latin coverage | 26 + 26 + 10, separately drawn | `supportsLatin: true` is literally true here |
| OpenType scripts | `latn` only — `liga` in GSUB, `kern` in GPOS | **No `thai` script is declared at all** |
| Embedding permission (fsType) | 8, Editable embedding | Document embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level |
**The line that matters most is the OpenType one.** Not one font in the 2005 series declares a Thai script, so there is no mark-positioning feature and no alternate tone-mark form for a tall consonant. Vowel and tone-mark placement comes from the fixed geometry of the NP Naipol template, which is exactly why these fonts behaved identically in Photoshop and in Microsoft Word in 2005 and why they still behave predictably today — and also why a modern shaping engine has nothing to work with. Treat iannnnnMTV as [display type](/fonts/categories/display/). For running Thai text, take a face from [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) instead.
## The file you download is version 1.000 — and for this font, that is the interesting answer
**The designer rebuilt the 2005 series after the fact and told people to re-download it, but iannnnnMTV is one of the fonts that was already current: its version string still reads "Version 1.000 2005 initial release" and its internal creation date is 13 October 2005, a week before it was listed.** On the iannnnnISO page, posted at the start of 2006, he writes: "ป.ล. ใครเคยโหลดฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน (2005) ไป ผมอัปเกรดและแก้ไขตำหนิมันเมื่อ 20 พ.ย.48 ครับ … ยังไงลบของเก่าทิ้งไปแล้วดูดของใหม่เข้าไปแทนโลด !!" — he upgraded the 2005 fonts and fixed their flaws on 20 November 2548, so delete the old files and take the new ones.
For most of the series that note explains a real discrepancy: the January releases ship files created in autumn 2005, months after they were first posted. [iannnnnJPG](/fonts/iannnnn-jpg/) is the clean example — listed 20 January 2005 and shipping a file stamped `Version 2.000` and created 25 September 2005.
iannnnnMTV is on the other side of that line. It was made in mid-October and posted a week later, at the end of the rebuild window rather than before it.
| | iannnnnMTV | iannnnnJPG |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Listed on the designer index | 20 Oct 2005 | 20 Jan 2005 |
| Version string in the served file | Version 1.000 | **Version 2.000** |
| `head.created` | 13 Oct 2005 | 25 Sep 2005 |
| `head.modified` | 14 Oct 2005 | 13 Oct 2005 |
| Reading | Original build, made a week before release | Rebuilt roughly eight months after release |
One honest caveat on the dates. The designer's announcement is dated 20 November 2005, and neither file carries a head timestamp later than mid-October, so his date is best read as when he announced the pass rather than when each binary was written. The version strings, which differ between these two files, are the harder evidence.
## Is iannnnnMTV free for commercial use?
**Yes. The release page files iannnnnMTV under f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี category — free for commercial use — and the site licence answers the client-work question directly with "ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย", go right ahead.** No payment, no permission, no attribution requirement. The download button is preceded by one line of agreement: "ข้อตกลง: คลิกดาวน์โหลด = ยอมรับสัญญาอนุญาต" — clicking download is accepting the licence.
The category itself is defined on f0nt.com in one sentence: "ฟอนต์ที่ผู้สร้างสรรค์อนุญาตให้นำไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้", fonts their creators permit to be used to earn a living. The designer says the same thing in the first person in the bio that appears on every one of his release pages: "ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ".
Three restrictions are real, and they are tighter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
- **You may not sell the font file.** Bundling it with a deliverable so the thing renders correctly is expressly allowed; selling the `.ttf` as the product is not.
- **You may not re-host it.** Copying the file and offering it for download elsewhere is answered "ไม่ได้จ้ะ". Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back to the download page — which is why every download link on this site points at f0nt.com and never at a mirror.
- **Modifying for redistribution needs permission.** Private modification is fine. Modifying in order to sell or distribute onward requires the owner's consent, with the NP Naipol Template named as the single exception.
The full comparison against OFL, Creative Commons and the Thai National Font terms is in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
### The licence inside the file says the opposite
**Open the TTF and its name table claims a restriction the website does not: nameID 13 reads "For educations used only." That string is stale template boilerplate, and f0nt.com's own precedence rule is what settles it.** Here is every place a term for this font lives, and what weight each carries:
| Where the term lives | What it says | Weight |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The release page and the f0nt.com site licence | ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี; FAQ answer "ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย" | The publisher's current, explicit grant — and here the rights holder *is* the site operator |
| A licence document inside the archive | There isn't one. `2005_iannnnnMTV.zip` contains a single `.ttf` | The one channel the site licence says can override the default is empty |
| nameID 13 in the TTF | `For educations used only.` | Binary metadata, not a bundled document. The same file's nameID 10 credits `NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000` |
The site licence gives other terms priority only when they appear **on the download page** or in **a document file attached to the font**. The download page states the grant; the archive contains no document. The embedded string is neither of the two things that could displace it, and it travels with the template rather than with the author's intent — the identical string sits in eighteen of the nineteen files in this series. On top of that, fsType is 8, so embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level too.
That is our reading of a genuine conflict, not legal advice. For a high-value identity project, ask the designer through the f0nt.com forum, which the licence page points to.
## Where to download iannnnnMTV
**Download it from the [iannnnnMTV release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnnmtv/). That is the only source the licence permits, and the file you get is `2005_iannnnnMTV.zip`, roughly 62 KB, containing one TTF.**
Two practical notes for anyone scripting this:
- The button on the page points at `https://www.f0nt.com/?dl_name=iannnnn/2005_iannnnnMTV.zip`, which answers `302` and redirects to the stored archive under `/wp-content/files/iannnnn/`. **Verified negative, against the common assumption:** we requested that endpoint from a bare command line on 29 August 2026 with no `Referer` header and no browser User-Agent, and it served the full 62,345-byte zip. There is no hotlink protection to work around. Use the release page regardless — the redirect target is an undocumented implementation detail that can move without notice, and re-hosting or hot-linking the file breaks the licence in any case.
- There is no Google Fonts entry, no GitHub repository and no OFL text anywhere in this series. Any site offering an "iannnnnMTV free download" from its own server is re-hosting against the terms above.
To install: unzip, then right-click the `.ttf` and choose Install on Windows, or double-click and choose Install Font on macOS. For web use you would self-host and declare it with `@font-face` — permitted by fsType 8, but read the OpenType caveat above first, because a browser shaping Thai will get no help from this file.
## What to set it with
**iannnnnMTV is a voice, not a text face: give it the headline and hand the paragraph to something neutral.** Briefs it genuinely fits:
- Posters, social graphics and campaign headlines aimed at a young Thai audience — the site's own tags for it are teen, children and cute
- Packaging and menu boards where the type should feel handwritten but still hold at a distance
- Titles and pull quotes set large, where the loops are an asset
- Bilingual Thai/English display lines, since the Latin is drawn rather than substituted
Where it does not fit: long Thai body copy, UI labels, any layout with heavy tone-mark stacking at small sizes, and anything that needs to read as institutional. Set the running text in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), the standard open-licence Thai body face, or in [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) for a loopless counterpoint that lets the headline do all the talking.
If you like the register but need weights and a modern shaping table, the designer's own [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) from 2025 is the direct upgrade path. If you want to understand why 2005 Thai freeware looks the way it does before you build on it, start with [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/) and the [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/).
## What "MTV" means here — and what nobody has published
**There is no published explanation for the name iannnnnMTV, and this page is not going to invent one.** The series uses a single naming device throughout: the designer's handle plus a three-letter uppercase acronym out of the media and technology vocabulary of 2005 Thailand. Some of those fit their designs — BMX is a child learning to ride a bicycle, TKO is a comic knockout face, CPU and AMD are 8-bit, JPG is a picture-caption face. At least one is arbitrary by his own admission: on iannnnnSME he writes that he could not think of a name and reused one like its twin's.
For MTV, HBO, UBC, GMO, GMM, CTX, DVD, SMS and SOS, no naming statement exists on any of the seventeen release pages, on the About page, or in the 2011 Positioning interview or the 2006 Blognone interview. Anything telling you this font is named after the music channel is unsourced. Stating the gap is more useful than filling it, and it is the single most likely place a competing listicle has made something up.
One name in the series does have an explanation, and it points away from the broadcasters entirely: on iannnnnITV the designer writes "ตั้วชื่อว่า I เพราะตัว I มันยาวดี" — named I because the letter I is nicely long. That is a statement about a letterform, not about a television station.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and searching any of them should land here:**
- **iannnnnMTV** — the name on the release page, five n's, no space
- **iannnnn MTV**, **iannnnn-MTV** — spaced and hyphenated forms in common use
- **2005_iannnnnMTV** — the filename inside the archive, and the form people paste from a font menu
- **ฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน**, **ไอ้แอนนนนน** — the designer's handle written in Thai
- **ฟอนต์ 2005** — the query for the series this font belongs to
- **iannnnn font**, **f0nt.com MTV font** — the English and site-name forms
- **Prachya Singhto**, **ปรัชญา สิงห์โต** — the designer's name in both scripts
For the rest of the run — all sixteen 2005 releases plus iannnnnITV, with dates, download counts and what is inside each file — see [iannnnn Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/). For where this face sits by style, see [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) and [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/). And for the face the designer was chasing when the series started, read [CordiaUPC](/fonts/cordia-upc/) — he names it as his model on the iannnnnGMO page.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-owl.mdx
## What iannnnn-OWL is
**iannnnn-OWL (นกฮูก) is a Thai handwriting display typeface released free for commercial use by Prachya Singhto in September 2024, with three free weights: Thin, Regular and Bold.** It is the mood piece of the designer's animal series — the one drawn for atmosphere rather than for legibility.
The brief he set himself is specific and worth quoting in substance: a face with a Thai atmospheric quality, cool and unsettling and evocative, inspired by Halloween but without tipping into the overtly supernatural. That restraint is the design problem. A horror face is easy; a face that is merely uneasy is not.
Two further weights, Heavy and Black, exist as supporter rewards. The three listed here are free outright, which is what puts OWL in the [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) set rather than the personal-use pile that most atmospheric Thai display faces land in.
## Character design and tone
**iannnnn-OWL carries an eerie, mysterious character built from handwriting rather than from horror-genre clichés — no dripping strokes, no fractured letterforms, just a hand that feels slightly wrong.** The unease comes from proportion and stroke behaviour, which is a harder and more durable effect than decoration.
Because the tension is structural, the face keeps working at a range of sizes rather than collapsing into noise the way a heavily textured display font does. The Thin weight in particular reads as thin and cold rather than merely light.
Against [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/), which gets its drama from calligraphic contrast, OWL is quieter and more modern. Against the rest of the animal series it is the clear outlier: [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) is cheerful, [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/) is tidy, OWL is neither.
## Weights and availability
**Three weights — Thin, Regular and Bold — are free; Heavy and Black are supporter-reward extras.** For display work the free three are sufficient, and the Thin is the most distinctive of them.
Download it from the [iannnnn-OWL release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnn-owl/).
## Best use cases
**iannnnn-OWL is an atmosphere face — use it for short lines where the mood is the message.** Strong briefs:
- Film, series and event posters in horror, thriller and mystery
- Halloween and seasonal campaign lettering with a Thai sensibility
- Book covers and editorial titles that need unease without gore
- Music, nightlife and game branding wanting a cold register
Where it does not fit: body copy, UI, and anything that needs to feel trustworthy or institutional. Set the running text in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) and let OWL carry only the title.
## Licensing
**iannnnn-OWL is free for commercial use: the release page states it is usable for both personal and commercial work without needing permission, and every release on the designer's f0nt.com page carries the site's free-for-commercial badge.** That is unusually clean for an atmospheric display face — read the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for why the distinction between "free" and "free for commercial use" matters so much in Thai type.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-rabbit.mdx
## What iannnnn-RABBIT is
**iannnnn-RABBIT (กระต่าย) is a Thai handwriting typeface released free for commercial use by Prachya Singhto in December 2025, with four free weights: Thin, Regular, Bold and Extra Bold.** It is the widest-spaced hand in the designer's animal series, drawn deliberately loose so it stays readable in running text.
Four free weights is the widest range in the series, and effectively the widest of any free Thai handwriting face outside the Google Fonts catalogue. The designer also offers a "fluffy" variant of all four weights to donors, but the four standard weights carry no such condition — they are free outright.
RABBIT is the newest of the tidy hands in the series, arriving four years after [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/), and it reads as a refinement of the same idea rather than a departure. See [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) for where it sits in the wider category.
## Character design and tone
**iannnnn-RABBIT is the designer's own handwriting drawn with deliberately wider letter spacing, a choice the release page names explicitly as a readability decision.** Spacing is the usual failure point of Thai handwriting fonts: Thai stacks vowels and tone marks above and below the baseline, and a tight hand collapses those marks into the consonants. Extra sidebearing is the cheapest fix, and RABBIT takes it.
The letterforms carry a faint serif-like finish at the stroke ends, which gives the face a slightly more considered air than a pure casual hand. Coverage spans Thai, English, numerals and symbols.
Tonally it is warm and unhurried — a written-out hand rather than a dashed-off one. Against [Mali](/fonts/mali/) it is looser and more personal; against [iannnnn-MONKEY](/fonts/iannnnn-monkey/) it is far calmer.
## Weights and availability
**All four weights — Thin, Regular, Bold and Extra Bold — are free, distributed together from the f0nt.com release page.** The donor-only extra is a separate "fluffy" styling of the same four weights and is not needed to use the family properly.
Download it from the [iannnnn-RABBIT release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnn-rabbit/).
## Best use cases
**iannnnn-RABBIT is the series' best choice for running text — the wide spacing and four weights make it the rare handwriting face that can carry a paragraph.** Strong briefs:
- Long-form handwritten body text, worksheets and study notes
- iPad and tablet note-taking apps where lines run long
- Editorial and social layouts needing a handwriting hierarchy across four weights
- Packaging and menus with a warm, personal register
Where it does not fit: formal and institutional documents, and anywhere the loose spacing wastes column width. Pair it with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) when the layout needs a neutral text face alongside.
## Licensing
**iannnnn-RABBIT is free for commercial use: the release page states the font may be downloaded and used for both personal and commercial work without asking permission, and the designer's f0nt.com page carries the free-for-commercial badge on every release.** No payment and no permission request. Browse the rest of the verified commercial-safe set in [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/), and read the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) before shipping any Thai font in client work.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-sos.mdx
## What iannnnnSOS is
**iannnnnSOS is a free Thai handwriting display face by Prachya Singhto (ปรัชญา สิงห์โต), listed on f0nt.com on 27 January 2005 and free for commercial use.** It ships one weight, covers Thai and Latin, and its whole character is a stroke that keeps breaking and being gone over again — the mark of a ballpoint that will not take ink.
It is the fourth most downloaded font of the seventeen-strong [iannnnn 2005 series](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/). The counter on its release page read โหลด 607,198 ครั้ง on 29 August 2026 — 607,198 downloads, behind only iannnnnMTV, iannnnnJPG and iannnnnGMO. That is a live meter and it will have moved since.
The date matters more than it looks. Twenty-seven January 2005 puts this font five weeks into the life of f0nt.com, which registered its domain on 19 December 2004, and the designer who drew it is the same person who founded and still runs that site. So iannnnnSOS is not a font that happened to be published on the main channel for independent Thai type; it is part of that channel's own first-year output. The [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/) sets out where that independent layer sits against the commercial catalogues.
## Why iannnnnSOS looks the way it does, in the designer's own words
**The face is a direct trace of a failing ballpoint pen, and the designer says so on the release page — it is the third font he taught himself to make in FontCreator, and it came out of the annoyance of writing with a pen that would not lay down ink.** His description, quoted as printed:
> นี่เป็นฟอนต์ตัวที่สามที่ผมหัดทำในโปรแกรม FontCreator เกิดจากความหงุดหงิดเวลาใช้ปากกาลูกลื่นห่วยๆ เขียนกระดาษแล้วดันไม่ยอมติดซะที … ต้องคอยถูๆ ลากๆ ย้ำๆ จนออกมาเป็นตัวอักษรที่เหมือนขอความช่วยเหลือชาวบ้านอยู่ยังงี้แล.. (จริงๆ แล้วชอบเป็นการส่วนตัว)
In English: this is the third font he practised making in FontCreator; it came from the irritation of using a lousy ballpoint that would not take on paper, having to keep rubbing, dragging and going back over the stroke, until the letters came out looking like they were calling the neighbours for help — and, he adds in brackets, he personally likes it.
Two things in that sentence are worth more than most of what is written about this series. The first is that he names the tool: **FontCreator**, a Windows editor, not FontLab and not Fontographer. The second is that he names the physical source of the texture. A great many Thai display faces from this period look distressed because distress was fashionable. This one looks distressed because he was describing a specific failure of a specific pen, and the ragged, doubled, re-gone-over stroke is a record of that. If you want to see how a hand becomes a font, the process is set out in [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/).
## Is the name SOS explained anywhere?
**No, and it should not be invented. f0nt.com publishes no naming explanation for iannnnnSOS, but the last line of its own release post is the closest thing to one, and it is his sentence, not ours.** He writes that the letters ended up looking like they were ขอความช่วยเหลือชาวบ้าน — asking the neighbours for help. He does not then say "so I called it SOS", and this page will not put that in his mouth.
The wider pattern across the series is uniform: the designer's handle plus a three-letter uppercase acronym out of the media-and-technology vocabulary of 2005 Thailand. Some fit their designs obviously; at least one is arbitrary by his own written admission; for most of them, including SOS, there is no published explanation at all. Any listicle that tells you these fonts are named after broadcasters or brands is filling a gap with a guess. The full accounting is on the [iannnnn foundry hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/).
## What the letterforms actually do
**iannnnnSOS is looped Thai — every consonant that should carry a หัว carries one — but the loops are small, often barely closed, and set on a stroke of uneven density.** That combination is what gives it a texture nothing else in the series has: it reads as handwriting under stress rather than as handwriting in a hurry.
Read out of the binary, the shape of the design is:
| Property | Value in 2005_iannnnnSOS.ttf |
| --- | --- |
| Weights in the family | 1 — nameID 2 reads "Regular", usWeightClass 400 |
| Units per em | 2048 |
| Glyph count | 238 |
| Italic angle | 0 (upright; the irregularity is drawn, not slanted) |
| Width class | 5 (medium/normal) |
| hhea ascent / descent / line gap | 1782 / −922 / 33 |
| OS/2 typo ascent / descent / line gap | 1102 / −766 / 64 |
| fsType | 8 — Editable embedding |
The gap between the two ascender-descender pairs is the practical detail. The hhea box is far taller than the typographic one because Thai needs vertical room above and below the baseline for stacked vowels and tone marks, and a 2005 face solved that by simply making the box big. Set iannnnnSOS at a tight leading in a modern layout tool and the lines will feel further apart than the point size suggests. Type your own line into the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before you commit to a grid.
Against its siblings: [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/) from 2021 is the tidy, controlled version of the same hand, and [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) from 2025 is the cheerful one. SOS is neither. Against [Purisa](/fonts/purisa/), the TLWG handwriting face most Thai Linux users know, SOS is looser and much rougher; against [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) it is not calligraphic at all. Browse the neighbours at [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) and [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/).
## Thai script coverage, and the OpenType caveat that matters in 2026
**The Thai coverage is complete — every assigned codepoint from U+0E01 to U+0E5B is in the cmap with zero gaps, all ten Thai digits ๐–๙ included — but the font declares no Thai OpenType script at all, and that is the single most important thing to know before using it.** GSUB registers only `latn`, with `liga`. GPOS registers only `latn`, with `kern`. There is no `thai` script in either table, no Thai mark-positioning feature, and no alternate tone-mark forms for tall consonants.
What holds Thai together in this font instead is fixed geometry. The combining marks are drawn where they sit and given zero advance width — U+0E31 ไม้หันอากาศ, U+0E34 สระอิ, U+0E38 สระอุ, U+0E48 ไม้เอก and U+0E49 ไม้โท all measure 0 — so they overlay the preceding consonant by construction rather than by shaping. That is the NP Naipol template at work; the file credits it in nameID 10, `This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000`, alongside thanks to B513DS!GN (Ekaluck Peanpanawate) and a named staff list.
In 2005 that fixed geometry was the innovation — it was what made a Thai font behave the same in Photoshop and in Microsoft Word. In 2026 it is a limitation with two visible consequences:
- **Tone marks over tall consonants sit at one height only.** There is no substitution to lower ไม้เอก over ป, ฝ, ฟ or ฬ, so collisions in those combinations are drawn in, not fixable by the shaper.
- **The GDEF table is malformed.** Its GlyphClassDef uses ClassDef format 0, which is not a valid OpenType format — the spec defines formats 1 and 2 — and fontTools reports `Unknown ClassDef format: 0` on load. Most rendering engines ignore GDEF here and carry on, but a strict font-validation or subsetting pipeline may object.
Treat iannnnnSOS as [display type](/fonts/categories/display/): headlines, captions, short lines. For running Thai text in an engine that expects modern shaping, use one of the [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) drawn for the job.
## The file you download is the November 2005 rebuild, not the January original
**iannnnnSOS was listed on 27 January 2005, but the TTF served today was created on 3 November 2005 and last modified on 4 November 2005 — the designer rebuilt the whole series that autumn and said so in public.** Its version string reads `Version 2.000 2005 initial release`, which is the template generation, not the post date.
His note is on the iannnnnISO release page:
> ป.ล.ใครเคยโหลดฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน (2005) ไป ผมอัปเกรดและแก้ไขตำหนิมันเมื่อ 20 พ.ย.48 ครับ ดังนั้นตัวไหนที่โหลดไปก่อนอาจจะมีไม่สมบูรณ์อยู่บ้าง ยังไงลบของเก่าทิ้งไปแล้วดูดของใหม่เข้าไปแทนโลด !!
Anyone who downloaded the 2005 fonts earlier should delete them and take the new ones, because he upgraded them and fixed their flaws on 20 November 2548 — which in the Common Era is 2005. The binary timestamps agree with him. If you have a copy of this font sitting in an old project folder from before that, it is not the file f0nt.com serves now. [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/) is the one font listed before the rebuild that still ships its January original, and its file is measurably different because of it. [iannnnnMTV](/fonts/iannnnn-mtv/) also escaped the rebuild, but only because it was first built in October 2005, after the pass had already started.
## Is iannnnnSOS free for commercial use?
**Yes. The release page carries f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge — free for commercial use — and the site licence answers the commercial question directly: ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย, go right ahead.** The badge links the site's commercial-use category, defined there as ฟอนต์ที่ผู้สร้างสรรค์อนุญาตให้นำไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้ — fonts their creators permit to be used to earn a living. The release page also states the mechanism plainly: ข้อตกลง: คลิกดาวน์โหลด = ยอมรับสัญญาอนุญาต, clicking download means accepting the licence.
The designer says it in the first person in the bio shown on every one of his release pages: ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ — fonts from iannnnn are free forever, go and use them to make a living.
Three restrictions are real, and they are tighter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
- **You may not sell the font file.** ไม่อนุญาตให้นำ 'ไฟล์ฟอนต์' ไปขาย เว้นแต่จะเป็นการแนบไฟล์ติดไป...แต่ไม่ใช่เพื่อการขายฟอนต์เป็นหลัก — bundling the file so a deliverable renders is fine; selling the font as the product is not.
- **You may not re-host it.** Asked whether you can copy the files and offer them for download elsewhere, the licence answers ไม่ได้จ้ะ. Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with a link back to the download page. That is why the download link on this page points at f0nt.com and never at a mirror.
- **Modifying for redistribution needs permission.** Private modification is allowed; modifying in order to distribute onward requires the owner's consent.
One honest complication, because it is in the file you download. The name table's licence field, nameID 13, reads `For educations used only.` — which is not what the website says. That string travels with the NP Naipol template credited two fields above it in the same file, and f0nt.com's licence gives other terms priority only when they appear on the download page or in a document bundled with the font. The download page states the grant, and the archive contains nothing but the TTF. Our reading is that the release-page grant governs; fsType is 8, Editable embedding, so document embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level too. That is a reading, not legal advice — the full treatment, including the harder case of [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/), is on the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), and the general rules are in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## Where to download iannnnnSOS
**Download it from the [iannnnnSOS release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnnsos/) — that is the only source the licence permits anyone to point you at.** The page's button resolves to `https://www.f0nt.com/?dl_name=iannnnn/2005_iannnnnSOS.zip` and redirects to the file itself. Downloaded on 29 August 2026 it delivered a 62,597-byte archive containing exactly one file, `2005_iannnnnSOS.ttf`.
There is no licence document in the archive — no LICENSE, no OFL.txt, no README. The terms live on the release page and on f0nt.com's licence page, not in the zip. Install it the ordinary way: unzip, then right-click the .ttf and choose Install on Windows, or double-click and choose Install Font in Font Book on macOS.
## What to pair iannnnnSOS with
**Use it for the loud line and set everything else in a text face — a rough single-weight hand cannot carry a hierarchy on its own.** It suits:
- posters, flyers and gig art that want urgency rather than polish
- comic and zine lettering, especially shouted or strained dialogue
- packaging and merchandise with a handmade, anti-corporate register
- titles for student work, campaigns and anything deliberately unglossy
Where it does not fit: body text, UI, forms, government and corporate documents, and anything set below roughly 18 px, where the broken stroke stops reading as texture and starts reading as a rendering fault. Set the running text in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — the standard open-licence Thai body face — and let SOS take only the headline.
For a smoother hand from the same designer, [iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/) and [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) are both modern multi-weight families. For more impact and less legibility, [iannnnnTKO](/fonts/iannnnn-tko/) is the sound-effect face from the same month.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and searching any of them should land you here:**
- **iannnnnSOS** — the name on the release page, five n's
- **iannnnn SOS**, **iannnnnsos** — spaced and lowercase forms
- **2005_iannnnnSOS** — the internal font name (nameID 1) and the filename inside the archive
- **2005_iannnnnSOS.zip** — the archive name on f0nt.com
- **ฟอนต์ iannnnnSOS**, **โหลดฟอนต์ SOS** — the Thai-language searches
- **ฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน** — the designer's handle in Thai
- **ฟอนต์ 2005** — the query for the whole series, answered on the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/)
- **Prachya Singhto**, **ปรัชญา สิงห์โต** — the designer's name in both scripts
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-tko.mdx
## What iannnnnTKO is
**iannnnnTKO is a free Thai comic sound-effect display face by Prachya Singhto (ปรัชญา สิงห์โต), listed on f0nt.com on 25 January 2005 and free for commercial use.** It is a single heavy weight drawn for the noise in a comic panel, not for reading: thuds, crashes, smashes and shouts.
The designer's own description on the release page is one line: ฟอนต์เจ็บ!.. เอาไว้ประกอบภาพการ์ตูนที่มีเสียงเอฟเฟกต์อย่าง ตุ้บตั้บ พลั่ก โครมคราม เพล้ง โอ้วววว อู้ววววว อ๊าววววว — "a font that hurts! For comic art with sound effects like *tup-tap*, *plak*, *khrom-khram*, *phleng*, *ooooh*, *woooo*, *aaargh*." Those are Thai comic onomatopoeia, and the brief is exactly that narrow.
Its counter read โหลด 555,277 ครั้ง on 29 August 2026 — 555,277 downloads, fifth in the [iannnnn 2005 series](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/), a live meter that will have moved since. And it is the file in that series worth opening in an editor, because it is different from all sixteen others in every dimension that can be measured.
## The one file in the 2005 series that still ships its January original
**iannnnnTKO is the only font listed before the autumn 2005 rebuild that still ships the file it launched with — the copy f0nt.com serves today was created on 19 January 2005 and last modified on 25 January 2005, the day it was listed.** That is not an inference from a filename; it is `head.created` and `head.modified` inside the TTF you download. One other font in the run also escaped the rebuild, but for the opposite reason: [iannnnnMTV](/fonts/iannnnn-mtv/) was listed on 20 October 2005 and built on 13 October, after the rebuild round had already begun, so there was nothing to redo. Every other file in the series carries an autumn 2005 timestamp.
The rebuild is documented by the designer himself, on the iannnnnISO release page:
> ป.ล.ใครเคยโหลดฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน (2005) ไป ผมอัปเกรดและแก้ไขตำหนิมันเมื่อ 20 พ.ย.48 ครับ ดังนั้นตัวไหนที่โหลดไปก่อนอาจจะมีไม่สมบูรณ์อยู่บ้าง ยังไงลบของเก่าทิ้งไปแล้วดูดของใหม่เข้าไปแทนโลด !!
Anyone who downloaded the 2005 fonts should delete them and take the new ones, because he upgraded them and fixed their flaws on 20 November 2548 — 2005 in the Common Era. What is uniform across the rest of the run is the timestamp, not the version string: every one of the other eighteen files was created between 20 September and 4 November 2005, months after most of them were first listed. The version strings vary — fifteen of the eighteen read `Version 2.000`, [iannnnnMTV](/fonts/iannnnn-mtv/) reads `Version 1.000`, and iannnnnGMM and iannnnnGTO read `Version 1.001`. TKO's reads `Version 1.050`, and its timestamp is the only one outside that autumn window. It is the original build, still in circulation.
Everything else that makes TKO odd follows from that. Set beside [iannnnnSOS](/fonts/iannnnn-sos/), a rebuilt file from the same month:
| | iannnnnTKO | iannnnnSOS (rebuilt) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Version string (nameID 5) | Version 1.050 | Version 2.000 |
| head.created | 19 Jan 2005 | 3 Nov 2005 |
| Glyph count | 223 | 238 |
| GSUB / GPOS | neither table present | both present |
| GDEF / kern | neither present | both present |
| Vendor (nameID 8) | iannnnn.com | iannnnn |
| Template credit (nameID 10) | "This font Created and Encoded by http://webnaipol.f2g.net" | "This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000" |
| Embedded licence (nameID 13) | five-clause English block | "For educations used only." |
Both files were built on the same community template — NP Naipol, the shared substrate under a large part of mid-2000s Thai freeware type — but TKO carries the template author's own site credit rather than the template's version credit, which is the fingerprint of the earlier workflow.
## The embedded licence says the opposite of the website — how that resolves
**Open the TTF and its name table claims a restriction the release page does not: clause 4 of iannnnnTKO's embedded licence reads "None use font files for any commercial." The release page carries f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge, free for commercial use. This is the genuine ambiguity in the 2005 series and it is worth setting out completely rather than picking a side quietly.**
Here is the whole nameID 13 block from `2005_iannnnnTKO.ttf`, quoted as printed, misspelling included:
> 1. This Font is FREEWARE. You can install and use it on an unlimited number of computers. This font is free for distribution in any form as long as it's kept in the original form.
> 2. This Font Encoded by http://webnaipol.f2g.net and license of this font does not transfer any ownership of the FONT FILES to you.
> 3. You may not translate, modify, reverse files, disassemble, decompile or otherwise re-gennerate the font files.
> 4. None use font files for any commercial.
> 5. NO WARRANTY. THIS FONT IS LICENSED TO YOU "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OR GUARANTEE OF ANY KIND.
Every place a term for this font lives, and what weight each carries:
| Where the term lives | What it says | What weight it carries |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Release page badge + f0nt.com site licence | ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี; the licence answers the commercial question ได้จ้ะ เอาเลย | The publisher's current, explicit grant. The rights holder is also the site operator. |
| A licence document inside the archive | There isn't one. `2005_iannnnnTKO.zip` contains a single .ttf and nothing else. | The channel the site licence names as able to override the default is empty. |
| Designer's bio on every one of his release pages | ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ — free forever, use them to earn a living | First-person statement by the rights holder, current. |
| nameID 13 in the TTF | "None use font files for any commercial." | Binary metadata inherited from the encoding template, credited in nameID 10 to webnaipol.f2g.net. |
| fsType in the TTF | 8 — Editable embedding | Binary permission: document embedding and webfont conversion are allowed. |
f0nt.com's licence sets the precedence rule explicitly: แต่ถ้ามีการระบุข้อตกลงอื่นใดจากเจ้าของฟอนต์ ดังที่แสดงไว้ในหน้าดาวน์โหลดฟอนต์ หรือเป็นไฟล์เอกสาร...ให้ยึดข้อตกลงดังกล่าวเป็นสำคัญ — other terms from the font's owner take priority *when they appear on the download page, or in a document file bundled with the font*. The name table is neither of those two things. The download page states the grant, and the archive contains no document at all.
**Our reading: the release-page grant governs, and iannnnnTKO is free for commercial use.** That is a reading and not legal advice. For a high-value or high-risk use — a national campaign, a logotype, a product you will manufacture — ask the designer through the f0nt.com forum first, which the licence page points to. The general framework for questions like this is in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), and the same contradiction across the whole series is tabulated on the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/).
The category badge itself carries the same caution, in the site's own words: most fonts run on the standard site licence, แต่ก็มีบางฟอนต์ที่กำหนดเป็นอย่างอื่น ขอให้ตั้งใจอ่านจะได้ไม่งงจ้ะ — but some fonts set other terms, so read carefully.
## What the letterforms actually do
**iannnnnTKO is heavy looped Thai — the หัว is present on every consonant that takes one, but it is drawn as a solid blob rather than an open ring, which is what lets the face survive being blown up to fill a panel.** The strokes are thick and blunt, the counters are small, and nothing about it is regular.
From the binary:
| Property | Value in 2005_iannnnnTKO.ttf |
| --- | --- |
| Weights in the family | 1 — nameID 2 reads "Regular", usWeightClass 400 |
| Units per em | 2048 |
| Glyph count | 223 |
| Italic angle | 0 (upright; any tilt you see is drawn into the outlines) |
| hhea ascent / descent / line gap | 1895 / −915 / 0 |
| fsType | 8 — Editable embedding |
Two measurable defects survive in the shipping file, and both are worth knowing before you put it in a production pipeline:
- **The glyph `sara_uee` carries an advance width of 65535.** That is 2¹⁶ − 1, the unsigned representation of −1, so a negative width has been written into a field that cannot hold one. fontTools flags it on load: *"Glyph sara_uee has a huge advance width (65535); is it intentional or an (invalid) negative value?"* The mark สระอือ is common in Thai, so if a tool ever honours that number literally rather than clamping it, the damage is visible.
- **The OS/2 typographic descender is positive.** `sTypoDescender` is recorded as +915 where the same value appears correctly as −915 in `hhea.descent`. A layout engine that reads the OS/2 typo metrics and honours the sign will compute the wrong line box.
Neither prevents the font from installing or rendering in ordinary use — half a million people have downloaded it — but they are the reason it should be treated as a display asset, not a system font. Try your own line in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before committing.
## Thai script behaviour: complete coverage, no shaping at all
**The Thai coverage is complete — every assigned codepoint from U+0E01 to U+0E5B is in the cmap with zero gaps, all ten Thai digits ๐–๙ included — but iannnnnTKO has no GSUB, no GPOS, no GDEF and no kern table, so there is no OpenType shaping in this font whatsoever.** Not for Thai, and not for Latin either. It is the only file in the 2005 series with none of the four.
Thai still stacks correctly, because the marks are drawn where they sit and given zero advance width: U+0E31 ไม้หันอากาศ, U+0E34 สระอิ, U+0E38 สระอุ, U+0E48 ไม้เอก and U+0E49 ไม้โท all measure 0. They overlay the preceding consonant by construction. That fixed geometry is what the shared Naipol encoding template bought Thai designers in 2005 — a font that behaved the same in Photoshop and in Microsoft Word — and it is why this font works at all without a shaping table.
The cost is the same cost the whole series pays. There is only one height for a tone mark, so ไม้เอก over a tall consonant such as ป, ฝ, ฟ or ฬ sits where it was drawn and cannot be lowered by the shaper. In a sound-effect face nobody will notice. In body text they would. Keep it in [display Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/display/) territory and set your text in one of the [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) built for it.
The Latin is real, incidentally, not borrowed: 26 capitals, 26 lowercase and 10 Western digits with their own outlines. For a comic face that matters, because English effects — CRASH, BAM — are set in the same lettering as often as Thai ones.
## Is the name TKO explained anywhere?
**No. f0nt.com publishes no naming explanation for iannnnnTKO, and this page will not invent one.** TKO reads in English as the boxing abbreviation for a technical knockout, and the font is a punch-and-crash face, so the fit is obvious — but the designer never says that on the release page, in the site's About page, or in either of the published interviews with him. Obvious is not the same as sourced.
The series as a whole uses one naming device: the designer's handle plus a three-letter uppercase acronym drawn from the media and technology vocabulary of 2005 Thailand. Some fit their designs. At least one is arbitrary by his own written admission. For most, including this one, no explanation exists in print. Where a competitor listicle tells you these fonts are named after broadcasters, that is filler. The complete accounting of what he actually said about naming is on the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/).
## Its 2022 successor: iannnnn-TIGER
**The release page itself points forward. The note reads ฟอนต์ iannnnnTKO อัปเดตเวอร์ชันใหม่ล่าสุดเมื่อปี 2022 ในชื่อ "ฟอนต์เสือ" (iannnnn-TIGER) ปรับปรุงภายในใหม่ มีหลายน้ำหนักด้วย ไปโหลดกันได้ ใช้ฟรีเหมือนเดิมครับ** — iannnnnTKO was updated in 2022 under the name ฟอนต์เสือ, iannnnn-TIGER, rebuilt internally, with multiple weights, still free.
We report his words and stop there: he says ปรับปรุงภายในใหม่, rebuilt internally, and we have not verified whether TIGER redraws TKO's outlines or is an independent design. ThaiGraph does not yet hold a page for iannnnn-TIGER. What we do hold from the designer's later, modern-workflow era is the animal series — [iannnnn-HEN](/fonts/iannnnn-hen/) and [iannnnn-MONKEY](/fonts/iannnnn-monkey/) among them — and those are the fonts to reach for when you want the same voice with real weight axes and current shaping tables. If you want to understand what changed between 2005 and now, [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/) covers the modern pipeline, and the [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/) places the independent scene against the commercial catalogues.
## Where to download iannnnnTKO
**Download it from the [iannnnnTKO release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnntko/) — that is the only source the licence permits anyone to point you at.** The page's button resolves to `https://www.f0nt.com/?dl_name=iannnnn/2005_iannnnnTKO.zip` and redirects to the file. Downloaded on 29 August 2026 it delivered a 16,845-byte archive containing exactly one file, `2005_iannnnnTKO.ttf`. That is small even for a single-weight face, and the outlines are most of the reason: the file carries 223 glyphs against iannnnnSOS's 238, and far simpler drawing. Of the 83,752-byte gap between the two TTFs, `glyf` alone accounts for 60,956 bytes — about three quarters — while the four missing layout tables (GSUB, GPOS, GDEF and `kern`) total 16,360 bytes, roughly a fifth.
There is no licence document in the archive — no LICENSE, no OFL.txt, no README. The terms live on the release page and on f0nt.com's licence page, not in the zip. Install it the ordinary way: unzip, then right-click the .ttf and choose Install on Windows, or double-click and choose Install Font in Font Book on macOS.
## What to pair iannnnnTKO with
**Use it for one to five characters at a time. This is an effects face, and it stops working the moment it has to behave like type.** Where it fits:
- comic and manga sound effects, in Thai or Latin
- poster and cover words that need to feel like an impact
- sports, gaming, gym and combat-sport titling
- kids' and youth packaging, event art, sticker and merch lettering
Where it does not fit: body copy, subheads, UI labels, captions, forms, anything institutional, and anything set small — the blobbed loops fill in and the word turns to a smudge. Set every running line in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and let TKO carry only the noise.
For a rougher hand from the same month with a different kind of energy, [iannnnnSOS](/fonts/iannnnn-sos/) is the scratchy ballpoint face. For drama with calligraphic contrast instead of blunt weight, [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) is the obvious alternative. Neighbours are indexed at [display Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/display/) and [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/).
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same typeface, and searching any of them should land you here:**
- **iannnnnTKO** — the name on the release page, five n's
- **iannnnn TKO**, **iannnnntko** — spaced and lowercase forms
- **2005_iannnnnTKO** — the internal font name (nameID 1) and the filename inside the archive
- **2005_iannnnnTKO.zip** — the archive name on f0nt.com
- **ฟอนต์ iannnnnTKO**, **โหลดฟอนต์ TKO** — the Thai-language searches
- **ฟอนต์เสียงเอฟเฟกต์**, **ฟอนต์การ์ตูน** — what the font is for, in Thai
- **ฟอนต์เสือ** / **iannnnn-TIGER** — its 2022 successor, per the release page
- **ฟอนต์ 2005** — the query for the whole series, answered on the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/)
- **Prachya Singhto**, **ปรัชญา สิงห์โต** — the designer's name in both scripts
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iannnnn-ubc.mdx
## What iannnnnUBC is
**iannnnnUBC is a free-for-commercial-use loopless Thai handwriting typeface listed on f0nt.com on 12 January 2005, and it is the first font Prachya Singhto ever made — the one he taught himself in order to caption images in his university thesis, and the one that, by his own account, ended with him building f0nt.com.** One weight, complete Thai and Latin coverage, 303,088 downloads when we read the counter on 29 August 2026.
By downloads it is the ninth of seventeen in the [iannnnn 2005 series](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/). By significance it is first, because every other font in that run — and arguably the site those fonts are hosted on — descends from it. f0nt.com's own tags for it are UBC, ลายมือ (handwriting) and ไม่มีหัว (loopless).
That third tag is the one to hold onto. Almost every write-up of this series files it as looped Thai handwriting. It is not. The file confirms the tag, and the section below shows exactly where the heads went.
## The thesis font that became f0nt.com
**The origin is not a legend retold by fans — the designer states the whole causal chain in the first sentence of the release page, and it is short enough to quote in full.**
> ฟอนต์ตัวแรกในชีวิตของผม หัดทำตอนจะส่งวิทยานิพนธ์เพียงเพราะอยากได้ฟอนต์ที่เป็นลายมือตัวเองไว้บรรยายภาพส่งอาจารย์ โดยไม่มีความรู้เรื่องการทำฟอนต์เลย พอเสร็จแล้วสนุกดี ก็เลยแรงบันดาลใจที่จะทำฟอนต์อีกเยอะๆ จนเกิดเป็นเว็บฟอนต์.ไอ้แอนนนนน และ ฟอนต์.คอมในที่สุด!
"The first font of my life. I taught myself to make it when I was about to submit my thesis, purely because I wanted a font of my own handwriting to caption images for my professor, with no knowledge of font-making at all. When it was done it was fun, so I was inspired to make many more fonts — until that became the fonts.iannnnn site and finally f0nt.com!"
The dates behind that sentence line up. f0nt.com's About page logs the site starting at `fonts.iannnnn.com` in 2003 as plain HTML, then the domain being registered and the site formally launched on 19 ธันวาคม 2004. UBC was listed twenty-four days later. Two decades on, the About page is still signed @iannnnn — ผู้ดูแลเว็บไซต์, the site administrator.
The ordering inside the series is corroborated from a second post rather than from file dates. iannnnnHBO, listed a week later on 19 January 2005, closes with (ฟอนต์ตัวที่สองในชีวิตครับ) — the second font of his life. So UBC first, HBO second, in the designer's own numbering. For where independent publishing like this sits against the commercial Thai foundries, see [Thai type foundries](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/).
## The file you download is not the 2004 original, and not the January 2005 one either
**iannnnnUBC has been rebuilt at least twice, and the designer documents both steps. The page carries this note: ฟอนต์ iannnnnUBC ตัวนี้เป็นเวอร์ชันปรับปรุงจาก 2004_iannnnnUBC ที่ทำมาก่อนหน้า และถูกแก้ไขขัดเกลาเป็นเวอร์ชัน 2005 ในปัจจุบัน — this iannnnnUBC is an improved version of the earlier 2004_iannnnnUBC, refined into the 2005 version served now.**
The binary adds a third step he does not mention here. `head.created` inside the shipped `2005_iannnnnUBC.ttf` reads **4 November 2005**, ten months after the January listing date, with `head.modified` one minute later. That places it at the very end of the rebuild window the designer announced elsewhere for the whole 2005 run; the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/) sets out that chronology and his announcement in full. The first font he ever made was among the last he went back and fixed.
There is no live release page on f0nt.com for `2004_iannnnnUBC`. It is referenced by its successor and not published, so treat it as a lost draft rather than a downloadable variant.
One more artefact of the site's own history sits on this page. Where the interactive specimen used to be, the raw text of an unrendered WordPress shortcode is printed on the page, pointing at `iannnnnUBC.swf` uploaded in June 2009 — a dead Flash embed left behind by the migration to WordPress that the About page logs for July 2009. The static PNG specimen above it, still served from the 2005/01 upload folder, is the one that works.
## What the letterforms actually do — and why this face is loopless
**Rendered at 640 px, iannnnnUBC has no หัว to speak of: on ก and ถ the head is gone entirely and the stroke simply turns a corner, while on ด, บ and ผ it survives as a small open hook that never closes into a circle.** That is what f0nt.com's ไม่มีหัว tag records, and it is a genuine finding about this font rather than a style label applied by eye.
The construction is a light, fast, unhurried hand with a nearly constant hairline stroke and a slight forward lean. Measured at 2048 units per em:
| Feature | iannnnnUBC | [iannnnnGMO](/fonts/iannnnn-gmo/), for scale |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Head (หัว) | Absent or an open hook | Small closed round dot |
| ข advance | 487 | 732 |
| ณ advance | 1068 | 1066 |
| Width spread across the alphabet | 2.19× | 1.67× |
| ป ascender | 1139 | 1034 |
| Deepest descender | ฤ at −432 | ฏ at −297 |
| Latin cap height | 919 | 884 |
That ข at 487 units next to ณ at 1068 is the whole personality in one row. A fitted text face keeps those in a narrow band; a hand does not, and UBC does not. The rhythm is visibly uneven along a line, which is exactly what makes it read as writing rather than as type.
The ascenders are the second signature. ป, ส, ศ, ฝ and ฟ all push past 1077 units against a consonant body of roughly 800, so tall letters spike well clear of the line while the body stays small and light. Combined with descenders reaching −432 on ฤ, the face needs generous leading or the lines will tangle.
The Latin is separately drawn and larger-feeling than the Thai — cap height 919 against a Thai body of about 800 — so mixed setting reads Latin-forward unless you size the two independently.
## How iannnnnUBC handles Thai script
**Thai coverage is complete: all 87 assigned codepoints in U+0E01 to U+0E5B are in the cmap with no gaps, Thai digits ๐ to ๙ included, and mark placement comes entirely from fixed glyph geometry, because the font declares no Thai OpenType script at all.**
The tone marks begin at y 1089 (mai tri), 1100 (mai chattawa), 1117 (mai tho) and 1118 (mai ek). Those sit lower than in most of the series, and lower than the tops of ป at 1139 and ส at 1137 — so on a tall consonant the mark does not clear the ascender vertically at all. It avoids it by horizontal offset alone: the marks are drawn to the right of the stem, and the tall strokes of ป and ฝ rise on the left. Set ป่, ฟ้ and ส้ and they resolve cleanly. It is a tighter, more handwritten result than the high fixed band used elsewhere in the series — and it is tighter because it has less margin, not because it is smarter.
Over a plain consonant the same fixed height leaves a visible gap. ก่ and น่ float their marks roughly 270 to 300 units above the letter, about 14% of the em. Where an upper vowel occupies the space, as in ที่ or ปี่, the stack reads correctly.
Below-line vowels reach further than the rest of the face does. Measured on the vertical axis, สระอุ spans −461 to −110 and สระอู −379 to −92. สระอู stays inside the descender depth the tails already require, but สระอุ at −461 drops slightly below the font's deepest tail, ฤ at −432 — so a line with ดุ or คุ in it sets the lowest ink on the page. Give the line a little more leading than the tails alone would suggest.
## What is inside the file
**iannnnnUBC is the thinner build of the two 2005 fonts on this site: it has GDEF and GSUB but no GPOS and no legacy `kern` table, so it ships with no kerning of any kind — not even for the Latin.** Its sibling [iannnnnGMO](/fonts/iannnnn-gmo/) has both. Set UBC in Latin at display size and you will see the gaps.
The rest, read with fontTools:
- **unitsPerEm** 2048; **238 glyphs**; **fsType 8**, Editable embedding, so embedding in documents and conversion to webfonts are permitted at the binary level.
- **GSUB registers `latn` only, with `liga`.** No `thai` script, no Thai mark-positioning features, no alternate tone-mark forms for tall consonants. That is the 2005 state of the art for this family of files, and it is an honest caveat for modern webfont use.
- **nameID 10** credits the shared community template the whole series was built on: This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000.
- **nameID 3, the unique font identifier, reads `iannnnn: 2005_iannnnnGMO: 2005`.** It names GMO. This is a copy-paste left in the file: every other name record in it correctly says `2005_iannnnnUBC`, including the trademark string. It is harmless in practice — the family and full names are what applications key on — but it is a real defect in a file that has been downloaded 303,088 times, and it is the kind of detail you can only get by opening the font.
- Five glyphs are drawn but unmapped: `lochula.short`, `lulakkhangyao`, `rulakkhangyao`, `saraamleft` and `yamakkanleftthai`.
If you are building your own Thai face, the modern route through this same problem is in [how to make a Thai font](/learn/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font/).
## Is iannnnnUBC free for commercial use?
**Yes. The release page carries f0nt.com's ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge — free for commercial use — twice, linking to a category the site defines as ฟอนต์ที่ผู้สร้างสรรค์อนุญาตให้นำไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้, fonts their creators permit to be used to earn a living. The contradicting string inside the file is inherited template metadata.**
The site licence, published 28 กรกฎาคม 2552 (28 July 2009), contains the precedence rule that settles it: you may download and use the fonts free of charge, but if any other agreement is stated by the font's owner — *as shown on the font's download page, or as a document file attached to the font* — that agreement governs. Here the download page states the grant, and the archive contains one `.ttf` and no licence document at all. So nothing displaces the grant. The name-table string `For educations used only.` travels with the NP Naipol template credited two records above it, not with the author, whose bio on the same page reads ฟอนต์จาก iannnnn แจกฟรีตลอดไป เอาไปใช้ทำมาหากินได้เลยครับ — free forever, go and use them to make a living.
Three restrictions are real, and stricter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/):
1. **You may not sell the font file.** Bundling it with a deliverable so the file renders is fine; selling the font as the product is not.
2. **You may not re-host it.** The FAQ answers that question with ไม่ได้จ้ะ. Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back to the download page.
3. **Modifying to redistribute needs permission.** Private modification is fine; modifying to sell or hand on requires the owner's consent.
This is our reading of published terms, not legal advice; for a high-value use, ask through the f0nt.com forum. The [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets the whole framework out.
## Where to download iannnnnUBC
**The only authorised source is the [iannnnnUBC release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/iannnnnubc/), where clicking the download button is what accepts the licence — the page states it plainly: ข้อตกลง: คลิกดาวน์โหลด = ยอมรับสัญญาอนุญาต.**
The archive is `2005_iannnnnUBC.zip` and contains exactly one file, `2005_iannnnnUBC.ttf`. No OTF, no webfont build, no second weight, and no licence file — which is normal for this series and is itself part of the licensing picture above.
Two practical notes. Save the file from the release page rather than hot-linking the archive — not because the endpoint stops you (we checked on 29 August 2026: it serves the zip to a bare request with no `Referer` and no browser User-Agent) but because the f0nt.com licence forbids re-hosting the files, and the redirect target is an undocumented path that can move without notice. And because there is no Thai OpenType shaping in the file, check the mark placement in the application you actually intend to use before committing to it — the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) will show you your own text.
## Where iannnnnUBC sits among the iannnnn fonts
**UBC is the origin point, and the designer's later work makes the distance obvious.** Three useful comparisons on this site:
- **[iannnnnGMO](/fonts/iannnnn-gmo/)**, listed a week later, is the opposite experiment: a looped, even, geometric attempt at a standard text face rather than a record of a hand. Same designer, same month, same template, entirely different intent.
- **[iannnnn-DOG](/fonts/iannnnn-dog/)**, from the later animal series, is what twenty years of practice does to the same instinct — a tidy hand with proper weights and modern shaping.
- **[iannnnn-OWL](/fonts/iannnnn-owl/)** shows the same designer working for atmosphere rather than legibility, and is the clearest evidence that the animal series is a deliberate body of work rather than a set of one-offs.
For faces built like UBC rather than by the same person, browse [loopless Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/loopless/) and [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/).
## What to use iannnnnUBC for, and where it fails
**Use it where the point is that someone wrote this — short, light, personal lines at display size.** It suits:
- Image captions and annotations, which is literally what it was drawn for
- Notes, quotes and pull-outs inside an otherwise typeset layout
- Zines, exhibition labels, and small-run print with a handmade register
- Titles for personal, craft and student work
Where it fails: body text at small sizes, anything needing a bold, and any interface. The stroke is a hairline, there is no second weight, and there is no kerning to lean on. Set the running text in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) and give UBC only the handwritten part. Give it more leading than you think it needs — those −432 unit descenders are not decorative.
## Name variants and spellings
**These all point at the same 2005 typeface:**
- **iannnnnUBC** — the name on the release page and in the file's family name
- **2005_iannnnnUBC** — the family name inside the .ttf and the archive name
- **2004_iannnnnUBC** — the earlier version the designer says this one improves on; not published, not downloadable
- **iannnnn UBC**, **ianUBC** — spacing and n-count variants; the handle has exactly five n's
- ฟอนต์ iannnnnUBC — the standard Thai query
- ฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน — the designer's handle written in Thai
- ฟอนต์ 2005 — the query for the whole series, which resolves at the [iannnnn hub](/fonts/categories/iannnnn/)
There is no published explanation for what the three letters UBC stand for. The designer explains the naming of a few fonts in this series and not this one; we are not going to invent one.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped.mdx
## What IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped is
**IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped is the looped, traditional-Thai cut of IBM's corporate typeface, drawn so the head loops that native readers expect are fully present rather than cut open. It ships free on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License in seven weights, from Thin to Bold, with matching Latin.** Where the loopless [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/) opens the terminals for a stripped-down modern look, this Looped version keeps the loops, so it reads as calmer and more conventionally Thai in running text.
The Thai extension of IBM Plex was designed by Mark Frömberg together with Ben Mitchell in 2018, built on the Latin structure that Mike Abbink and Bold Monday created for IBM's global brand. Google Fonts published the Looped family in June 2021, giving Thai teams an open-licensed corporate system that finally matches IBM's own Latin across scripts.
In practice, IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped is the choice when a product wants IBM Plex's neutral, engineered tone but needs the warmth and legibility of looped Thai for body copy, documentation, and interfaces read by a general audience.
## What "Looped" means, and which cut you probably want
**"Looped" is the Thai typographic term for มีหัว, "with heads": consonants such as ก ถ ภ ม keep the small circle at the start of the stroke. The main family, [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/), is the loopless cut that IBM uses for UI and web; this Looped family is the body-text companion. Both were added to Google Fonts on 18 June 2021 with seven upright weights, no italics and the same OFL licence**, per the [Looped](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthailooped/METADATA.pb) and [loopless](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthai/METADATA.pb) metadata.
If you searched for "IBM Plex Sans Thai" and landed here, the [loopless page](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/) is the one you most likely want. Choose Looped for reports, manuals and long emails; choose the loopless cut for dashboards, apps and headings; install both when one design system needs both, since line heights match. A comparable looped workhorse with a variable file is [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/); for a variable Plex-toned loopless Thai see [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/).
Practical notes: download from the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai+Looped) or the Releases page of the [IBM/plex repository](https://github.com/IBM/plex), which ships it as a separate package; Figma [includes Google fonts by default](https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Add-a-font-to-Figma); Google Docs adds it via More fonts, [documented](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1663349?hl=en) as available for Thai; PowerPoint files can [embed the font](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/benefits-of-embedding-custom-fonts-cb3982aa-ea76-4323-b008-86670f222dbc), which the [OFL FAQ](https://openfontlicense.org/ofl-faq/) permits (1.12). The Thai-language guide, including Word's Complex scripts setting, is on the [Thai page](/th/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/).
## Character design and tone
**IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped keeps closed head loops on the consonants, a moderate x-height, and even, low-contrast strokes tuned for long-form reading rather than display impact.** The head of ก and the loops on ถ and ภ stay round and closed, which is the single feature that separates this cut from the loopless sibling and makes it read as familiar Thai to older and general readers.
Terminals are squared in the IBM Plex manner, echoing the Latin's slightly mechanical finish, but the loops soften that engineered feel so the face never turns cold. Stroke modulation is minimal, so the design holds up at small sizes on screen. Thai tone marks and vowel signs are drawn at a consistent weight through the range, keeping ไม้เอก and ไม้โท clear even at Light on a dense interface.
The Latin companion is the standard IBM Plex Sans: a neutral grotesque with a faint humanist warmth. Because both scripts share one skeleton, mixed Thai-English lines sit level and even, which is exactly what technical documentation and dashboards need. For a comparison of looped versus loopless construction, see the [typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Weights and availability
**IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped is available free from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai+Looped) in seven upright weights, Thin (100) through Bold (700).** The full IBM Plex system, including the Looped Thai, is also distributed through IBM's official [Plex site](https://www.ibm.com/plex/) and the project's open-source repository.
There are no separate condensed or italic Thai cuts in the current Looped release; the upright weights cover interface and document needs. Each Thai plus Latin subset is compact in WOFF2, so a three-weight web loadout of Regular, Medium, and Bold stays lightweight.
## Best use cases
**IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped is the correct pick when a brand already runs on IBM Plex and needs conventional looped Thai for readable body text.** Strong fits include:
- Corporate and product documentation that must read comfortably for a general Thai audience
- Software interfaces, dashboards, and admin panels where looped Thai aids legibility
- Bilingual Thai-English reports, whitepapers, and technical PDFs
- Design systems already standardised on IBM Plex across Latin scripts
- Accessibility-minded projects where closed loops help less type-fluent readers
Where it fits less well: high-impact display headlines (reach for a display face) and projects wanting a deliberately stripped, ultra-modern look, where the loopless [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/) is the better sibling.
## Pairings
**IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped pairs most naturally with its own loopless sibling and with open-licensed Thai body sans.** Three dependable pairings:
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — the loopless cut of the same family, for display or UI contrast within one system
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a neutral open-licensed Thai body sans when you want a second voice for long copy
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — another loopless workhorse for fallback or secondary hierarchy
## Licensing
**IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and bundling as long as the original copyright and OFL text are preserved.** Verify the terms on the [Google Fonts page](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai+Looped) or IBM's official [Plex site](https://www.ibm.com/plex/). There is no paid tier — the whole family is free.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai.mdx
## What IBM Plex Sans Thai is
**IBM Plex Sans Thai (often shortened to IBM Plex Thai) is the loopless Thai extension of IBM's global Plex type system, credited to Mike Abbink and Bold Monday in the [Google Fonts metadata](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthai/METADATA.pb), with the Thai extension drawn by Mark Frömberg with Ben Mitchell per [Frömberg's project page](https://markfromberg.com/projects/ibm-plex-thai-looped). It is released under the SIL Open Font License in seven upright weights from Thin to Bold, with no italics, and has a looped companion, [IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/).** The official family name on Google Fonts and in the IBM/plex repository is "IBM Plex Sans Thai", per the metadata and the [plex-sans-thai package](https://github.com/IBM/plex/tree/master/packages/plex-sans-thai); "IBM Plex Thai" is the common short form. Note that Frömberg's page documents the Looped cut; the credit for the loopless family follows the Google Fonts metadata.
The original IBM Plex was designed by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday in 2017 as IBM's new corporate typeface, replacing Helvetica after 50+ years of use. The Thai extension was drawn in 2018 by Mark Frömberg with Ben Mitchell (per Frömberg's page on the Looped cut) and reached Google Fonts on 18 June 2021 per the metadata, translating Plex's humanist-with-engineering character into Thai consonant and vowel forms.
The result is the most technically rigorous free Thai corporate sans-serif currently available. Because it carries IBM's backing, the spacing, hinting, and opentype features are production-grade from day one.
## Character design and tone
**IBM Plex Sans Thai uses sharp geometric terminals, a high x-height, and engineering-flavoured straight stems that echo the Latin Plex's "humanist sans meeting machined hardware" brief.** The loopless cut removes the traditional circle on consonants like ก and ถ in favour of clean open hooks.
What makes Plex Thai distinctive is the subtle flare at terminals — the end of a stroke on น or ม picks up a small optical widening that echoes Plex Latin's slab-adjacent endings. Tone marks sit higher than on [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), which suits the tall, architectural feel. The Looped cut is the same skeleton with traditional loops restored for legibility-critical contexts.
The Latin companion is of course IBM Plex Sans itself, which means the two scripts are drawn as one system. Cap heights, x-heights, and stem weights align precisely. A Thai sentence set next to an English sentence looks like one typeface, not two.
## Weights and availability
**IBM Plex Sans Thai and [IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/) each ship in seven upright weights from Thin (100) to Bold (700) with no Thai italics, per the [Google Fonts metadata](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthai/METADATA.pb); italics exist only on the Latin IBM Plex Sans side.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai) or the [IBM Plex GitHub repository](https://github.com/IBM/plex).
The full Plex family also includes Plex Serif, Plex Mono and Plex Sans across multiple scripts, so a Thai + English + code-block design system can be built entirely from one family. File sizes for Plex Sans Thai are roughly 40-55KB per weight in WOFF2.
## Loopless IBM Plex Sans Thai versus IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped
**IBM Plex Sans Thai is the main, loopless cut for UI, headings and anything where Thai and Plex Latin must read as one system; [IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/) is the looped cut for long body copy and readers who expect the traditional head loops. They are two separate families on Google Fonts, added the same day (18 June 2021), with the same seven weights and the same OFL licence.** Both metadata files ([loopless](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthai/METADATA.pb), [Looped](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthailooped/METADATA.pb)) list seven upright static files and no variable axes.
The "loop" is the small circle at the stroke start of consonants such as ก ถ ภ ม. The loopless cut opens it into a hook; Looped keeps it. Everything else is shared, so the two can be swapped within one layout without line-height changes. Rule of thumb: dashboards, apps and headings use this page's font; reports, manuals and long emails use Looped. For a single variable file in the same tonal family, [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) is a loopless Thai drawn from Plex's Latin. See the [loopless category](/fonts/categories/loopless/) for alternatives.
## How to download and install IBM Plex Sans Thai
**Download free from the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai) ("Get font" then "Download all", seven static .ttf files, no sign-up) or from the Releases page of IBM's own [IBM/plex repository](https://github.com/IBM/plex), which also publishes the family as the npm package `@ibm/plex-sans-thai` with subsetted .woff2 files and ready CSS.** There is no variable file for this family; [MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_fonts/Variable_fonts_guide) describes this static model as one file per style, so pick two or three weights for the web.
- **Windows / macOS** — right-click the .ttf and Install, or double-click and Install in Font Book; the Thai side has no italics, so the Italic button in Word produces a synthetic slant
- **PowerPoint hand-offs** — File → Options → Save → Embed fonts in the file, per [Microsoft](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/benefits-of-embedding-custom-fonts-cb3982aa-ea76-4323-b008-86670f222dbc); the [OFL FAQ](https://openfontlicense.org/ofl-faq/) permits embedding (1.12)
- **Google Docs, Canva, Figma** — Figma [includes Google fonts by default](https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Add-a-font-to-Figma); Google Docs adds it through More fonts, which [Google documents](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1663349?hl=en) as available for Thai; in Canva filter by language or upload the TTFs on a paid plan. Type the full name with "Sans" — searching "IBM Plex Thai" finds nothing
Thai-speaking readers will find the full guide, including Word's Complex scripts setting, on the [Thai-language page](/th/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/).
## Best use cases
**IBM Plex Sans Thai is purpose-built for bilingual corporate identity, technical documentation and product UI.** Strong briefs:
- Thai B2B and enterprise SaaS, particularly fintech, cloud, and dev tooling
- Technical documentation, API reference sites, engineering blogs in Thai
- Corporate annual reports and investor relations materials
- Bilingual product marketing for brands that use Plex as their global face
- Design systems for Thai government digital services that want a modern corporate feel
Where it doesn't fit: consumer lifestyle brands (Plex reads as technical), long-form Thai editorial (the Looped cut is better, but serifs like [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) still edge it), and traditional cultural contexts.
## Pairings
**IBM Plex Sans Thai pairs obviously with the rest of the Plex family, but also with other engineered sans-serifs.** Three pairings:
- **IBM Plex Sans** — the canonical bilingual pairing, perfectly matched by design
- **IBM Plex Mono** — for code samples and tabular data inside technical Thai content
- **Inter** — when Plex feels too branded, Inter's humanist skeleton reads as a neutral sibling
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai-looped/)** — the looped cut of the same family, for long body copy under loopless headings
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — an independent loopless Thai drawn from Plex's Latin, shipped as a single variable file
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral looped Thai body text when the whole system need not be Plex
See the [typography learning hub](/learn/typography/) for bilingual system guidance.
## Licensing
**IBM Plex Sans Thai is released under the SIL Open Font License, which allows free commercial use, modification and bundling.** This is unusual for a typeface commissioned as a corporate identity — IBM open-sourced Plex specifically so the broader community could use it. Verify the licence at [github.com/IBM/plex](https://github.com/IBM/plex) or on the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai).
## Frequently asked questions about IBM Plex Sans Thai
**The questions people searching for IBM Plex Sans Thai ask most are whether "IBM Plex Thai" is the same font, whether it has italics or a variable file, and whether commercial use is allowed; the short, sourced answers are below.**
### Are IBM Plex Thai and IBM Plex Sans Thai the same font?
**Yes. "IBM Plex Sans Thai" is the official family name on Google Fonts and in IBM's repository; "IBM Plex Thai" is a common short form.** Use the full name when searching font menus.
### Does IBM Plex Sans Thai have italics or a variable font?
**Neither, on Google Fonts. The [metadata](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/ibmplexsansthai/METADATA.pb) lists seven upright static files.** For a variable Plex-toned Thai use [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/); for true Thai italics use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/).
### Can I use IBM Plex Sans Thai commercially?
**Yes. Both the IBM/plex repository and Google Fonts state OFL-1.1, and the [OFL FAQ](https://openfontlicense.org/ofl-faq/) allows any design work including logos (1.1) without required attribution; the only restriction is selling the font files by themselves (1.5–1.6).** See the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/iris-upc.mdx
## What IrisUPC is
**IrisUPC is a sturdy looped Thai sans-serif with even, low-contrast strokes, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users IrisUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**IrisUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with the later Iris New revision, a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a sans-serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**IrisUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "IrisUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**IrisUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai sans-serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [sans-serif category](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**IrisUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/irisupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/itim.mdx
## What Itim is
**Itim is a friendly, hand-drawn display Thai typeface from Cadson Demak with rounded letterforms and a warm, informal tone that sits between a formal script and a standard sans-serif.** It ships as a single Regular weight under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
Where most Cadson Demak releases are full families with multiple weights, Itim is deliberately a one-shot display face. The single weight is calibrated for headline and short-text use at 20-60pt, where its hand-drawn quality reads clearly without fatiguing the eye.
In the ecosystem of free Thai fonts, Itim fills a specific gap: a face that feels hand-lettered and approachable without being a full cursive script. It is the Thai equivalent of something like Fredoka or Quicksand — soft, round, and unmistakably friendly.
## Character design and tone
**Itim uses softly rounded stem terminals, slightly irregular curves that mimic hand-lettering, and looped consonants with a gentle informal tone.** Unlike strict loopless faces, Itim keeps the traditional circular heads on ก, ถ, ภ, which makes it feel more cultural and less corporate.
The irregularity is deliberate but subtle — letters do not look mechanical, but they are consistent enough to read smoothly. Stem weights vary very slightly across the alphabet in the way hand-lettered work naturally does. Curves on ถ and ภ are near-circular rather than elliptical, reinforcing the rounded friendly tone.
Tone marks and vowel signs share the rounded character, with small terminals and soft curves rather than sharp points. The Latin companion is a humanist rounded sans with similar soft tone — in the neighbourhood of Nunito or Quicksand, but with more visible hand-drawn character.
## Weights and availability
**Itim ships only one weight — Regular — with no italic, light, or bold cuts.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Itim) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/itim).
File size is approximately 50-65KB in WOFF2 with Thai + Latin subset. The single-weight constraint means Itim is usually paired with a fuller-family companion (Sarabun, Mitr, or Prompt) that can handle the weight range the layout needs.
## Best use cases
**Itim is the right Thai font when a project needs hand-drawn friendliness and approachability.** Strong briefs:
- Children's book and education publishing — workbooks, primary-school posters
- Toy, nursery, and family-product branding and packaging
- Bakery, dessert, and candy brand logos and display headlines
- Community event posters — school fairs, neighbourhood festivals, farmer's markets
- Casual cafe and home-style restaurant branding
Where it doesn't fit: any body text use, corporate communications, luxury branding (reach for [Charm](/fonts/charm/) or [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/)), and UI where neutrality matters more than warmth.
## Pairings
**Itim pairs with neutral Thai body sans that let its display personality breathe.** Three pairings:
- **Sarabun** — clean Thai body for paragraphs under Itim display headlines
- **Quicksand** — Latin rounded sans with matching warm tone for bilingual work
- **Nunito** — softly rounded Latin sans for body copy with Itim titles
See [/fonts/](/fonts/) for more display options.
## Licensing
**Itim is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Itim) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/itim). Use in children's products, packaging, and commercial print requires no additional permission.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/jasmine-upc.mdx
## What JasmineUPC is
**JasmineUPC is a decorative, high-contrast looped Thai serif with a calligraphic flavour, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users JasmineUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**JasmineUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with the later Jasmine New revision, a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**JasmineUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "JasmineUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**JasmineUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [serif category](/fonts/categories/serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**JasmineUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/jasmineupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/js-chaimongkol.mdx
## What JS Chaimongkol is
**JS Chaimongkol is a free, GPL-licensed vintage Thai display face from the JS Technology family by Panutat "Jimmy" Tejasen and Busaya Tejasen, distributed as a single-weight TrueType font.** It is one of the more than 100 JS fonts from the earliest Thai desktop-publishing era, released free to the public in 2006.
According to the [ThaiFaces specimen page](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/js-chaimongkol/), the JS catalogue grew out of the Orchid DTP project the Tejasens started as medical students, and many faces were named after Thai television programmes and characters of the day. After Microsoft built Thai support into Windows, JS Technology closed and the fonts were dedicated to the public — the same story behind [JS Chalit](/fonts/js-chalit/).
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), JS Chaimongkol is a nostalgic Thai display option: a free, period-flavoured face for headlines that want a retro Thai voice.
## Character design and tone
**JS Chaimongkol is a display face with a distinctly vintage, decorative character, drawn for headline and title use rather than body text.** Its personality lives in the shapes rather than in a range of weights — this is a face you set large.
Set at display sizes, the letterforms carry a retro Thai flavour that reads as period-specific rather than neutral, which is exactly what recommends it for nostalgic and themed work. As with any single-weight display face, hierarchy and body text have to come from a separate, quieter companion, a point we make throughout the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
Because it is a display design, JS Chaimongkol should be tested at the exact size and against the exact word shapes you intend to use, rather than assumed to work as running text.
## Weights and availability
**JS Chaimongkol ships as a single TrueType file — one Regular weight — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology), which distributes the JS Technology fonts as free software.
There are no bold or italic cuts, and no official webfont build; the font is not on Google Fonts. Web use means converting the TrueType file yourself, which its terms permit.
## Best use cases
**JS Chaimongkol works where a Thai layout wants a free, vintage, decorative display voice at large sizes.** Strong briefs:
- Event posters and themed graphics that want a retro Thai character
- Packaging, labels and signage evoking an earlier era of Thai print
- Book and magazine cover display lettering with a nostalgic flavour
- Title cards and lower-thirds in period or nostalgia-driven video work
- Menus and promotional pieces that lean on a vintage Thai mood
Where it doesn't fit: body text (display only), UI work, and modern minimal branding — for contemporary Thai display under an open licence with webfont support, reach for [Chonburi](/fonts/chonburi/) or [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/).
## Pairings
**JS Chaimongkol needs a quiet Thai text face underneath it to carry paragraphs.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the neutral OFL body sans that lets JS Chaimongkol headlines lead
- **TH Sarabun New** — the government-standard body face for document layouts with a display title
- **[JS Chalit](/fonts/js-chalit/)** — the sibling JS display face for period-consistent JS-only posters
## Licensing
**JS Chaimongkol is free software: the JS fonts were dedicated to the public and are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, so you can use, modify and redistribute the file.** ThaiFaces documents the 2006 free release and the Orchid/JS Technology origin; download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology) and read the [GPL v2](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html) before embedding. For a similar Thai display voice under the SIL OFL, see [Chonburi](/fonts/chonburi/) or browse the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/js-chalit.mdx
## What JS Chalit is
**JS Chalit is a free, heavy looped Thai display face from the JS font family created by JS Technology, the 1990s Thai font house co-founded by Sawaeng Tantiraphan (the "S") and Dr. Panutat Tejasen, known as "Dr. Jimmy" (the "J").** It survives today as a single-weight TrueType font distributed freely through the Thai Font Collection.
The JS fonts occupy a specific place in Thai type history. After Microsoft built native Thai language support into Windows, JS Technology's business closed and co-founder Sawaeng Tantiraphan passed away; the JS fonts were then dedicated to the public domain, which made them among the earliest freely usable Thai font families, according to the [ThaiFaces specimen page](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/js-chalit/). The file in circulation today reports "Version 1.1; 2001" and credits a 2001 re-encoding by P-chanSoft.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), JS Chalit is a period piece: a pre-Google-Fonts Thai display face that still installs and renders cleanly, from the same era that produced faces like [PSL Kittithada](/fonts/psl-kittithada/).
## Character design and tone
**JS Chalit is a heavy, high-contrast looped Thai display face in the fat-face/poster tradition — and its Latin glyphs are drawn in a blackletter, Old English/Fraktur-like style, an unusual Thai-blackletter pairing.** Inspection of the official TTF shows thick vertical strokes against thin joins, giving Thai headlines a dense, ornamental poster weight.
The looped consonant heads (หัว) stay intact despite the heavy weight, so words like ชลิต or อักษรไทย keep a traditional, readable Thai silhouette even at poster scale. The contrast between fat stems and hairline connections is what pushes the face into [display territory](/fonts/categories/display/) rather than text use.
The blackletter Latin is the memorable quirk. Set "Chalit" or any English word in this font and you get Old English-style capitals and lowercase — a gothic texture that either makes a bilingual layout (certificates, event posters, retro packaging) or breaks it. There is no neutral Latin fallback inside the file, so bilingual body settings need a second font.
## Weights and availability
**JS Chalit ships in exactly one weight: Regular (OS/2 weight class 400), in a compact TrueType file containing 223 glyphs that cover the complete Thai block plus Basic Latin letters, numerals, and punctuation.** There are no bold, italic, or condensed cuts.
The font is not on Google Fonts. It is distributed as a free TTF in the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/blob/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology/README.md) (packaged in 2017 by Lanna Innovation Co., Ltd.), circulates on thaifonts.net as a 39 KB copy with over 8,000 downloads and an "Installable" embedding permission, and is packaged for Linux users in openSUSE's M17N:fonts repository. No official webfont (WOFF2) build exists, so web use means converting the TTF yourself — legal under its terms, but you carry the QA burden.
## Best use cases
**JS Chalit works where a Thai layout needs heavy, ornamental, deliberately retro display type at large sizes — and nowhere near body text.** Strong briefs:
- Event posters and temple-fair or festival graphics that want a classic Thai poster voice
- Retro packaging, labels, and shopfront signage evoking 1990s–2000s Thai print
- Certificates and formal ornamental headings, where the blackletter Latin actually fits
- Book and magazine cover display lettering with a nostalgic Thai flavour
- Title cards and lower-thirds in period or nostalgia-driven video work
Where it doesn't fit: body text at any size (the contrast collapses), UI work, and modern minimal branding — for contemporary Thai display or heading work under an open licence with proper webfont support, reach for [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Chonburi](/fonts/chonburi/) instead.
## Pairings
**JS Chalit needs a quiet, well-hinted Thai text face underneath it, because the display face carries all the personality.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the neutral OFL Thai body workhorse; lets JS Chalit headlines shout while paragraphs stay legible
- **[TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)** — the government-standard body choice for certificate and official-document layouts where JS Chalit sets the ornamental title
- **[Maitree](/fonts/maitree/)** — an OFL Thai serif whose bookish tone matches JS Chalit's traditional looped structure in editorial covers
## Licensing
**JS Chalit is free to use: ThaiFaces records that the JS fonts were dedicated to the public domain after JS Technology closed, and the Thai Font Collection distributes the family under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.** The README credits the original copyright (1993–2003) to Panutat Tejasen, Seveng Tantiraphan, and Pongsathorn Sraouthai of JS Technology.
Practical read: the [Thai Font Collection README](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/blob/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology/README.md) is the closest thing to a licence document that exists for this family — read it before embedding the font in a product. The TTF itself carries "Installable" embedding permission per thaifonts.net. If your project demands the legal clarity of a modern SIL Open Font License with active maintenance, use an OFL face like [Chonburi](/fonts/chonburi/) or [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) for a similar heavy or ornamental Thai display voice. See the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) for how licence class affects font choice.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/js-jindara.mdx
## What JS Jindara is
**JS Jindara is a free, GPL-licensed looped Thai text face from the JS Technology family — the fonts that trace back to the first Thai-language desktop publishing software.** It is a light, monoline body-copy sans released to the public in 2006, per the [Thaifaces specimen](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/js-jindara/).
The JS family carries real history. JS Technology was co-founded by the late Sawaeng Tantiraphan (the "S") and physician Panutat Tejasen, known as "Doctor Jimmy" (the "J"), and its fonts date to the era when Thai desktop publishing had to be built from scratch. According to Thaifaces, after Microsoft built Thai support directly into Windows, the successor company 315 Co., Ltd. closed and Sawaeng Tantiraphan passed away; the JS fonts were then dedicated to the public and published free under GPL Version 2 in B.E. 2549 (2006).
The [jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection repository](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology) dates the original JS Technology fonts to 1993–2003 and credits Panutat Tejasen, Seveng (Sawaeng) Tantiraphan, and Pongsathorn Sraouthai, with later modifications by ReEncode and Lanna Innovation Co., Ltd. That makes JS Jindara a genuine artefact of the pre-[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) generation of free Thai type.
## Character design and tone
**JS Jindara is a light, monoline looped (มีหัว) Thai text face: conventional loop terminals, even stroke weight, and quiet proportions built for body copy rather than display.** The rendered specimen reads closer to a document face than to anything drawn for branding.
Consonants keep their traditional looped heads, so characters like ก, ด, and ม stay unambiguous at text sizes — the classic argument for looped faces in long-form reading, covered in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). The monoline stroke means there is little weight contrast to carry a headline; set large, JS Jindara looks thin and utilitarian rather than expressive.
The Latin companion is a plain sans-serif covering A–Z, a–z, Arabic numerals, and Thai numerals (๐–๙), which is enough for mixed Thai–English documents, dates, and figures, though it has none of the bilingual polish of modern [sans-serif Thai releases](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/).
## Weights and availability
**JS Jindara ships as four TrueType files — Normal, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic — i.e. two weights, each with an oblique companion, per the jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection repository.** The circulating JS-Jindara-Normal.ttf carries the internal version string "Version 1.1; 2001" and the notice "Copyright (c) ReEncode by P-chanSoft, 2001", so the digital files predate the 2006 free release.
There is no official foundry site distributing it today; JS Technology's successor closed. The practical source is the [thai-font-collection repository on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology), which distributes the JS Technology fonts as free software under GNU GPL v2 or later. JS Jindara is not on Google Fonts and has no official webfont build.
## Best use cases
**JS Jindara suits Thai body-copy settings — documents, legacy print layouts, and projects that want a period-correct 1990s–2000s Thai document voice.** Reasonable briefs:
- Thai-language documents and internal print materials where a free looped text face is required
- Retro or archival design work referencing the Thai DTP era the JS fonts came from
- Long-form Thai reading text where looped letterforms aid recognition
- Projects studying or preserving the free Thai font heritage catalogue
Where it doesn't fit: display and branding work (the monoline light weight carries no headline presence), and modern web products — for those, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) give the same looped body-text role with contemporary engineering and simpler licensing, and [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) covers the loopless display end.
## Pairings
**Pair JS Jindara's quiet looped body text with a stronger loopless display voice for hierarchy.** Sensible combinations:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless Thai sans for headlines over JS Jindara body copy
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — rounder loopless display alternative when Kanit feels too rigid
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — as a modern stand-in when JS Jindara's four-file family runs out of weights
## Licensing
**JS Jindara is free software: the JS fonts were dedicated to the public and published under GPL Version 2 in 2006, and the thai-font-collection repository distributes them under GNU GPL v2 or later.** You can download, use, modify, and redistribute the files under the terms of the [GPL v2](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html); download from the [thai-font-collection repository](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology).
Note the license is GPL, not the SIL OFL used by most modern free Thai fonts. If your project needs the more familiar OFL terms — especially for webfont deployment — [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) are the straightforward open alternatives in the same roles.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/js-prasoplarp.mdx
## What JS Prasoplarp is
**JS Prasoplarp is a free, GPL-licensed looped Thai sans from the JS Technology family by Panutat "Dr. Jimmy" Tejasen and Busaya Tejasen, shipping a Regular and a matching Italic.** It is one of the more than 100 JS fonts that came out of the earliest era of Thai digital typography, released free to the public in 2006.
According to the [ThaiFaces specimen page](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/js-prasoplarp/), the JS family began in bitmap form and moved to vector, with a first release in 1993 and a 2001 re-encoding by P-chanSoft. That lineage makes JS Prasoplarp a genuine artefact of the pre-[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) generation of free Thai type, alongside [JS Jindara](/fonts/js-jindara/).
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), JS Prasoplarp is a compact, period-correct free Thai text sans — a plain roman with an italic, from the DTP catalogue that seeded Thai desktop publishing.
## Character design and tone
**JS Prasoplarp is a looped (มีหัว) Thai sans with even, largely monoline strokes and conventional loop terminals, drawn for text rather than display, with a companion italic.** The tone is quiet and utilitarian, consistent with the document orientation of the JS text faces.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ด and ม stay legible at reading sizes, the recognition advantage of looped Thai discussed in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). With only a Regular and Italic, the family carries no bold, so hierarchy has to come from a paired display face rather than from weight.
The Latin companion covers the basic Latin set, numerals and punctuation — enough for mixed Thai–English text of the era, without the bilingual refinement of modern [sans-serif Thai](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) releases.
## Weights and availability
**JS Prasoplarp ships as two TrueType files — Normal and Italic — i.e. a single weight with an oblique, and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology), which distributes the JS Technology fonts as free software.
The font is not on Google Fonts and has no official webfont build, so web use means converting the TrueType files yourself — permitted under its terms, but the QA burden is yours.
## Best use cases
**JS Prasoplarp suits Thai body-text settings and projects wanting a compact free document sans with an italic.** Reasonable briefs:
- Thai documents needing a free looped text sans with a matching italic
- Retro and archival design referencing the 1990s–2000s Thai DTP era
- Long-form Thai reading text where looped letterforms aid recognition
- Preservation and study of the free JS Technology catalogue
Where it doesn't fit: display and branding (single weight, no headline presence) and modern web products — [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) cover the same role with contemporary engineering and more weights.
## Pairings
**Because JS Prasoplarp has no bold, pair it with a loopless display face to carry hierarchy.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a modern OFL body sans to extend the weight range JS Prasoplarp lacks
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless Thai sans for headlines over JS Prasoplarp body copy
- **[JS Jindara](/fonts/js-jindara/)** — the sibling JS body face for period-consistent JS-only layouts
## Licensing
**JS Prasoplarp is free software: the JS fonts were dedicated to the public and are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, so you can use, modify and redistribute the files.** ThaiFaces documents the 1993 origin, 2001 P-chanSoft re-encoding and 2006 free release; download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology) and read the [GPL v2](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html) before embedding. For familiar OFL terms in the same role, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the open alternative.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/js-saksit.mdx
## What JS Saksit is
**JS Saksit is a free, GPL-licensed looped Thai text sans from the JS Technology family, created by Panutat "Dr. Jimmy" Tejasen and Busaya Tejasen and released to the public in 2006.** It is one of the fuller JS families, shipping Normal, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic files for genuine body-text use.
According to the [ThaiFaces specimen page](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/js-saksit/), JS Saksit descends from the pioneering Orchid Thai desktop-publishing software the Tejasens built while medical students, before Thai support was native to Windows. That history places it in the same heritage catalogue as [JS Jindara](/fonts/js-jindara/), the other JS body face documented here.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), JS Saksit is a period-correct free Thai text sans from the DTP era — plainer than modern OFL faces, but with a full roman-and-italic, regular-and-bold complement.
## Character design and tone
**JS Saksit is a looped (มีหัว) Thai text sans with even strokes and conventional loop terminals, drawn for body copy rather than display, with true italic and bold companions.** The tone is quiet and document-oriented, as befits a face designed for setting Thai paragraphs.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ด and ม stay clear at reading sizes, supporting the recognition argument for looped Thai explained in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). Because it is a text sans, JS Saksit carries little display contrast; set large it reads as utilitarian rather than expressive.
The Latin companion covers the basic Latin alphabet, numerals and punctuation, enough for mixed Thai–English documents from the era, though without the bilingual polish of modern [sans-serif Thai](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) releases.
## Weights and availability
**JS Saksit ships as four TrueType files — Normal, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic (two weights, each with an oblique) — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology), which packages the JS Technology fonts as free software.
The font is not on Google Fonts and has no official webfont build, so web use means converting the TrueType files yourself — permitted under its terms, but the QA burden is yours.
## Best use cases
**JS Saksit suits Thai body-copy settings and any project wanting a period-correct free Thai document sans with italics.** Reasonable briefs:
- Thai-language documents and print materials needing a free looped text sans with a true italic
- Retro or archival design referencing the 1990s–2000s Thai DTP era
- Long-form Thai reading text where looped letterforms aid recognition
- Projects studying or preserving the free JS Technology heritage catalogue
Where it doesn't fit: display and branding (the text weights carry no headline presence) and modern web products — for those, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) give the same role with contemporary engineering.
## Pairings
**Pair JS Saksit's quiet looped body text with a stronger loopless display voice for hierarchy.** Three pairings:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless Thai sans for headlines over JS Saksit body copy
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — a rounder loopless display alternative when Kanit feels too rigid
- **[JS Jindara](/fonts/js-jindara/)** — the sibling JS body face for period-consistent JS-only layouts
## Licensing
**JS Saksit is free software: the JS fonts were dedicated to the public and are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, so you can use, modify and redistribute the files.** ThaiFaces documents the 2006 free release and the Orchid/JS Technology origin; download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/js-technology) and read the [GPL v2](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html) before embedding. If your project needs the more familiar OFL terms, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the straightforward open alternative in the same role.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/k2d.mdx
## What K2D is
**K2D is a loopless geometric Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak, sitting in the same family as [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) but with slightly wider proportions and a more contemporary commercial feel.** It ships nine weights with matching italics under the SIL Open Font License.
The name K2D is a Cadson Demak internal designator rather than a Thai word, which hints at the font's commercial-system intent. It was drawn to slot into brand systems as a neutral geometric workhorse — enough personality to read as "designed," but not so much that it competes with a brand's own visual identity.
In production, K2D tends to appear on Thai B2C brands that want the modernity of Kanit but find Kanit too visually loud. The slightly wider set reads as more confident and less startup-y.
## Character design and tone
**K2D uses wider proportions than Kanit, monolinear stroke weight, and loopless geometric terminals with clean open hooks, producing a more grounded, commercial-brand silhouette.** The head of ก is a short open hook, slightly more angular than Prompt's softer curve.
Counters on ก, ถ, ภ are noticeably wider than Kanit at the same point size, which gives the font a settled, confident tone. Stems are perfectly vertical with no taper, and curves are built from clean elliptical arcs. Thai tone marks align in a consistent horizontal band above the baseline across the full weight range.
Italic cuts rotate at about 8° and keep the same geometric skeleton. The Latin companion is a geometric sans in the wider Avenir / Nunito territory — slightly softer than Kanit's Latin. Numerals are lining and full cap-height, with circular 0 and straight 1.
## Weights and availability
**K2D ships nine weights from Thin (100) to Black (900) with matching italics across the full range, matching Kanit's weight coverage.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/K2D) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/k2d).
File sizes are around 45-60KB per weight in WOFF2. The variable-font version consolidates the full range into a single file under 200KB. K2D's width makes it marginally heavier per glyph than Kanit, but the difference is minor in practice.
## Best use cases
**K2D works best as a core brand sans for commercial Thai brands that want geometric modernity without the cooler edge of Kanit.** Strong briefs:
- Consumer product and FMCG branding where K2D reads as "approachable modern"
- Retail and e-commerce brand systems — signage, packaging, web, app UI
- SaaS and technology brands that prefer warmer geometry to industrial sans
- Fitness, sports, and athleisure brand typography
- Real estate and property marketing at mid-market price points
Where it doesn't fit: government documents (use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)), long-form editorial body copy, and ultra-luxury or heritage contexts (reach for [Charm](/fonts/charm/) or [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/)).
## Pairings
**K2D pairs well with wider geometric Latin sans and with neutral body serifs.** Three pairings:
- **Nunito** — rounded geometric Latin sans with similar width and warmth
- **Avenir Next** — paid Latin companion with matching geometric skeleton
- **Lora** — transitional serif for body copy under K2D display headlines
## Licensing
**K2D is released under the SIL Open Font License, free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/K2D) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/k2d). No paid tier exists.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/kanit.mdx
## What Kanit is, and why it is called คณิต
**Kanit is a loopless geometric Thai sans-serif from Cadson Demak, published on Google Fonts on 7 December 2015 in nine weights from Thin (100) to Black (900), each with a matching italic, for 18 styles in total, under the SIL Open Font License.** It covers Thai, Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese.
The name is a real Thai word, not an invention. The Cadson Demak project repository states it plainly: **"Kanit means mathematics in Thai."** The name matches the design — the letterforms are built from measurable geometric shapes rather than from pen strokes.
That is why a large share of Thai searchers look for this font as ฟอนต์คณิต rather than typing the romanised name. If you arrived that way: yes, ฟอนต์คณิต is this same Kanit, and it is a free download. (A "maths font" for typesetting equations is a different thing entirely.)
Kanit belongs to the generation of loopless Thai faces that removed the traditional circular head (หัว) from consonants in favour of open terminals, bringing Thai closer to contemporary Latin sans-serifs. That shift is covered in our [loopless Thai type article](/learn/typography/loopless-revolution/). Because it sits inside Google Fonts for free, Kanit shows up in Thai startup branding, fashion sites, and property developer marketing more than almost any other free Thai typeface.
## Is Kanit really free, and can you use it commercially?
**Yes to both. Kanit is released under the SIL Open Font License, which permits use in commercial work, web embedding, app embedding, modification, and bundling into products, at no cost and with no permission required.** The only condition is that the OFL notice travels with the font files when the files themselves are passed on.
The point that confuses people most: the OFL restricts **selling the font files on their own**. It does not restrict selling work made with the font. Logos, packaging, posters, templates and applications set in Kanit are all fine to sell, and no credit line is required on printed work.
One rule to know if you modify it: a modified and redistributed version must be renamed — it cannot keep the name "Kanit" — and it stays under the OFL. Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) compares these terms against commercial Thai foundries.
## How to download and install Kanit
**Kanit is a free download from Google Fonts — the family ZIP contains all 18 TTF styles, no registration, no payment.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Kanit specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Kanit), click "Get font", and download the family. It works in Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma and Microsoft Word as soon as it is installed.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Kanit:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&display=swap` in a `` tag (add weight pairs as needed), then set `font-family: 'Kanit', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/kanit repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/kanit) holds the upstream project files under OFL-1.1.
**A file-weight warning:** do not load all 18 styles on a website. The Google Fonts TTFs run roughly 164–188 KB per style, so requesting every weight through one `` measurably slows the page. Pick only the cuts you actually use — most projects need Regular (400) and Bold (700) and nothing else.
Windows and macOS install steps are in the download panel at the top of this page. To try it with your own text first, use the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## All 9 weights and 18 styles
**Kanit ships nine weights, each with a true italic, for 18 styles — one of the most complete free Thai type systems available.** The full range:
| Weight | CSS value | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Thin | 100 | Very large settings only; it disappears at small sizes |
| ExtraLight | 200 | Covers and oversized headings that need air |
| Light | 300 | Secondary headings on light backgrounds |
| Regular | 400 | Body text and the general-purpose default |
| Medium | 500 | Subheads and UI buttons |
| SemiBold | 600 | Headings and labels that need presence without weight |
| Bold | 700 | Headlines and emphasis; the default heading cut |
| ExtraBold | 800 | Large headlines, signage and promotional work |
| Black | 900 | High-impact headlines, packaging and outdoor advertising |
**There is no variable-font build.** The Google Fonts directory for Kanit contains only the 18 static TTFs. If you need continuous weight interpolation via `font-variation-settings`, this family cannot do it — each weight loads as its own file.
## Character design and tone
**The project repository describes Kanit as mixing a humanist sans-serif motif with capsulated geometric curves, and singles out one technical feature: the stroke terminals have flat angles, which lets the design use tighter letter spacing while staying legible at small point sizes.** That is the designers' own account.
A detail that shows the care behind it: the repository records that special attention went to the consonant groups that become easy to confuse once the loop is removed — **ก ถ ภ ฤ ฦ / ฎ ฏ / บ ป / ข ช** — so that each glyph stays distinct. This is the central problem in loopless Thai design, because the loop is exactly what separates several of those pairs in traditional letterforms.
The repository also notes that the sizes and positions of vowels and tone marks had to be managed carefully, since they all bear on readability, legibility and overall texture. That is why Kanit still reads cleanly at Black, where many Thai faces begin to clog.
One more landmark: the repository states that Kanit is the **first Thai font family to be hinted with TTFAutohint**, which directly affects how crisp the letterforms are on Windows screens at small sizes.
The Latin companion is a clean geometric sans, deliberately less ornamented than the Thai so the two scripts align without the Latin pulling focus.
## Best use cases
**Kanit performs best on display and mid-length text for modern, commercial, urban-feeling brands.** Concrete briefs where it wins:
- Thai startup landing pages, SaaS marketing sites, fintech UI
- Fashion, beauty and lifestyle packaging where the brand wants an international feel
- Property developer signage and print collateral in Bangkok and Phuket
- Co-working spaces, coffee chains, and F&B brands targeting younger urban Thais
- Bilingual app interfaces where the Latin pair is a geometric sans
Where it struggles: formal government documents ([Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the mandated default), long-form reading at 9–10pt, and traditional Thai cultural contexts where looped Thai remains the more respectful choice.
## Kanit versus Prompt and Mitr
**All three are loopless Thai sans faces from Cadson Demak on Google Fonts, and they get compared constantly. The differences are personality and weight range.** In short:
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — rounder and friendlier than Kanit; better where the brief calls for warmth
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — wider and more humanist; strong on headlines and posters
- **[Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/)** — squarer and more technical
- **[Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/)** — a harder, more institutional and technological register
If your criterion is the widest weight range, Kanit wins this group with nine weights and 18 styles. See every option in the [loopless Thai font category](/fonts/categories/loopless/).
## Pairings
**Kanit pairs best with geometric Latin sans faces that match its high x-height and circular construction.** Three that work:
- **Poppins** — a geometric Latin sans on a similar circular skeleton, which lines up neatly against Kanit
- **Montserrat** — similar tone with slightly narrower proportions, good for editorial headlines
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — when you want looped Thai body text under Kanit headings for easier long-form reading
See the [typography hub](/learn/typography/) for more combinations.
## Name variants and spellings
**This font is searched for in several forms, all meaning the same family:**
- **Kanit** — the official Google Fonts name
- **คณิต / ฟอนต์คณิต** — the Thai name; the word means mathematics
- **Kanit font Thai / font Kanit ไทย** — searches for the Thai version, which is the same file published on Google Fonts
## Licensing
**Kanit is released under the SIL Open Font License and can be used commercially, bundled in products, and modified provided the original copyright and OFL licence travel with the file.** The canonical source is the [Cadson Demak GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/kanit); Google Fonts mirrors the same OFL-licensed files. No commercial licence purchase is required for any weight or style.
Browse every licence-verified free Thai family in the [free Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/kinnari.mdx
## What Kinnari is
**Kinnari is a free, GPL-licensed transitional Thai serif — one of the three original National Fonts alongside Garuda and Norasi — with more refined, elegant looped letterforms than its siblings.** It ships six styles including true italics and is free to download and redistribute.
According to [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Kinnari carries two copyright lines — "Db Type, 1999" and "National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, 2007" — reflecting a Db Type origin later adopted and released as a National Font by NECTEC, with ongoing maintenance under the GNU GPL by the Thai Linux Working Group.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Kinnari is the dressier of the free National serifs: where Norasi is plain and bookish, Kinnari leans toward a more classical, transitional serif feel.
## Character design and tone
**Kinnari is a looped (มีหัว) Thai serif with visible stroke contrast and transitional serif detailing, giving it a more formal, literary tone than the plainer National sans faces.** It reads as a considered book serif rather than a system font.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ are drawn with a graceful finish, and the contrast between thick and thin strokes gives Thai text a rhythm closer to a classical serif — the kind of texture we discuss in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). Tone marks stay proportionate, so the vertical stack holds together in dense settings.
The Latin companion is a matching transitional serif with proper italics, which makes Kinnari a genuinely usable bilingual serif for formal documents and books.
## Weights and availability
**Kinnari ships Regular and Bold, each with italic and oblique companions — six TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the other TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and installed by default on most Linux systems, making it broadly available for free Thai serif work.
## Best use cases
**Kinnari is the right choice when a Thai layout needs a free, formal, classical serif with a literary tone.** Strong briefs:
- Thai books, anthologies and literary publishing needing a licence-free classical serif
- Formal certificates, invitations and programmes where a dressier serif fits
- Bilingual academic and cultural documents wanting matching Thai and Latin serifs
- Open-source and budget projects that need a more elegant free serif than Norasi
- Heritage and cultural design referencing the National Fonts programme
Where it doesn't fit: screen-first UI and branding — for those, a modern OFL serif such as [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/) or [Trirong](/fonts/trirong/) offers webfont builds and wider weights.
## Pairings
**Kinnari pairs with a quiet Thai body sans for supporting text, or with a modern serif when you need extra weights.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL body sans for captions and tables beneath a Kinnari text serif
- **[Maitree](/fonts/maitree/)** — a modern OFL Thai serif to extend Kinnari's classical tone with more weights
- **Angsana New** — the legacy Windows Thai serif for cross-platform office documents
## Licensing
**Kinnari is free software, released as a National Font by NECTEC and maintained by TLWG under the GNU General Public License, so it is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL Thai serif with webfont support, see [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/kodchasan.mdx
## What Kodchasan is, and how it relates to TH Kodchasan
**Kodchasan (คชสาร) is a casual looped Thai family modelled on teenage handwriting, designed by Kansuda Peamprajakpong and distributed free on Google Fonts since 22 August 2018 in six weights with matching italics — twelve styles — under the SIL Open Font License.** It is the same design as TH Kodchasan from Thailand's 13 National Fonts; only the distribution build differs.
In 2007, Thailand's Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) released 13 free fonts for public and government use — the project that also produced TH Sarabun PSK, ancestor of today's [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/). TH Kodchasan was the casual one in that batch. Cadson Demak later prepared the family for Google Fonts and widened the weight range to six.
Practically: if a government document template names the font "TH Kodchasan", use the SIPA build, because the internal family name differs from the Google Fonts release. For new work, use the Google Fonts build — more weights, and it is the maintained version.
The project description sets the tone honestly: the face "gives a flavor of cuteness but yet not too fun or being funny". It is handwriting that has been to school — controlled, legible, a little soft.
## What does คชสาร mean?
**คชสาร (khot-cha-san) is a Thai noun meaning elephant. It is a literary word formed from คช, meaning elephant, plus สาร.** It is not a coined font name; the word existed long before the typeface.
It belongs to the set of poetic Thai synonyms for elephant, alongside words like กุญชร and ไอยรา. Choosing a literary Thai word rather than a transliteration follows the naming pattern across the National Fonts set.
## Is Kodchasan free for commercial use?
**Yes, fully. Kodchasan is released under the SIL Open Font License, which permits commercial work, web embedding, app embedding, modification, and bundling into products — no payment, and no need to contact the designer.** The official Google Fonts listing confirms the OFL.
**A warning, because this matters:** several international font-aggregator sites publish incorrect information about Kodchasan, listing it as "free for personal use" and instructing users to contact the author for commercial licensing. Some also credit the wrong designer entirely. That is wrong. Kodchasan has lived in the Google Fonts OFL collection (the `ofl/kodchasan` directory) since 2018, and the GitHub project ships an OFL file.
The OFL's only real conditions are that the licence notice travels with the font files when the files are redistributed, and that the font files are not sold on their own. Selling work made with the font — packaging, textbooks, apps, templates — is entirely permitted. If you modify and redistribute the files, rename the font and keep it under the OFL. Compare the terms against commercial Thai foundries in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## All weights — Kodchasan Bold and SemiBold
**Kodchasan ships six weights, each with a true italic, for twelve styles, and all of them come in the same download.** There is no separate Bold or SemiBold file to track down:
| Weight | CSS value | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| ExtraLight | 200 | Large settings that need air |
| Light | 300 | Secondary headings and captions |
| Regular | 400 | Body text and the default |
| Medium | 500 | Subheads and buttons |
| SemiBold | 600 | Headings that need presence short of Bold |
| Bold | 700 | Headlines, children's book covers, emphasis |
Twelve styles is a generous range for a handwriting-flavoured face, and the italics give editorial designers an emphasis style inside the family rather than forcing a second font.
**There is no variable-font build.** The Google Fonts directory holds 12 static TTFs of roughly 99–107 KB each, so every weight loads as its own file.
## How to download and install Kodchasan
**Kodchasan is a free download from Google Fonts: one family ZIP containing all six weights and six italics. No registration, no payment.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Kodchasan specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Kodchasan), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Kodchasan:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&display=swap` in a `` tag (add weight pairs as needed), then set `font-family: 'Kodchasan', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Kodchasan repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Kodchasan) carries the project files under OFL-1.1.
Use those two sources only. Third-party aggregators often serve older builds and, as noted above, misstate the licence.
Windows and macOS install steps are in the download panel at the top of this page. To try it with your own text first, use the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Character design and tone
**Kodchasan keeps the full looped structure of formal Thai writing but rounds and relaxes it, the way a teenager's neat notebook hand rounds a textbook model.** Looped heads on ม, ภ, and บ stay closed and circular; strokes are monolinear and gently bouncy rather than ruler-straight.
The Cadson Demak repository describes "a little flare of feminist handwriting" that makes the face "more gentle and soft spoken", and that reads accurately on the page: terminals curl slightly, counters are generous, and nothing is sharp.
Compared with [Itim](/fonts/itim/), Kodchasan is more disciplined — closer to careful homework than to a marker doodle. Compared with [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/), it is less stylised and easier to read in running text. And unlike [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/), it is not a calligraphic face, which is why it can genuinely carry body copy.
The Latin matches the rounded, hand-drawn register, so bilingual children's material keeps one voice across scripts.
## Best use cases
**Kodchasan fits content aimed at children and teenagers, and any brand that wants approachable Thai without losing legibility.** Strong briefs:
- School materials, workbooks, and educational apps for Thai students
- Snack, dessert, and bubble-tea packaging in a cute-but-tidy register
- Youth campaigns, summer camps, and after-school programmes
- Comics lettering and casual social graphics where Itim feels too loose
- Informal announcements that still have to be read easily — activity boards, community flyers
Where it fails: corporate identity, legal or government documents ([TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) is the mandated choice), and luxury anything. The handwriting flavour caps the formality ceiling. Long body text past a few paragraphs also tires; the bounce that charms in a headline accumulates on a full page.
## Pairings
**Kodchasan works best as the personality layer over a plain text family.** Three combinations:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — its SIPA sibling as the neutral body under Kodchasan headings
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — the safe body choice for apps and e-learning interfaces
- **Kodchasan with itself** — Bold headings, Regular body, Italic captions; few free Thai families can run a whole children's book alone, and this one can
For other free Thai handwriting faces worth comparing, see [Charm](/fonts/charm/) and the full [handwritten Thai font category](/fonts/categories/handwritten/).
## Name variants and spellings
**All of these refer to the same font:**
- **Kodchasan** — the Google Fonts name
- **TH Kodchasan** — the National Fonts name, used in government document templates
- **คชสาร** — the Thai name, meaning elephant
- **TH Kodchasal / Kodchasarn / Kotchasan** — frequent misspellings; all mean this font
- **Kodchasan Bold / SemiBold** — weights within the family, both included in the same download
## Licensing
**Kodchasan is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, and embedding, with the OFL notice kept alongside the files.** That covers packaging runs, apps, and printed schoolbooks alike. Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Kodchasan) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Kodchasan).
The 2007 SIPA originals remain separately downloadable and are likewise free, but the Google Fonts build is the maintained version with the fuller weight range. Browse every licence-verified free Thai family in the [free Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/kodchiang-upc.mdx
## What KodchiangUPC is
**KodchiangUPC is a traditional looped Thai serif for formal, book-style setting, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users KodchiangUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**KodchiangUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with the later Kodchiang New revision, a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**KodchiangUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "KodchiangUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**KodchiangUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [serif category](/fonts/categories/serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**KodchiangUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/kodchiangupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/koho.mdx
## What KoHo is
**KoHo is a looped Thai and Latin sans drawn by a three-person studio of the same name in Khon Kaen — Kham Chaturongkhakun, Kanokwan Phaenthaisong, and Khanittha Sitthiyaem — and distributed through Cadson Demak on Google Fonts since August 2018.** Six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700), each with a true italic, all under the SIL Open Font License.
Two official descriptions exist, and they disagree in a useful way. The Google Fonts specimen calls KoHo a family "inspired by geometric and humanist san serifs" that appears "neither too mechanical or too calligraphic" and works for both text and display. The project README is blunter: a display face with "a charm of vernacular and carefree handmade typeface," a deliberate nod to what it calls the "unfashionable countryside and folk way of life" of rural, agricultural Thailand. Both are accurate. The skeleton is a tidy modern sans. The detailing is country.
## Character design and tone
**KoHo's signature decision is inconsistency on purpose: organic forms were "randomly applied to the head loop through out the whole set," per the project README, so the loops (หัว) on ม, ถ, and ภ do not quite match each other.** Most looped Thai fonts treat the head as a precision element. KoHo treats it like a potter's thumbprint.
At poster sizes the unevenness reads as handmade warmth. At 14px it flattens into ordinary texture, which is the practical reason Google Fonts can honestly position the family for text use as well as display. The strokes stay close to monolinear and the structure stays geometric, so paragraphs hold together even while individual heads wobble.
Latin, Latin Extended, and Vietnamese ship alongside the Thai set, which matters for menus and packaging that mix scripts on one surface.
## Weights and availability
**KoHo ships twelve static styles on Google Fonts: six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700), each with a matching italic. No variable-font version is listed.** True italics across every weight remain unusual among free looped Thai families; KoHo commits to them throughout.
Regular and SemiBold cover most signage and menu work. ExtraLight is fragile below display sizes — the thin loops lose their character first.
## How to download KoHo
**KoHo is a free download from Google Fonts — the family ZIP contains all twelve static TTFs, no registration required.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [KoHo specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/KoHo), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=KoHo:ital,wght@0,400;0,600;1,400&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'KoHo', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Koho repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Koho) holds the project files for self-hosting.
## Best use cases
**KoHo fits friendly, local, food-adjacent briefs — the kind of work where a polished corporate sans would feel like a costume.** Strong briefs:
- Café, street-food, and market branding: menus, stall signage, delivery packaging
- Community festival posters and local event material
- Packaging for agricultural products and small-batch goods
- Editorial features on rural Thailand and Thai food writing
Where it does not fit: corporate identity systems, fintech UI, and long technical documents. The loop inconsistency that gives KoHo its charm becomes noise in a data table. For quiet body text under KoHo headers, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) does the unglamorous work.
## Pairings
**KoHo pairs best with quieter Thai faces that let its uneven loops stay the point.**
- **Sarabun** — the loopless workhorse for body text under KoHo display; see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)
- **Prompt** — geometric loopless sans when subheads need a cleaner modern counterweight; see [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)
For looped alternatives with steadier heads, compare [Krub](/fonts/krub/) and [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/). The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers pairing logic; the [fonts directory](/fonts/) has the full catalogue.
## Licensing
**KoHo is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, web embedding, and bundling, provided the OFL notice travels with the files.** Copyright sits with The KoHo Project Authors. Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/KoHo) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Koho). A restaurant can put KoHo on every menu, sign, and delivery box without paying anyone.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/krub.mdx
## What Krub is
**Krub is a looped Thai and Latin text face originally designed by Ekaluck Peanpanawate and distributed through Cadson Demak on Google Fonts since August 2018, in six weights with matching italics.** The project README files it as an "old fashion text face with a little twist": the modern structure of Thai's traditional looped letterforms crossed with the texture of hot-metal-era text faces.
The README also makes a market claim worth quoting: Krub is "one of the most popular choices among the graphic designers who are looking for a sweet spot of less dusty traditional Thai typeface." That is the brief in one line. Traditional register, none of the mustiness.
The romanisation happens to match the Thai polite particle ครับ, and whether or not the naming was intentional, the README leans into that register — the face "captures the sense of politeness and classic old style without making the page looks out of date."
## Character design and tone
**Krub's standout characteristic, per its own README, is the disconnected Thai loop: the head (หัว) is drawn open rather than fully closed, so the traditional marker of looped Thai reads as a crisp gap of white space instead of a solid circle.** On letters like ค, ด, and ม, the detail is nearly invisible at body sizes and quietly distinctive at headline sizes.
The reference point is mid-century metal type — the printed texture of older Thai books — but the drawing is contemporary and even. Nothing about Krub is nostalgic pastiche. It keeps the politeness of the old register and drops the wear.
The Latin companion carries the same low-key tone, and the family covers Latin Extended and Vietnamese alongside Thai, so bilingual page layouts hold together without a second family.
## Weights and availability
**Krub ships twelve static styles on Google Fonts: ExtraLight (200) through Bold (700), each with a true italic. No variable-font version is listed.** Copyright reads "Copyright 2018 The Krub Project Authors."
For text settings, Regular carries paragraphs and SemiBold handles subheads. The italics are genuinely useful in editorial work — sloped looped Thai is rare among free fonts, and Krub's reads as emphasis rather than distortion.
## How to download Krub
**Krub is a free download from Google Fonts — one ZIP, all twelve styles, no registration.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Krub specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Krub), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Krub:ital,wght@0,400;0,600;1,400&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Krub', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Krub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Krub) hosts the project files for self-hosting.
## Best use cases
**Krub belongs in work that needs the looped, traditional register of printed Thai without looking dated.** Strong briefs:
- Book interiors and long-form Thai reading where readers expect looped letterforms
- Cultural institutions: museum labels, programme booklets, exhibition text
- Heritage brands that want classic manners in a current drawing
- Formal invitations and announcements
Where it does not fit: startups chasing the loopless look — [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) or [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) signal modern more directly — and high-impact poster work, where Krub's restraint reads as quiet rather than loud. For a serif register at the same level of formality, compare [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/).
## Pairings
**Krub works as a body face under stronger display partners, or alone across a whole document where consistency matters more than contrast.**
- **Kanit** — loopless geometric headlines over Krub body text; see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)
- **Prompt** — a softer loopless option for subheads and navigation; see [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)
- **Pridi** — when the project needs a literary serif alongside Krub captions; see [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/)
The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers looped-versus-loopless pairing logic; the [fonts directory](/fonts/) lists every profiled family.
## Licensing
**Krub is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and redistribution, as long as the OFL notice stays with the files.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Krub) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Krub). A publisher can set an entire novel in Krub, print ten thousand copies, and owe nothing.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/krungthep.mdx
## What Krungthep is
**Krungthep is Apple's bold Thai display font, bundled with the Macintosh operating system since 1992 and still preinstalled on current macOS — Apple's font lists for macOS Sonoma and macOS Tahoe both include "Krungthep 14.0d1e1"** ([Apple Support](https://support.apple.com/en-us/122869)). It ships in a single Regular weight, and its Latin letters are drawn after Chicago, the original Macintosh system typeface.
The name is the font's most Thai feature: กรุงเทพฯ (Krung Thep) is the short form of Bangkok's official Thai name, most commonly translated as "City of Angels" — *krung*, of Khmer origin, means "capital", and *thep* derives from the Pali/Sanskrit *deva*, "deity" (Wikipedia, [Bangkok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangkok)). Naming its Thai system font after the Thai capital was Apple's way of localising the classic Mac look for the Thai market.
Apple has never published a designer credit for Krungthep. Type historian [Luc Devroye's entry](https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-56150.html) describes it only as "a bold Apple computer font for Latin and Thai, 1992-2003" — the 1992–2003 span being the copyright period Apple embedded in the font. Designer attributions circulating on font-scraper sites are unverifiable — we do not repeat them. For how ThaiGraph handles credits like this, see our [typography pillar](/learn/typography/).
## Character design and tone
**Krungthep looks like the classic Macintosh speaking Thai: heavy, compact strokes with the unmistakable chunky rhythm of Chicago, the typeface of the original 1984 Mac interface.** Per [Wikipedia's Chicago entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)), "two Thai-language fonts bundled with macOS, Krungthep and Silom, use Chicago for their Latin letters and hence can be used as modern replacements" for the discontinued original.
That lineage gives Krungthep a tone no other Thai font has: instant 1990s-Macintosh nostalgia. The Latin glyphs carry Chicago's dense, almost pixel-era silhouette, and the Thai consonants are drawn bold and compact to sit beside them at interface sizes. Among classic-Mac enthusiasts the font is treated as the last living descendant of Chicago — "Arguably, Chicago still exists through the thai 'Krungthep' typeface, but the spacing and style is not exactly the same" ([JohnDDuncanIII/macfonts](https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/macfonts)).
The result reads as a display voice, not a text one. At paragraph sizes the heavy strokes clog; at headline sizes the retro-Mac character does all the work.
## Weights and availability
**Krungthep ships in exactly one weight — Regular — preinstalled with macOS; it is not available on Google Fonts, and no legal standalone download exists.** Apple lists it on its developer [System Fonts page](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/) and on the official macOS font lists ([macOS Tahoe](https://support.apple.com/en-us/122869)).
Treat third-party download sites with suspicion here: several list "bold, italic, condensed" variants of Krungthep that do not exist in the macOS-shipped font, alongside unverifiable designer credits. As Jeff McNeill's [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/blob/master/apple-and-microsoft-thai-fonts.md) notes, Apple's macOS Thai fonts "come with the operating system and cannot be downloaded elsewhere." If you have a Mac, you already have Krungthep; if you don't, there is no legal way to get it.
## Best use cases
**Krungthep earns its place in retro-Mac and nostalgia-driven Thai display work viewed on macOS — and almost nowhere else.** Sensible briefs:
- Retro Apple-ecosystem visuals — 1990s Mac interface homages, pixel-era poster art with Thai text
- Thai headlines in macOS-native apps or documents that never leave Apple hardware
- Design-history and typography teaching material about Chicago's lineage
- Single-weight display lockups where the chunky Chicago rhythm is the point
Where it fails: any cross-platform or web project (no legal webfont), body text at any size (single heavy weight, no family), and modern corporate identity. For a bold open-licensed Thai display voice use [Chonburi](/fonts/chonburi/); for a versatile geometric family with real weight range, [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) — see the full [display category](/fonts/categories/display/).
## Pairings
**Krungthep is a one-weight display voice, so pair it with a quiet, well-built Thai text family and let the retro headline carry the tone.** Two pairings that work:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed Thai body workhorse; its neutral text color lets Krungthep's Chicago-heavy headlines stay the loudest thing on the page
- **[Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/)** — a clean loopless Thai family whose multiple weights supply all the hierarchy Krungthep's single cut cannot
Avoid pairing it with another heavy display face — two chunky voices at once, and the nostalgia reads as noise.
## Licensing
**Krungthep is proprietary Apple software, licensed only as part of macOS under the [Apple software license agreements](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/) — there is no standalone purchase, no webfont license, and no legal free download.** Using it in artwork produced on a licensed Mac is normal practice; redistributing the font file or self-hosting it as a webfont is not covered.
If the brief needs a bold Thai display font you can actually ship on the web, use the open-licensed alternatives: [Chonburi](/fonts/chonburi/) for a heavy Thai display voice, or [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for geometric loopless families with full weight ranges — all free for commercial use, with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) as the matching body text.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/leelawadee.mdx
## What Leelawadee is
**Leelawadee is Microsoft's looped Thai sans serif, supplied with Windows since Vista, and the basis of Leelawadee UI — the family Windows 8.1 and later use to render Thai in the interface.** Microsoft's typography documentation lists two families: Leelawadee in Regular and Bold, and Leelawadee UI in Regular, Semilight, and Bold.
The name is the Thai word for the plumeria flower (ลีลาวดี). Microsoft's font list credits no individual designer; the copyright sits with Microsoft Corporation. Where [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/) and [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) carried two decades of Thai office documents from the print era into Word, Leelawadee was drawn for screens, and Leelawadee UI now does the work Tahoma once did in Thai Windows installations.
## Character design and tone
**Leelawadee keeps traditional looped Thai letterforms — closed circular heads on consonants such as ก and ภ — with low contrast between thick and thin strokes, a combination Adobe's specimen notes describe as designed for legibility onscreen.** The result reads as nearly monolinear, neutral, and administrative-modern.
The Latin half is not an afterthought. Capitals and lowercase derive from Segoe UI, with documented adjustments: a narrower capital M with raised apex, tails on the lowercase i and l, and a serif-free capital I. A Thai-English paragraph set in Leelawadee therefore sits comfortably next to standard Windows UI text. Against Cordia New, the older bundled looped sans, Leelawadee holds up better at small screen sizes because its loops are larger and its strokes more even.
## Weights and availability
**Leelawadee ships in two cuts, Regular and Bold; Leelawadee UI adds a Semilight and extends script coverage to Lao, Buginese, and Khmer alongside Thai and Latin.** Neither family has italics.
Microsoft's product tables list Leelawadee from Windows Vista (font version 5.00) through Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11, plus Windows Server 2008. Leelawadee UI appears from Windows 8.1 onward. Both families are also available inside Office applications as cloud fonts. There is no Thin, no Black, and no plan Microsoft has published to extend the weight range.
## Where Leelawadee comes from
**Leelawadee arrives with a licensed copy of Windows or Office; Microsoft offers no standalone download.** Designers get it three legitimate ways: a Windows machine, an Office installation, or — for Leelawadee UI — an Adobe Fonts activation under a Creative Cloud subscription, which Adobe's terms cover for design projects, website publishing, PDFs, and video. Enterprise redistribution and self-hosting require a separate licence through Microsoft's typography licensing channel.
The trap is the web. Because the font sits on effectively every Thai Windows machine, CSS stacks can reference `'Leelawadee UI'` as a system fallback at no cost — but extracting the TTF and serving it via `@font-face` breaches Microsoft's redistribution terms, and macOS and Android visitors never had the font in the first place. A Windows-only font stack fails silently for half a Thai audience.
## Free alternatives
**[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the closest open substitute: a looped Thai sans built for documents and interfaces, free on Google Fonts in eight weights.** It covers everything Leelawadee does and adds the light and italic cuts Microsoft never drew.
[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) is the safer choice for multilingual products; its looped Thai matches the rest of the Noto system and ships in a full weight range. [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) offers a looped sans with more warmth for editorial settings. All three carry open licences that permit web embedding, which Leelawadee does not.
## Best use cases
**Leelawadee UI is the correct choice when the brief is to match the Windows system look in Thai.** Strong briefs:
- Windows desktop applications localised into Thai, where the UI font should match the OS
- Office templates, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks circulated inside Windows-standardised Thai organisations
- Internal tools and intranets viewed exclusively on managed Windows fleets
Where it does not fit: public websites (no web licence, no cross-platform presence), brand identities, and print editorial. For those, the open alternatives above do the job without the licence question.
## Pairings
**Segoe UI is the natural Latin partner, since Leelawadee's own Latin already derives from it.** Three pairings:
- **Segoe UI** — the documented source of Leelawadee's Latin glyphs; bilingual Windows UI stays uniform
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open looped sans for documents that must travel beyond Windows
- **[Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/)** — legacy continuity in organisations migrating old Thai Office templates
See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for bilingual system notes.
## Licensing
**Leelawadee is proprietary Microsoft software, licensed through Windows and Office, with web and redistribution rights sold separately.** It cannot be self-hosted, embedded, or shipped inside non-Microsoft products on the bundled licence alone. Leelawadee UI is usable under a Creative Cloud subscription via Adobe Fonts; enterprise terms run through Microsoft's licensing pages. For projects that need open terms, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) substitute cleanly. Verify current terms at the [Microsoft Typography Leelawadee entry](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/leelawadee).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/lily-upc.mdx
## What LilyUPC is
**LilyUPC is a monoline looped Thai sans-serif for body and interface text, designed by Unity Progress Corporation in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft, where it ships bundled with Thai editions of Windows and Office in four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.** It is one of the original UPC (Unity Progress Corporation) Thai system faces that predate the later "New" versions, and it covers both the Thai and Latin scripts.
For most Thai computer users LilyUPC is not a font they chose but one they inherited: it was installed with the operating system and quietly set as a default in older documents. That makes it a compatibility face first and a design choice second — if a legacy Thai document "just renders correctly," a UPC-family font is often why.
## Character and the UPC vs New distinction
**LilyUPC is a looped (มีหัว) Thai typeface, and its defining relationship is with the later Lily New revision, a later reissue of the same design with small spacing and glyph adjustments.** The two are visually close; Microsoft describes the "New" cuts as newer versions of the same typefaces with minor modifications and, in some cases, additional glyphs.
As a sans-serif face it sits in the traditional Thai text category rather than the modern loopless movement covered in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/). The Latin companion is a straightforward text alphabet included so mixed Thai–English lines can be set from a single family.
## Weights and availability
**LilyUPC ships in four styles — Regular, Bold, Bold Italic, and Italic — and is distributed exclusively bundled with Microsoft Windows and Office, not as a separate download.** It has been present in Windows from Windows XP through Windows 11, and is also available inside Office applications.
To check whether you already have it, open the font menu in Microsoft Word or your system font settings and look for "LilyUPC". Because it is a system font, there is no legitimate free-download source — it arrives with the platform.
## Best use cases
**LilyUPC earns its keep on compatibility and legacy Thai documents rather than new brand work.** Strong fits:
- Opening, editing, and reprinting older Thai documents that specified the UPC family
- Government, academic, and office files that must render identically to their original
- Environments standardised on Microsoft Thai system fonts
- Situations that need a widely-installed, no-cost-to-the-user Thai sans-serif
For new design work, a modern licensed or open face — see the [sans-serif category](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) — usually serves better than a legacy system font.
## Licensing
**LilyUPC is a commercial font owned by Unity Progress and licensed through Microsoft; it is bundled with Microsoft products and is not free to redistribute or host as a webfont without a Microsoft licence.** Confirm the terms on the [Microsoft Learn typography page](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lilyupc) and the [Office fonts documentation](https://support.microsoft.com/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how bundled system fonts differ from OFL and free faces.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/loma.mdx
## What Loma is
**Loma is a free, GPL-licensed looped Thai sans-serif from NECTEC, part of the TLWG National Fonts package released in 2003 to expand Thailand's stock of public, licence-free typefaces.** It ships four practical styles and is a common default Thai sans on Linux systems.
Per [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Loma carries the copyright line "NECTEC, 2003" and is distributed by the Thai Linux Working Group under the GNU GPL, alongside Garuda, Kinnari, Norasi and the other National Fonts.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Loma is another of the free workhorse Thai sans faces from the pre-Google-Fonts era — a plain, dependable option where licensing has to be free and the job is reading, not branding.
## Character design and tone
**Loma is a looped (มีหัว) Thai sans with even, largely monoline strokes and conventional loop terminals, drawn for legible body and interface text rather than display.** Its tone is neutral and functional, tuned to the same public-typeface brief as the other National Fonts.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ stay open and clear at text sizes, supporting the recognition advantage of looped Thai discussed in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). Its slightly wider proportions give paragraphs a steady, easy rhythm on screen.
The Latin companion is a plain sans covering the basic Latin set, numerals and punctuation — adequate for mixed Thai–English text without any bilingual styling flourish.
## Weights and availability
**Loma ships Regular and Bold, each with an oblique companion — four TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the rest of the TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and preinstalled on most Linux distributions, so it is widely available wherever free Thai type is needed.
## Best use cases
**Loma is the right choice when a Thai layout needs a free, plain, readable sans for body and UI text.** Strong briefs:
- Thai-language documents, forms and reports needing a licence-free body sans
- Linux and open-source localisation, where Loma is already a common default
- On-screen reading text that benefits from wider, looped letterforms
- Non-profit and budget projects that cannot license commercial Thai type
- System and fallback fonts in software that must render Thai for free
Where it doesn't fit: display and branding — for expressive [sans-serif Thai](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) with modern weights, a Google Fonts release is the better tool.
## Pairings
**Loma pairs with other quiet Thai document faces or with a display face for hierarchy.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL government-standard body sans, a modern companion or replacement
- **TH Sarabun New** — the official Thai document face for formal layouts
- **Cordia New** — the legacy Windows Thai sans for cross-platform office work
## Licensing
**Loma is free software from NECTEC, maintained by TLWG under the GNU General Public License, so it is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL body sans, see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/maitree.mdx
## What Maitree is
**Maitree is a looped Thai serif by Cadson Demak with wide proportions and bigger-than-usual loop terminals, released on Google Fonts in 2016 in six weights under the SIL Open Font License.** The name means "friendliness" in Thai (ไมตรี).
The brief was screen-first. Cadson Demak's own documentation states the wide proportion was designed so the face "can fit on a device with a variety of screen and form factors." That puts Maitree in a different lane from the foundry's other looped serifs: [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) and [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/) were drawn with the printed page in mind, Maitree with the tablet. The Latin companion carries long serifs sized to balance the oversized Thai loops, so bilingual paragraphs hold an even texture.
The tone the foundry targets is "antique and historical manner" — old-world warmth, delivered through a structure that survives low-resolution rendering.
## Character design and tone
**Maitree's defining features are loop terminals drawn larger than Thai convention, asymmetrically curved terminals, and a wide body that gives each glyph room at small screen sizes.** The big loops on ก, ถ, and ภ read clearly at 14px where finer serifs muddy.
One caution comes from the foundry itself. The glyph groups ก ถ ภ ฤ ฦ, ฎ ฏ, บ ป, and ข ช sit close together in this design and can be confused in very short settings — a one-word headline, a two-character label. Running text disambiguates through context; isolated display setting does not. Cadson Demak also notes that vowel and tone mark sizes and positions were managed with particular care, since these drive Thai readability and the overall texture of the page.
The result is warmer than [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) and less formal than [Trirong](/fonts/trirong/). Maitree is the looped serif that smiles.
## Weights and availability
**Maitree ships six weights — ExtraLight (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), SemiBold (600), and Bold (700) — in upright cuts only. No italics exist.** Subsets cover Latin, Latin Extended, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The family entered Google Fonts on 20 June 2016, part of Cadson Demak's run of Thai families for the platform. Source files in Glyphs format live in the public repository, so the typeface can be modified and rebuilt under the OFL.
## How to download Maitree
**Maitree is a free download from Google Fonts — the family ZIP contains all six static TTF weights, no registration required.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Maitree specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Maitree), click "Get font", and download the family.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Maitree:wght@200;300;400;500;600;700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Maitree', serif;`. Trim the weight list to the two or three weights actually used; each static weight is a separate file.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/maitree repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/maitree) holds TTF, OTF, and the .glyphs sources.
## Best use cases
**Maitree fits projects that want looped-serif warmth on screens: cultural publishing, heritage brands, and long-form Thai reading on devices.** Strong briefs:
- Museum and cultural-institution websites where the content is historical
- Long-form Thai editorial read on tablets and phones
- Bilingual Thai-English publications — the long-serif Latin keeps mixed lines even
- Food, craft, and hospitality brands that want antique warmth without a script face
Where it fails: single-word display work at small sizes, because of the glyph-similarity groups the foundry documents; interface labels and data tables, where a loopless sans such as [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) is the safer instrument; and any brief that needs an italic, since Maitree has none.
## Pairings
**Maitree carries body and headline duty; pair it with a loopless sans for navigation and captions.** Three pairings:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless sans for UI chrome and captions over Maitree body
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — rounder loopless sans when the brand voice is friendly rather than technical
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral workhorse for forms and footnotes beneath Maitree headlines
Layout guidance for serif-plus-sans systems is in the [typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Licensing
**Maitree is released under the SIL Open Font License — free for commercial use, web embedding, modification, and bundling, provided the OFL notice travels with the files.** Copyright sits with Cadson Demak, 2015. Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Maitree) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/maitree). No paid tier, no usage reporting, no separate webfont licence.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/mali.mdx
## What Mali is
**Mali is a handwritten Thai and Latin family by Sudarat Leotsithong, distributed through Cadson Demak on Google Fonts since 22 August 2018 under the SIL Open Font License — twelve styles, being six weights from 200 to 700, each with a true italic.** That is unusual depth for a handwriting font; most ship one style.
The premise is unusually specific. The project README describes the character directly: a "cute and joyful 6th grade student" with "neat handwriting," named **"Little Jasmine"** — เด็กหญิงมะลิ — an imaginary friend invented by the designer. The face is her schoolwork hand. Mali (มะลิ) is the Thai word for jasmine.
A handwriting font built on a named character is a different proposition from a generic casual face. The fiction gives the drawing a consistent personality — diligent, cheerful, eleven years old — and the personality survives into print.
## Three different fonts are called Mali — which one do you want?
**"Mali" points to at least three unrelated Thai fonts with three different licences. Check this table before downloading.**
| Name | Designer / origin | Year | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Mali** (this page) | Sudarat Leotsithong / Cadson Demak on Google Fonts | 2018 | SIL OFL — commercial use allowed |
| **[TH Mali Grade 6](/fonts/th-mali-grade6/)** | Sudarat Leotsithong / SIPA National Fonts | 2010 | Free, commercial use allowed |
| **Mali** (fontbysaikhim) | fontbysaikhim, published on f0nt.com | 2024 | Personal, non-revenue use only |
**The first two are by the same designer and built on the same character.** The National Fonts record states that TH Mali Grade 6 is one of the 13 Thai national fonts released by the Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) in 2010, designed by Sudarat Leotsithong, and describes it as "the handwriting of a grade-6 girl named Little Jasmine or Mali (เด็กหญิงมะลิ), a character created by the designer" — the same character the Cadson Demak README describes. The same record notes the national font set was revised in 2018 by Cadson Demak and Google Fonts, the year Mali landed on Google Fonts.
**The third is unrelated.** Its f0nt.com release page dates it 3 June 2024, credits the shop fontbysaikhim, and offers it free "for personal use and general work that generates no income" only, with commercial licensing sold separately. **If you need a Mali for revenue-generating work, take one of the first two.**
## Character design and tone
**Mali uses the big head loop of Thai grade-school penmanship — the README calls it "a big head loop writing style which is very popular among the young generation grade school" — rendered with "a fine pencil effect by naive handwriting sense."** The heads on ม, ด, and ค are drawn oversized and round, the way schoolteachers in Thailand teach them, and the strokes keep a light, drawn-by-hand thinness even in the Bold cut.
The result is naive but tidy. This is not scrawl; it is the handwriting of a student who takes pride in her notebook — matching the README's own word for the character, "neat." The Latin set carries the same pencil quality, so bilingual children's material does not break tone mid-sentence.
Google Fonts summarises the family's voice as inspired by a 6th grader's handwriting with a "carefree and naive appearance."
## All 12 weights and styles
**The google/fonts metadata lists Mali in twelve static styles: six weights at 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 and 700, each with a true italic. No variable-font version is listed.** The weight range is the practical argument for Mali over single-style casual faces: a children's book can run headings, body, and captions in one family without faking bold.
| Weight | Value | Where it works |
|---|---|---|
| ExtraLight | 200 | Large decorative lines and signatures |
| Light | 300 | Captions and secondary text |
| Regular | 400 | Short body passages in children's material |
| Medium | 500 | Subheadings |
| SemiBold | 600 | Secondary headlines |
| Bold | 700 | Main headlines, packaging |
ExtraLight and Light hold the pencil delicacy best; Bold trades some of it for legibility on packaging and signage.
## How to download Mali
**Mali is a free download from Google Fonts — one ZIP with all twelve static TTFs, no registration or payment.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Mali specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Mali), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Mali:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Mali', cursive;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Mali repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Mali) hosts the project files for self-hosting.
### Installing locally
- **Windows** — unzip, right-click a `.ttf` file and choose "Install"
- **macOS** — double-click the `.ttf` and click "Install Font" in Font Book
- **Microsoft Word** — install first, then pick "Mali" from the font menu; restart Word if it does not appear
Compare it against other casual faces in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/), or browse [handwritten Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/handwritten/).
## Is Mali free for commercial use?
**Yes, fully. The google/fonts metadata records the licence as OFL.** Under it you can:
- Use it on retail packaging, shop signage, advertising, and print you sell
- Embed it as a webfont, self-hosted or served from Google Fonts
- Embed it in apps, games, video, and PDFs
- Modify and redistribute it, as long as the OFL notice travels with the files
A kindergarten can print every worksheet, banner, and report card in Mali without licensing paperwork. **One caution: do not confuse it with the fontbysaikhim font of the same name on f0nt.com, which permits non-revenue use only.** See the comparison table above.
## Best use cases
**Mali is for work aimed at, about, or voiced by children — the README itself recommends it for "kids related subject or primary school casual announcement."** Strong briefs:
- Children's books and early-reader material in Thai, English, or both
- School communications: classroom posters, notices, activity sheets
- Snack, dessert, and dairy packaging aimed at families
- Café chalkboard menus and handwritten-style price tags
Where it fails: anything that needs authority. Banking, law, news, government — Mali undercuts all of them by design. It is also a poor body face past a paragraph or two; handwriting texture tires the eye at length. Set the body in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and keep Mali for headings and pull quotes.
## Pairings
**Mali needs a plain partner; two handwriting voices on one page compete.**
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral looped body text under Mali headings, also OFL
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — geometric sans for navigation and UI around Mali display text
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — the most neutral option when material must render across many devices
When a project outgrows the child's voice — a snack brand moving upmarket, say — a geometric headline face like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) is the next step that stays friendly without handwriting.
For adjacent casual voices, compare [Itim](/fonts/itim/) (rounder, more uniform), [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/) (looser, more adult) and [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) (a connected script hand). The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers register matching; the [fonts directory](/fonts/) has the full catalogue.
## Licensing
**Mali is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and bundling, provided the OFL notice stays with the files.** The google/fonts metadata records the licence as OFL, the category as HANDWRITING, and the date added to the repository as 22 August 2018.
Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Mali) or the [cadsondemak/Mali repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Mali). If the brief calls for the Thai national-font lineage of the same child's hand, see [TH Mali Grade 6](/fonts/th-mali-grade6/) by the same designer.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/manoptica.mdx
## What Manoptica is
**Manoptica (มานพติก้า) is the 1973 loopless Thai display face by Manop Srisomporn — Thailand's first well-known typeface to drop the traditional loops, deliberately designed to invoke the characteristics of Helvetica.** Per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manoptica), it remains among the most widely used fonts in Thailand, a fixture of advertising headlines, commercial art, and street signage.
It did not start as a digital font. According to [ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/thaitype/manoptica/), Manoptica was first produced as dry-transfer lettering through the partnership between DHA Siamwalla and the Dutch company Mecanorma, beginning in 1973 — sheets of rub-down letters that designers burnished onto artwork by hand. Srisomporn went on to design over 20 dry-transfer letter sets and worked across four typographic eras, from hand-drawn lettering to digital PostScript.
The version you can license today is [Manop Mai](https://fontstand.com/fonts/manop-mai), Cadson Demak's revival. Anuthin Wongsunkakon and the foundry's design team restored the dry-transfer original and extended it with Latin support. If you want to understand why this face matters, start with the loopless-versus-looped divide covered in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Character design and tone
**Manoptica's defining move is the loopless consonant: it abandons the circular heads (loops) of conventional Thai letterforms in favor of simple, minimalist strokes — a style that, per [Wikipedia's Thai typography entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography), became extremely popular in advertising.** The result reads modern and international, the Thai answer to Helvetica's neutral confidence.
Strip the loop from ก, ค, or พ and what remains is closer in rhythm to a Latin grotesque — clean stems, even stroke weight, uncluttered counters. That is exactly the effect Srisomporn was after, and it is why the face carries so well at billboard and shopfront scale: at display sizes the letterforms feel like a unified Thai-Latin system rather than two scripts negotiating space.
The trade-off is the classic loopless one. Without loops, some characters lean on context to disambiguate, so Manoptica belongs in headlines and signage, not paragraphs. For long-form Thai text, a looped or reading-optimized sans like [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the safer companion.
## Weights and availability
**The Manop Mai revival ships in three weights — Light, Regular, and Bold — and supports both Thai and English (Latin) scripts, per [SandollCloud](https://www.sandollcloud.com/font/1115/Manop-Mai?lang=en_US).** Distribution runs through [Fontstand's](https://fontstand.com/fonts/manop-mai) rental model, in 3 styles.
There is no free download and the font is not on Google Fonts. After the original dry-transfer era, the typeface disappeared from font menus for decades; the Cadson Demak revival is what returned it to working designers as licensed digital software.
## Best use cases
**Manoptica is a display face for work that wants mid-century Thai modernism: advertising headlines, signage, posters, and brand marks where the loopless silhouette is the point.** Strong briefs:
- Advertising headlines and campaign key visuals with a Thai-modernist voice
- Street-level and retail signage, where the face has decades of real-world precedent
- Poster and exhibition typography referencing 1970s Thai commercial art
- Logotypes and brand wordmarks that need a Helvetica-adjacent Thai companion
- Editorial display setting — covers, section openers, pull quotes
Where it doesn't fit: body text (loopless faces sacrifice the disambiguation loops provide), UI text at small sizes, and projects without licensing budget — for open-license loopless geometry, look to [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) instead.
## Pairings
**Pair Manoptica display with a quiet, readable Thai body sans and let the headline do the talking.** Three pairings:
- **Sarabun** — the open-licensed Thai body workhorse; neutral enough to sit under Manoptica's strong display voice
- **Anuphan** — a lighter contemporary Thai sans for captions and interface text
- **IBM Plex Thai** — an open-source corporate sans when the brief needs a systematic Thai-Latin body family
## Licensing
**Manoptica's modern digital release, Manop Mai, is paid commercial software from Cadson Demak, distributed via [Fontstand's](https://fontstand.com/fonts/manop-mai) rental/subscription model — there is no legal free download.** Verify current pricing and terms on the Fontstand page before specifying it in client work.
If the budget doesn't stretch to a rental license, the free alternatives cover much of the same ground: [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) are OFL-licensed loopless Thai sans families on Google Fonts, and [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/) is the other major commercial answer to "Helvetica, but Thai." For body copy under any of these, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) remains the open-license default.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/mitr.mdx
## What Mitr is
**Mitr is a loopless Thai typeface paired with a Latin sans-serif, designed by Cadson Demak and released free on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License in six weights, ExtraLight through Bold.** The name means "friend" in Thai (มิตร), and the design follows through.
The description Cadson Demak ships with the font in the [Google Fonts repository](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/mitr/DESCRIPTION.en_us.html) calls it a combination of organic and humanist sans-serif design with rounded terminals, a wide structure and airy negative space, aimed at casual usage — celebration cards, magazines and posters. The [project brief](https://github.com/cadsondemak/mitr/blob/master/BRIEF.md) states the objective more tersely: an informal sans Latin and loopless Thai typeface built on a rounded structure in the counters.
[ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/mitr/) records the publication year as B.E. 2558 (2015 CE); Google Fonts added Mitr to its catalogue on 20 June 2016, per the [METADATA.pb entry](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/mitr/METADATA.pb). Character coverage spans Thai, Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese.
## Mitr's weights — and why there is no Mitr ExtraBold
**Mitr ships six upright weights, ExtraLight (200) through Bold (700). There is no Mitr ExtraBold, no Black, and no italic — Bold at 700 is the heaviest cut in the family.** This is confirmed by the [METADATA.pb file in the google/fonts repository](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/mitr/METADATA.pb), which lists exactly six files.
| Weight | CSS value | In the family |
|---|---|---|
| Mitr ExtraLight | 200 | Yes |
| Mitr Light | 300 | Yes |
| Mitr Regular | 400 | Yes |
| Mitr Medium | 500 | Yes |
| Mitr SemiBold | 600 | Yes |
| Mitr Bold | 700 | Yes |
| Mitr ExtraBold | 800 | **No** |
| Mitr Black | 900 | **No** |
If your design tool offers you a "Mitr ExtraBold", that is faux bold — the software thickening the Bold outlines itself, not a real file from Cadson Demak. The result is particularly bad on Thai, because the thickened strokes crowd the space around vowel signs and tone marks until the setting stops reading cleanly.
The [project brief](https://github.com/cadsondemak/mitr/blob/master/BRIEF.md) is explicit that italic, slant, narrow and extended cuts are possible future development, not shipped styles. So if the brief genuinely needs a loopless Thai heavier than Bold, change family from the start:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — nine weights including ExtraBold (800) and Black (900), with matching italics
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — nine weights plus italics, and the closest match to Mitr's roundness
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — nine weights up to Black when the brief wants neutrality
- **[K2D](/fonts/k2d/)** — nine weights, a loopless voice that has not yet been used everywhere
## Where to download Mitr free
**Mitr is a free download straight from Google Fonts — no registration, no payment, no paid tier.** Three legitimate routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Mitr specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Mitr), click "Get font", and download the ZIP with all six `.ttf` files.
2. **CSS embed** — add `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Mitr:wght@200;300;400;500;600;700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then declare `font-family: 'Mitr', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/mitr repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/mitr) holds the original `.ttf` and `.otf` files under OFL-1.1 for self-hosting or modification.
To set your own Thai copy in it before committing, use our [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Is Mitr free for commercial use?
**Yes. Mitr is released under the SIL Open Font License, which permits use, copying, embedding, modification and redistribution at no cost, commercial work included.** There is no paid tier to upgrade to.
That covers client work, logos, packaging, signage, advertising, webfont embedding, and bundling inside apps and e-books. What it does not cover: selling the font files on their own as a product, and using the original Reserved Font Name on a modified version. The practical detail is in our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## Character design and tone
**Mitr uses a moderate x-height, slightly modulated strokes, and rounded terminals that echo hand-drawn letterforms more than geometric construction.** The head of ก is an open curve with a subtle hook — friendlier than Kanit's cleaner opening but still firmly loopless.
Stroke contrast is present but subtle: verticals on น, บ, ป carry slightly more weight than the joining strokes, giving the page a gentle rhythm. Bowls on ถ and ภ are drawn with a distinct humanist tilt, as though a calligrapher adjusted the pen angle mid-stroke. Thai tone marks and vowel signs match the stroke modulation, so the overall page texture stays cohesive.
The official description flags two properties you notice immediately in a paragraph: the wide structure and the airy negative space. Together they make Mitr occupy more line length than other loopless Thai families at the same weight — worth budgeting for in tight layouts.
The Latin companion is a humanist sans with two-storey a, slightly flared stems and wider counters than Kanit's Latin. Numerals are lining and align to cap height.
## Best use cases
**Mitr earns its place on editorial-feeling consumer brands and on body copy that wants a warmer loopless sans than Sarabun's neutrality.** Strong briefs:
- Boutique travel, hospitality and wellness brands (spa, yoga, retreat)
- Non-profit and cultural institution branding (museums, arts festivals, heritage)
- Celebration cards, invitations and festive print — the use the designers named themselves
- Editorial blog and magazine layouts needing a modern but human voice
- Skincare and beauty packaging targeting a mid-premium market
Where it doesn't fit: dense UI work ([Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) are cleaner at 12-14px), Thai government documents ([Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the expected default), and headlines that need more weight than Bold.
## Pairings
**Mitr pairs best with humanist Latin sans and transitional serifs that share its warmth.** Three pairings:
- **Source Sans 3** — similar humanist skeleton with matching x-height, a good Thai-English editorial pair
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped Thai for long-form body while Mitr handles headlines
- **[Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/)** — also loopless but more geometric, for hierarchy inside a single loopless system
Browse the alternatives in our [loopless Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/loopless/) or the [full Thai font library](/fonts/).
## Licensing
**Mitr is released under the SIL Open Font License and can be used commercially, modified, and bundled in products provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Mitr) or the [Cadson Demak source repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/mitr), which states OFL-1.1. No paid tier exists.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/niramit.mdx
## What Niramit is
**Niramit is a humanist Thai serif from Cadson Demak with moderate stroke contrast, looped consonants, and six weights with matching italics — a serif purpose-built for mixed Thai-Latin editorial reading.** It is released under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
The name Niramit (นิรมิต) means "created" or "composed" in Thai, and the design reads as a careful editorial composition rather than a cultural or ceremonial statement. Where [Charm](/fonts/charm/) leans into high-contrast display ornamentation and [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) into literary weight, Niramit occupies a quieter editorial middle ground.
In the catalogue of free Thai serifs, Niramit is the most versatile body-text option after [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/). Its moderate contrast and extensive italic coverage make it well-suited to magazine-style layouts that switch between body, italic, and subhead repeatedly.
## Character design and tone
**Niramit uses moderate stroke contrast, fully looped consonant heads, and slightly softened terminals that together produce a calm, bookish editorial tone at body sizes.** Thin strokes on ก, ถ, ภ are clearly visible but not hairline-thin; the contrast ratio sits around 1:2.5.
The loops on consonants are slightly ovoid rather than perfectly circular, which gives the face a subtle humanist rhythm. Terminals on ง, ก, and ร are cupped gently inward rather than flared. At heavier weights, the contrast drops as curves thicken, producing a stable bold that reads cleanly in subheads.
Italic cuts are true italics — not just slanted romans — with a distinct italic skeleton and slightly narrower proportions. The Latin companion is a transitional serif in the Source Serif / Merriweather neighbourhood, with matching contrast and metrics.
## Weights and availability
**Niramit ships six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700) with matching italics across the full range.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Niramit) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/niramit).
File sizes are around 50-65KB per weight in WOFF2. A typical production loadout uses Regular, Regular Italic, SemiBold, and SemiBold Italic, totalling around 240KB before Brotli compression — affordable for editorial body deployments.
## Best use cases
**Niramit is built for long-form Thai editorial reading that needs serif authority without display ornamentation.** Strong briefs:
- Literary and academic publishing — novels, essay collections, research papers
- Magazine and newspaper body text, particularly for Thai-English bilingual editorial
- Long-form blog and content platforms where serif body reads as authoritative
- Corporate annual reports and communications that prefer a quiet serif voice
- White papers, research reports, and think-tank publications
Where it doesn't fit: UI and product design (sans reads better at small sizes), display and poster work, and tech/startup branding where serif feels mismatched.
## Pairings
**Niramit pairs with humanist sans-serifs for headline/body contrast or with its own italic for editorial rhythm.** Three pairings:
- **Kanit** — geometric Thai sans for display headlines above Niramit body
- **Source Sans 3** — humanist Latin sans with matching editorial tone
- **IBM Plex Sans** — for technical sidebars and captions alongside Niramit body
## Licensing
**Niramit is released under the SIL Open Font License and can be used commercially, modified, and bundled in products provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Niramit) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue entry](https://github.com/cadsondemak/niramit). All weights and italics are included free.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/norasi.mdx
## What Norasi is
**Norasi is a free, GPL-licensed Thai serif from the National Font Project — a bookish looped text face released in 1999 and later folded into the National Fonts maintained by the Thai Linux Working Group.** It ships six styles including true italics and is one of the few free Thai serifs built for long-form reading.
Per [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Norasi carries the copyright line "The National Font Project (v.beta), 1999" and credits Yannis Haralambous, Virach Sornlertlamvanich and Anutara Tantraporn — a lineage that connects it to serious digital-typography research rather than a commercial foundry.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Norasi is the free, open answer to the question of what a Thai book serif looks like when it is engineered for the page rather than the headline.
## Character design and tone
**Norasi is a looped (มีหัว) Thai serif with modest stroke contrast and calm, even proportions tuned for continuous reading.** Where a display face shouts, Norasi settles into the paragraph, which is exactly why it has served as a default free Thai text serif for years.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ are drawn conservatively so that words hold their traditional silhouette at body sizes — the legibility logic explained in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/). Tone marks and vowel signs sit at a consistent weight, keeping the vertical stack readable through dense Thai text.
The Latin companion is a genuine text serif with matching contrast, which makes Norasi more comfortable than most free Thai faces for bilingual books, reports and academic documents.
## Weights and availability
**Norasi ships Regular and Bold, each with italic and oblique companions — six TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the other TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and preinstalled on most Linux systems, so it is widely available even where commercial Thai serifs are not.
## Best use cases
**Norasi is the right pick when a Thai layout needs a free, readable serif for long-form text.** Strong briefs:
- Thai-language books, theses and academic papers requiring a licence-free text serif
- Bilingual reports and documents where Thai and Latin must share one serif voice
- Open-source and Linux documentation needing a default reading face
- Non-profit and budget publishing that cannot license commercial Thai serifs
- Editorial layouts that want a calmer, more traditional tone than a sans
Where it doesn't fit: display and branding — for expressive [serif Thai](/fonts/categories/serif/) with modern weight ranges, a Google Fonts release like [Maitree](/fonts/maitree/) offers more flexibility.
## Pairings
**Norasi pairs with a quiet Thai body sans for captions and UI, or stands alone across a whole document.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL body sans for captions, tables and footnotes under a Norasi text face
- **TH Sarabun New** — the government-standard sans for official document furniture
- **[Maitree](/fonts/maitree/)** — a modern OFL Thai serif to swap in where you need more weights
## Licensing
**Norasi is free software from the National Font Project, maintained by TLWG under the GNU General Public License, so it is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL Thai serif in the same reading role, see [Maitree](/fonts/maitree/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped.mdx
## What Noto Sans Thai Looped is
**Noto Sans Thai Looped is the looped, traditional-Thai variant of Google's Noto Sans, drawn with the closed head loops that native readers expect instead of the open, loopless terminals of the standard cut. It is a variable font, free under the SIL Open Font License, covering the full Thin-to-Black weight range plus width variation.** It belongs to the Noto ("no tofu") project, whose goal is complete, harmonised script coverage, and it gives Thai designers a looped sibling to the widely used loopless [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/).
Google added Noto Sans Thai Looped to Google Fonts in November 2020. The Looped and loopless cuts share proportions and weight structure, so a team can switch between a stripped modern look and a warmer, more conventional Thai reading experience without changing their layout metrics.
In use, Noto Sans Thai Looped is the sensible default when a project needs dependable, freely licensed looped Thai that renders identically across platforms, from Android and Chrome to embedded devices, and pairs cleanly with Latin.
## Character design and tone
**Noto Sans Thai Looped keeps closed, rounded head loops, an even x-height, and low-contrast monolinear strokes, producing a neutral, highly legible text face rather than a display voice.** The loops on ก, ถ and ภ read clearly at small sizes, which is the whole point of the looped cut: it favours effortless reading for a general audience over the pared-down geometry of loopless design.
Because it is a variable font, weight moves smoothly from hairline Thin through heavy Black, and the width axis lets the design compress for tight interface columns. Thai tone marks and vowel signs stay evenly weighted across the range, so a ไม้เอก above a Light weight still holds at small sizes. The construction is deliberately unopinionated, which is what makes Noto a reliable system default.
The Latin companion is Noto Sans, a clean humanist sans that sits level with the Thai on mixed lines. For the underlying difference between looped and loopless Thai, see the [typography guide](/learn/typography/) and compare the loopless [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/).
## Weights and availability
**Noto Sans Thai Looped is free from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai+Looped) as a variable font, with a weight axis from Thin (100) to Black (900) and a width axis for condensed settings.** Named instances cover the standard nine weights, so static exports of Regular, Medium, and Bold are straightforward for web or app use.
As part of the Noto project, the family is also available through the project's open-source releases, and it ships as a system fallback on many Google platforms, which makes it a safe choice for guaranteed cross-device rendering.
## Best use cases
**Noto Sans Thai Looped is the right pick when you need dependable, open-licensed looped Thai that renders consistently everywhere.** Strong fits include:
- Multi-platform apps and websites that need one guaranteed looped Thai fallback
- Long-form body text and documentation for a general Thai readership
- Bilingual Thai-Latin interfaces where matched metrics matter
- Government, education, and NGO material that must stay free to license
- Design systems that already standardise on the Noto family for other scripts
Where it fits less well: expressive display headlines and brand systems wanting a distinctive personality, where a purpose-built display or a Cadson Demak face earns more attention than Noto's deliberate neutrality.
## Pairings
**Noto Sans Thai Looped pairs cleanly within the Noto family and with other open-licensed Thai text faces.** Three dependable pairings:
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — the serif companion from the same project, for editorial headline-and-body contrast
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a neutral open-licensed Thai body sans for a second, distinct voice
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — the loopless sibling, for UI or display contrast inside one metric system
## Licensing
**Noto Sans Thai Looped is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and redistribution provided the original copyright and OFL text are kept intact.** Confirm the terms on the [Google Fonts page](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai+Looped). There is no paid tier — the full variable family is free.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/noto-sans-thai.mdx
## What Noto Sans Thai is
**Noto Sans Thai is the Thai-script member of Google's Noto family, released free under the SIL Open Font License across nine weights from Thin to Black, in a loopless cut.** The [google/fonts metadata](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/notosansthai/METADATA.pb) lists the designer as "Google", the category as SANS_SERIF, and the date the family was added to the repository as 19 November 2020.
The Noto project aims to give every Unicode script a harmonised typeface — sans and serif cuts that hold one tone across languages. For Thai, that produced a neutral, reliably rendering, web-safe sans whose vertical proportions align with the Noto Sans families for other scripts.
In production, Noto Sans Thai is the baseline fallback in most `font-family` stacks that target Thai readers. If you have not deliberately chosen something else, there is a good chance this is what your readers are already seeing.
## Noto Sans Thai vs Looped vs Serif
**The Noto project publishes four Thai families, not one — Noto Sans Thai, Noto Serif Thai, Noto Sans Thai Looped, and UI variants of the sans cuts. All share the same SIL OFL licence.** Picking the wrong one puts the work in the wrong Thai typographic register.
- **Noto Sans Thai** — loopless, plain stroke ends, modern tone. Good for UI, headings, and general web content.
- **[Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/)** — traditional circular heads, the same nine weights. Better for long body text, documents, and readers who expect loops.
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — the serif harmonised with Noto Sans Thai, for heading/body pairing inside one system.
- **Noto Sans Thai UI / Looped UI** — cuts with tightened vertical metrics for space-constrained interfaces.
**Short version:** for long-form Thai reading, start with the looped cut or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/); for modern UI and digital work, the loopless cut here is the right default.
## Weights and variable axes
**Noto Sans Thai has nine named weights — Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, Black — and the actual variable file carries two axes, not one.** Per the google/fonts metadata the file is `NotoSansThai[wdth,wght].ttf` with:
- **Weight axis (wght)** — 100 to 900, covering all nine named weights continuously
- **Width axis (wdth)** — 62.5 to 100, from heavily condensed to normal width
**The width axis is the part most people miss**, and it is the reason to load the variable file rather than a stack of static weights: a Thai heading that overruns its column can be condensed with `font-stretch` instead of being shrunk. In CSS:
```css
h1 {
font-family: 'Noto Sans Thai', sans-serif;
font-weight: 700;
font-stretch: 85%;
}
```
One variable file replaces nine static files, cutting both download size and request count.
## How to download Noto Sans Thai
**Noto Sans Thai is a free download from Google Fonts — no registration, no payment, and no paid tier to upgrade to.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Noto Sans Thai specimen](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai), click "Get font", and download the family ZIP. It contains both the variable file and the static weights.
2. **CSS embed** — fastest for the web. Add a `` to `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Sans+Thai:wght@100..900&display=swap`, then set `font-family: 'Noto Sans Thai', sans-serif;`.
3. **GitHub source** — the [notofonts/thai](https://github.com/notofonts/thai) repository hosts the sources and builds for self-hosting. Its README states plainly: "This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1."
### Installing locally
- **Windows** — unzip, right-click a `.ttf` file and choose "Install" (or "Install for all users" if every account on the machine needs it)
- **macOS** — double-click the `.ttf` file and click "Install Font" in Font Book
- **If you want the looped cut** — download [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) as well; it is a separate Google Fonts family with the same nine weights and the same licence
Compare candidates on your own copy first in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Is Noto Sans Thai really free for commercial use?
**Yes, fully. The google/fonts metadata records the licence as OFL, and the Noto source repository confirms SIL Open Font License Version 1.1.** Under that licence you can:
- Use it in any commercial work — logos, packaging, advertising, print
- Embed it as a webfont, self-hosted or served from Google Fonts
- Embed it in apps, games, and PDFs
- Modify and redistribute it, as long as the OFL notice travels with the files
The one restriction worth knowing: you cannot sell the font on its own, and a modified redistribution cannot keep the original Reserved Font Name. This is a completely different position from bundled system faces like [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) or [Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/), which are tied to an OS licence and cannot be embedded on the web at all.
## Best use cases
**Noto Sans Thai is the correct default when neutrality, multilingual coverage, and technical reliability matter more than brand personality.** Strong briefs:
- International websites with Thai as one of several supported languages
- Mobile app UI targeting Thai users that must render identically everywhere
- Encyclopedic reference content, software documentation, and knowledge bases
- Email newsletters and transactional messages where cross-client rendering matters
- Academic publications mixing Thai, English and Latin in the same paragraph
Where it does not fit: Thai-focused consumer brands that need a distinct voice — [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) and [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) all speak louder — luxury and editorial work, and long Thai body text for readers who expect loops, where [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the better call.
## Pairings
**Noto Sans Thai pairs with the rest of the Noto family by design, since every family is drawn to align on vertical proportions and stroke weight.** Three pairings:
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — heading/body pairing inside one fully harmonised system
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped body text under loopless headings, both open-licensed
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — when a design system wants slightly more character than Noto while staying neutral
The [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) covers pairing in more depth; the [fonts directory](/fonts/) has the full catalogue, and [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) narrows it to open licences.
## Licensing
**Noto Sans Thai is released under the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1, with every weight free for commercial use, modification, web embedding, and bundling.** The loopless and [looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) cuts share identical terms, and no paid tier exists.
Verify at either source: the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai), or the [notofonts/thai repository](https://github.com/notofonts/thai), which holds both the sources and the full licence text.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/noto-serif-thai.mdx
## What Noto Serif Thai is
**Noto Serif Thai is the serif member of Google and Adobe's Noto family for the Thai script, designed as the editorial and long-form companion to [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) with matched vertical metrics and licensing.** It ships as a variable font across nine weights from Thin to Black and is released under the SIL Open Font License. The [Google Fonts metadata](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/notoserifthai/METADATA.pb) credits the designer as "Google", files it under SERIF, dates its Google Fonts release to 19 November 2020, and lists one variable file, `NotoSerifThai[wdth,wght].ttf`, with a width axis of 62.5–100 and a weight axis of 100–900; Google's own [description](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/main/ofl/notoserifthai/DESCRIPTION.en_us.html) calls it "a modulated (serif) design for texts in the Southeast Asian Thai script".
Serif Thai is a relatively recent construct — Thai script evolved without a Western-style serif tradition — so "Thai serif" usually means a typeface that keeps the traditional loop (หัว) on consonants but adds subtle terminal modulation and stroke contrast borrowed from Latin serif conventions. Noto Serif Thai follows this approach: looped consonants, measured stroke contrast, and generous but not dramatic terminals.
The result is the most technically polished free Thai serif available, which is why it shows up in news archives, academic publishing, and bilingual reference sites.
## Character design and tone
**Noto Serif Thai keeps the traditional circular loops on consonants like ก, ถ and ภ but modulates stroke weight so thin strokes contrast clearly against thicker verticals, producing a quiet editorial texture on a page of body copy.** The contrast is moderate — roughly 1:2 between thin and thick — which matches the Latin Noto Serif.
Terminal shapes on ก and ง are softly rounded rather than cupped, which keeps the face feeling contemporary rather than antique. Vowel marks (สระอี, สระอา) and tone marks are drawn with matching contrast, so the page texture reads uniformly at body sizes.
The Latin companion is Noto Serif, a well-mannered transitional serif in the Times / Source Serif neighbourhood. Cap heights and x-heights align with Noto Sans Thai, so a designer can switch between sans and serif within the same layout without optical jumps.
## Weights and availability
**Noto Serif Thai ships nine weights from Thin (100) to Black (900) as a variable font, plus static files for each weight.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+Thai) or the [Noto GitHub repo](https://github.com/notofonts/thai).
Italic cuts are not part of the current release for the Thai script — Thai typography does not traditionally use italic as a separate style, so oblique variants are rarely drawn. For emphasis, designers typically reach for a heavier weight rather than an italic. File sizes are around 50-70KB per static weight in WOFF2.
## How to download and install Noto Serif Thai
**Noto Serif Thai is a free download from Google Fonts with no sign-up: "Get font" then "Download all" gives you a ZIP containing the variable file `NotoSerifThai[wdth,wght].ttf` plus a `static/` folder with nine fixed weights.** Use the variable file for the web and Figma; install the static files for Word, PowerPoint, Canva and other apps that expect fixed style names. [MDN's variable fonts guide](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_fonts/Variable_fonts_guide) explains the difference: one file holding every permutation versus one file per style.
- **Google Fonts** — the [specimen page](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+Thai), or embed with `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Serif+Thai:wght@100..900&display=swap`
- **GitHub** — the [notofonts/thai](https://github.com/notofonts/thai) repository builds releases automatically and states "This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1."
- **Windows / macOS** — right-click the .ttf and choose Install, or double-click and press Install in Font Book
- **Google Docs, Canva, Figma** — Figma [includes Google fonts by default](https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Add-a-font-to-Figma); Google Docs adds it through the More fonts dialog, which [Google documents](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1663349?hl=en) as available for Thai; in Canva filter fonts by language, or upload the static TTFs on a paid plan
- **PowerPoint hand-offs** — File → Options → Save → Embed fonts in the file, per [Microsoft](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/benefits-of-embedding-custom-fonts-cb3982aa-ea76-4323-b008-86670f222dbc); the OFL permits embedding
Thai-speaking readers will find the full guide, including Word's Complex scripts setting, on the [Thai-language page for Noto Serif Thai](/th/fonts/noto-serif-thai/).
## Best use cases
**Noto Serif Thai is built for long-form Thai reading: books, long articles, academic content, bilingual editorial.** Strong briefs:
- Thai-language news sites and online magazines, especially when paired with English
- Academic journals, university publications, and research papers
- E-book and EPUB body text for Thai novels and non-fiction
- Bilingual reference sites (Wikipedia-style, knowledge bases)
- Government white papers and policy publications that want a more editorial voice than [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)
Where it doesn't fit: UI and product interfaces (sans is almost always better for UI), display and poster work (reach for [Charm](/fonts/charm/) or [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) Medium/Bold), and brands where the serif reads as "corporate safe" rather than "considered".
## Pairings
**Noto Serif Thai pairs best with its Noto Sans sibling or with other editorial sans-serifs that share its proportions.** Three pairings:
- **Noto Sans Thai** — the intended sibling pairing, matched by design
- **Source Sans 3** — Adobe's humanist sans for headlines above Noto Serif Thai body
- **IBM Plex Sans** — cleaner corporate sans for captions and UI around serif body
## Licensing
**Noto Serif Thai is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+Thai) or the [Noto GitHub repository](https://github.com/notofonts/thai). The SIL OFL permits bundling in products and web fonts in commercial sites without attribution in the product itself, though the licence file must travel with the font file.
## Frequently asked questions about Noto Serif Thai
**The questions people searching for Noto Serif Thai ask most are whether it is looped, whether commercial use is allowed, and which weight to set body text in; the short, sourced answers are below.**
### Is Noto Serif Thai looped or loopless?
**Looped. The consonants keep the traditional head loops, which puts it alongside [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) rather than the loopless [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/).** It is the only member of the Noto Thai set with stroke contrast.
### Can I use Noto Serif Thai commercially?
**Yes. The [OFL FAQ](https://openfontlicense.org/ofl-faq/) allows use in any design work including logos (1.1), embedding in PDFs and documents (1.12) and webfont use (2.1); attribution is appreciated but not required.** The one restriction is that the font files may not be sold on their own (1.5–1.6). See the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
### Which weight should I use for body text?
**Regular (400) at 10–11pt in print; Regular to Medium (500) at 17–19px on screen, because the thin strokes of a serif fade on screens faster than a sans.** Reserve Thin (100) and Black (900) for large display sizes.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/pattaya.mdx
## What Pattaya is
**Pattaya is a bold brush-script display Thai typeface from Cadson Demak, drawn with confident flat-brush strokes that evoke street-sign lettering and vintage travel-poster type.** It ships as a single Regular weight under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
The name references the seaside resort city, and the design carries that implied tone: big, confident, casual, and commercial. Unlike the more romantic [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) or the casual script feel of [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/), Pattaya reads as painted signage — the letterforms have the uneven weight variation of a flat brush loaded with paint.
Pattaya is a specialist display face. It does not scale down, it does not pair well with itself, and its tone is too strong for anything but headline and poster work. Within that narrow range, however, it is one of the most recognisable free Thai display fonts.
## Character design and tone
**Pattaya uses thick flat-brush strokes, uneven stem weights that mimic hand-painted lettering, and looped consonants with ragged, slightly imperfect edges.** The vertical stems carry a distinct brush-stroke texture — not a smooth curve but a slightly varied edge that reads as paint on a rough surface.
Loops on ก, ถ, ภ are filled in heavily, producing bold solid shapes. The irregularities in stroke weight are calibrated rather than random — letters remain consistent enough to read clearly, but the hand-painted quality stays visible. Terminal shapes on ง and ล cut off abruptly, as though the brush lifted at the end of a stroke.
Tone marks and vowel signs share the brush quality, drawn with the same flat-stroke texture. The Latin companion is a matched brush-script in the Lobster / Pacifico territory — casual, heavy, and deliberately imperfect.
## Weights and availability
**Pattaya ships only one weight — Regular — consistent with its display-script intent.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Pattaya) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/pattaya).
File size is approximately 55-70KB in WOFF2 with Thai + Latin subset. Because Pattaya is a display-only script, it is typically deployed as a single self-hosted file or loaded from Google Fonts on demand rather than carried in a full brand loadout.
## Best use cases
**Pattaya is the right Thai font when a project needs confident, commercial, street-signage energy.** Strong briefs:
- Thai street food and casual restaurant branding — signage, menus, takeaway packaging
- Travel and tourism marketing — brochures, Instagram-era poster design, destination branding
- Festival and event posters — music events, food festivals, summer promotions
- Beach and resort merchandise — t-shirts, souvenirs, retail packaging
- Vintage-inspired product branding — craft beer, soda, ice cream
Where it doesn't fit: any body text use, corporate or editorial work, luxury and premium brands, and UI of any kind.
## Pairings
**Pattaya pairs with neutral, quiet body sans that stay out of its way.** Three pairings:
- **Sarabun** — clean neutral Thai body for paragraph text under Pattaya display
- **Oswald** — condensed Latin sans for secondary headlines that don't compete with the script
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — warmer humanist loopless Thai for subheads with Pattaya titles
## Licensing
**Pattaya is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Pattaya) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/pattaya). Use on commercial menu design, tourist merchandise, and packaging requires no additional permission.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/plaimanas07.mdx
## What Plaimanas07 is
**Plaimanas07 is an open-source Thai calligraphic typeface designed by Parin Rungpattarathakun in collaboration with Cadson Demak, released on GitHub in June 2025 under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 with Regular and Italic styles.** It is a rarity in Thai open type: a face released explicitly for beauty rather than utility.
The designer's own framing is direct. The typeface grew out of a personal investigation into how classical Thai calligraphy could inform contemporary digital type, and it targets what the documentation calls "the lack of Thai fonts with artistic elegance" — the gap left by a decade of open Thai releases optimised for screens and system UI.
One claim in the repository is worth repeating because it is so often untrue elsewhere: "All drawings are original. This is not a modification of an existing Thai typeface." Plaimanas07 is not a re-weighted derivative. For the letterform tradition it draws on, see the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Character design and tone
**Plaimanas07 renders Thai letterforms with calligraphic modulation — the thick-thin rhythm of a broad-nibbed hand — rather than the even monolinear stroke that most open Thai families use.** That is the whole point of the face, and it is what separates it from the rest of the [Cadson Demak catalogue](/fonts/categories/cadson-demak/), which is dominated by utility sans families.
Because the modulation carries the personality, the face rewards size. Set large it shows the pen logic clearly; set at body size the contrast thins out and the character it was built for disappears.
The tone is formal-artistic rather than casual: closer to a hand-lettered title or an invitation than to a note. Against [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) it is more restrained, and against [TH Charm of AU](/fonts/th-charm-of-au/) it is more contemporary in its detailing.
## Weights and availability
**Plaimanas07 ships as exactly two files — Plaimanas07-Regular.ttf and Plaimanas07-Italic.ttf — at Version 1.000; there is no weight axis and no variable build.** The repository also provides OTF and webfont directories alongside the TTFs, and the sources are included, so the family can be rebuilt or extended by anyone.
Coverage spans both scripts: the Regular carries the full basic Latin alphabet and 87 codepoints across the Thai block, verified in the font's own cmap. Download it from the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Plaimanas07).
## Best use cases
**Plaimanas07 is a display and occasion face — use it where Thai script is meant to be looked at, not read at length.** Strong briefs:
- Titles, posters and cover lines that want calligraphic Thai character
- Invitations, certificates and ceremonial headings
- Cultural, heritage and arts branding
- Editorial display where the Thai script itself is the visual subject
Where it does not fit: body copy, UI labels, and dense data. Set the text in [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and let Plaimanas07 carry the headline. If you need a handwriting face that survives small sizes instead, use [BoonJot](/fonts/boonjot/).
## Licensing
**Plaimanas07 is free for commercial use: it is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 with no Reserved Font Name, confirmed by the repository's OFL.txt, GitHub's declared licence, and the licence string embedded in the binary.** The absence of a Reserved Font Name matters in practice — it means renamed derivatives are legally straightforward, the same condition that makes [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) usable as a base for modified builds. See the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for the full picture.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/playpen-sans-thai.mdx
## What Playpen Sans Thai is
**Playpen Sans Thai is a casual handwriting typeface from TypeTogether that imitates relaxed, natural hand lettering, extending the popular Playpen Sans into the Thai script. It is a variable font, free on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License, with a weight range from Thin to ExtraBold and matching Latin.** The Thai was drawn by Bangkok-based designer Sirin Gunkloy alongside the TypeTogether team of Laura Meseguer, Veronika Burian, and José Scaglione, and Google Fonts published it in March 2025.
Playpen Sans began as more than two years of TypeTogether research into how children learn to write, which is why the letterforms feel like friendly, confident handwriting rather than a formal type design. That same warmth now carries into Thai, giving designers an open-licensed handwritten Thai that avoids the stiffness of most system fonts.
In use, Playpen Sans Thai is the choice for anything that should feel personal, playful, or human: children's material, informal branding, greeting and social content, and any Thai-Latin layout that wants a spoken, hand-drawn tone.
## Character design and tone
**Playpen Sans Thai is built to look genuinely hand-written: rounded, slightly irregular strokes, open loops, and a lively rhythm that never falls into rigid geometry.** The consonant loops on ก, ถ and ภ are drawn with a soft, informal hand, and the overall bounce keeps the Thai reading as casual script rather than a display sans.
A defining technical feature carried over from the Latin is that Playpen Sans was drawn with several versions of each glyph plus a built-in shuffler, so repeated letters never sit next to identical shapes, mimicking the natural variation of real handwriting. Weight runs smoothly from a delicate Thin to a chunky ExtraBold, letting the same voice serve fine captions and bold, marker-style headlines.
The Latin companion is Playpen Sans itself, a warm casual sans that pairs seamlessly with the Thai on mixed lines, plus a set of emoji-style reward icons. For where handwritten Thai fits in the wider landscape, see the [typography guide](/learn/typography/) and the [handwritten category](/fonts/categories/handwritten/).
## Weights and availability
**Playpen Sans Thai is free from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Playpen+Sans+Thai) as a variable font, with a weight axis from Thin (100) to ExtraBold (800).** Named instances cover eight weights, so exporting a static Regular, Medium, and Bold set for web or app use is straightforward.
The family is also distributed through [TypeTogether](https://www.type-together.com/playpen-sans-font), the original foundry, where the Latin Playpen Sans and its documentation live. Because it is variable, a single file can cover the full weight range in modern browsers, which keeps a handwritten display setting lightweight.
## Best use cases
**Playpen Sans Thai is the right pick when a Thai layout should feel personal, friendly, and hand-made.** Strong fits include:
- Children's books, education material, and learning apps in Thai
- Informal and playful branding — cafes, craft, kids' products, community events
- Greeting cards, social posts, and messaging content that wants a spoken tone
- Packaging and signage aiming for a warm, approachable, handwritten feel
- Bilingual Thai-Latin design where a single casual voice should span both scripts
Where it fits less well: formal documents, corporate identity, long body text, and anything that needs authority or neutrality, where a looped text sans reads better than handwriting.
## Pairings
**Playpen Sans Thai pairs best with rounded, friendly Thai faces and with clean sans companions that let the handwriting lead.** Three dependable pairings:
- **[Itim](/fonts/itim/)** — a rounded, informal Thai that shares Playpen's approachable warmth for secondary text
- **[Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/)** — a casual Thai script for a second handwritten accent within one playful system
- **[Charm](/fonts/charm/)** — a friendly Thai calligraphic face for headlines when Playpen carries the body
## Licensing
**Playpen Sans Thai is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and redistribution as long as the original copyright and OFL text are preserved.** Verify the terms on the [Google Fonts page](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Playpen+Sans+Thai) or at [TypeTogether](https://www.type-together.com/playpen-sans-font). There is no paid tier for the Google Fonts release — the full variable family is free.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/pridi.mdx
## What Pridi is
**Pridi is an editorial Thai serif from Cadson Demak with strong literary character — higher contrast than [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/), more restrained than [Charm](/fonts/charm/), designed specifically for book typography and long-form reading.** It ships six weights under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
The name evokes a Thai literary register — Pridi Banomyong was one of Thailand's most significant twentieth-century intellectuals, and the font's tone matches that associative weight. The design is deliberately bookish: measured contrast, looped consonants, and terminals drawn with the care of a typeface meant to live on a page rather than a poster.
Among free Thai serifs, Pridi is the go-to for book interiors, literary magazines, and any project where the typography needs to carry cultural seriousness without tipping into ornament.
## Character design and tone
**Pridi uses higher stroke contrast than most free Thai serifs (roughly 1:3), fully looped consonants, and finely drawn terminals that reward careful typesetting at book sizes.** Thin strokes on ก, ถ, ภ approach hairline proportions at smaller weights, giving the page a classical editorial texture.
Bowls on ถ, ภ, and ง are drawn with a subtle literary tilt — not as pronounced as a classical Latin italic, but enough to give the font rhythm when it runs for paragraphs. Terminals on ก and ง are cupped inward rather than flared outward, which keeps the overall tone restrained.
Tone marks and vowel signs are drawn with matching contrast and careful terminal detail. At body sizes (11-13pt), the contrast stays visible without muddying. The Latin companion is a transitional serif in the Garamond / Minion territory — classical, warm, and literary.
## Weights and availability
**Pridi ships six weights from ExtraLight (200) to Bold (700) in upright cuts. Italic cuts are not currently released for Pridi.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Pridi) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/pridi).
File sizes are around 50-65KB per weight in WOFF2. For editorial body deployment, Regular and SemiBold cover most needs; Light at 11-12pt produces the classical restrained book texture that Pridi does better than almost any other free Thai serif.
## Best use cases
**Pridi is the serif to reach for when a project needs Thai editorial authority and quiet literary texture.** Strong briefs:
- Thai novel and literary fiction publishing — book interiors and covers
- Literary magazines, poetry journals, and cultural review publications
- Academic publishing in humanities fields — history, literature, philosophy
- Museum and gallery catalogues, exhibition essays
- Long-form journalism and narrative non-fiction
Where it doesn't fit: UI and product design, corporate communications (too literary), technical documentation (use [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)), and any display/poster work that needs higher-contrast drama (use [Charm](/fonts/charm/)).
## Pairings
**Pridi pairs with quiet humanist sans for captions and with its own weight range for editorial hierarchy.** Three pairings:
- **Kanit** — geometric Thai sans for subheads and captions above Pridi body
- **Source Sans 3** — humanist Latin sans for bilingual pull quotes and captions
- **Mitr** — humanist loopless Thai for modern-feeling subheads with Pridi body
See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for editorial layout guidance.
## Licensing
**Pridi is released under the SIL Open Font License, free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Pridi) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/pridi). Commercial book publication requires no additional permission.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/prompt.mdx
**Reading in Thai?** The Thai edition of this page — ฟอนต์ Prompt, with the same download links, install steps and licence detail written in Thai — is at **[/th/fonts/prompt/](/th/fonts/prompt/)**. Start there if Thai is the language you work in.
This English page is written for the other job: setting Prompt in an English-language or bilingual build. Webfont CSS, self-hosting, the weight system, and how the Latin side behaves next to the Thai.
## What Prompt is
**Prompt is a loopless Thai typeface paired with a geometric Latin sans-serif, designed by Cadson Demak and released free on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License in nine weights with matching italics — 18 styles in total.** It covers Thai, Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese.
The name comes from the Thai word พร้อม, which means "ready" — the same sense as the English word, as the foundry notes in the [description shipped with the font on Google Fonts](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/prompt/DESCRIPTION.en_us.html). [ThaiFaces](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/prompt/) records the publication year as B.E. 2558 (2015 CE); Google Fonts added the family to its catalogue on 20 June 2016, per the [METADATA.pb entry](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/prompt/METADATA.pb).
The design objective is stated plainly in the [project brief](https://github.com/cadsondemak/prompt/blob/master/BRIEF.md): a formal loopless Thai and sans Latin typeface drawing on Avenir and the early modernist era. The result works as body text and holds up as a display face at larger sizes.
## Where to download Prompt free
**Prompt is a free download straight from Google Fonts — no registration, no payment, and no paid tier to upgrade to.** Three legitimate routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Prompt specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Prompt), click "Get font", and download the ZIP containing all 18 `.ttf` files. Unzip and install per your operating system.
2. **CSS embed** — add `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Prompt:wght@400;500;700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then declare `font-family: 'Prompt', sans-serif;`. Nothing to host yourself. Note the semicolon-separated weight list: the two-dot range form does not work on this family, and the next section explains why.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/prompt repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/prompt) holds the original `.ttf` and `.otf` files under OFL-1.1, for self-hosting or modification.
To see how your own copy sets before you commit, run it through our [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
One caution: third-party font aggregators sometimes redistribute older or altered builds of Prompt that are missing weights or mishandle Thai tone-mark positioning. Stick to Google Fonts or the Cadson Demak repository.
## Loading Prompt as a webfont in CSS
**Prompt has no variable build, so the Google Fonts range syntax fails on it: a request for `family=Prompt:ital,wght@0,100..900;1,100..900` returns HTTP 400, and every weight you want has to be listed individually.** A range URL copied from a variable-font tutorial does not degrade gracefully here: the stylesheet request fails outright and no Prompt loads.
The reason sits in the font's own metadata. The [METADATA.pb entry](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/prompt/METADATA.pb) lists 18 separate static files and carries no axes block, and Google's [CSS API v2 reference](https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/css2) defines the two-dot form as a request for "a range of a variable font axis". No axis, no range.
A working three-weight loadout:
```html
```
```css
body { font-family: 'Prompt', sans-serif; }
```
To pull the whole family, list all 18 tuples: `family=Prompt:ital,wght@0,100;0,200;0,300;0,400;0,500;0,600;0,700;0,800;0,900;1,100;1,200;1,300;1,400;1,500;1,600;1,700;1,800;1,900`. That URL returns 200 and 72 `@font-face` blocks, not 18 — each style is emitted once per `unicode-range` subset, across the four subsets described below. The reference asks for axes in alphabetical order and tuples sorted numerically; when we sent tuples out of order on 22 August 2026 the endpoint still answered 200, so treat the ordering rule as documentation hygiene rather than something that will break your build.
**What it costs to load.** Google serves Prompt v12 as WOFF2 split across four `unicode-range` subsets labelled thai, vietnamese, latin-ext and latin, so a page that sets only Thai and basic Latin never fetches the other two. Measured from the `Content-Length` headers on fonts.gstatic.com on 22 August 2026, the thai and latin subsets for Regular, Medium and Bold total 93,520 bytes — roughly 91 KB for a full three-weight bilingual loadout.
To self-host instead, take the files from the [cadsondemak/prompt repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/prompt), which ships TTF and OTF builds under OFL-1.1, convert them to WOFF2, and write one `@font-face` rule per weight. The `unicode-range` splitting pattern for a Thai and Latin pair is set out in our [Thai-Latin bilingual guide](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/).
## Is Prompt free for commercial use?
**Yes. Prompt is released under the SIL Open Font License, which permits use, copying, embedding, modification and redistribution at no cost, including in commercial work.** There is no paid licence tier — the full 18-style family is free.
What the OFL allows:
- Client work, logos, packaging, signage and commercial advertising
- Webfont embedding, and bundling inside apps and e-books
- Modifying the font files and redistributing derivatives under the same OFL
What it does not allow: selling the font files on their own as a product, and using the original Reserved Font Name on your modified version. Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) covers the practical detail.
## The nine weights, and where Prompt Bold sits
**Prompt ships nine weights from Thin (100) to Black (900), each with a matching italic, for 18 files in total — Prompt Bold is weight 700, not the heaviest cut in the family.** The full list is confirmed by the [METADATA.pb file in the google/fonts repository](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/prompt/METADATA.pb):
| Weight | CSS value | Italic |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt Thin | 100 | Yes |
| Prompt ExtraLight | 200 | Yes |
| Prompt Light | 300 | Yes |
| Prompt Regular | 400 | Yes |
| Prompt Medium | 500 | Yes |
| Prompt SemiBold | 600 | Yes |
| Prompt Bold | 700 | Yes |
| Prompt ExtraBold | 800 | Yes |
| Prompt Black | 900 | Yes |
If you reached for Bold because you wanted more punch in a headline, skip to ExtraBold (800) or Black (900) — both are in the same download, nothing extra to fetch. In CSS, use `font-weight: 700` for Bold and `font-weight: 900` for Black.
Prompt has no variable build, no condensed cut and no looped variant. For web deployment, a three-weight loadout of Regular, Medium and Bold covers most UI needs and measures about 91 KB across the Thai and Latin subsets, as set out above. If it is the missing condensed cut you came for, [ThaiGraph Condensed](/fonts/thaigraph-condensed/) is a free condensed loopless option in four weights under the OFL.
## Prompt versus Kanit
**Both are loopless Thai sans families from Cadson Demak with nine weights each, but [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) is strictly geometric and leans industrial, while Prompt rounds the corners and opens up the counters.** The choice is about brand temperature, not technical capability.
- **Choose Prompt** when the brand wants modernity that stays approachable — cafés, boutique hotels, wellness, independent e-commerce
- **Choose Kanit** for a harder, more assertive voice — sports, automotive, technology, heavy promotional work
- **Choose [Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** for humanist warmth, accepting six weights and no italics
- **Choose [K2D](/fonts/k2d/) or [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/)** for a loopless voice that has not yet been used everywhere
Browse the whole field in our [loopless Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/loopless/).
## Character design and tone
**Prompt uses a high x-height, soft circular curves, and short stems relative to its cap height, producing a rounder silhouette than other Cadson Demak loopless faces.** The head of ก is a gentle open hook that leans slightly inward, giving a softer profile than Kanit's more rigid opening.
Apertures on ถ, ภ and ร are open and wide, which keeps the face readable at small sizes despite the loopless construction. Stroke weight is essentially monolinear with subtle optical correction at joins. The official description notes that particular attention went into the size and position of Thai vowel signs and tone marks, and it shows: ไม้เอก above a Thin weight still reads at 10pt.
That same description carries a warning worth repeating: loopless construction makes certain Thai consonant pairs look alike, which can cause confusion in short strings such as labels and buttons. This is a property of loopless Thai in general, not a defect specific to Prompt — the background is in our piece on the [loopless revolution](/learn/typography/loopless-revolution/).
The Latin companion is a geometric sans with rounded terminals on s, c and e. Numerals are lining and full-height. Compared with Kanit's Latin, Prompt's sits closer to Avenir, which the brief names outright as the reference.
## Best use cases
**Prompt works hardest on consumer brands that want warmth and modernity in one typeface, and it is one of the few free Thai families with a genuine italic at every weight.** Strong fits:
- Boutique hotel and hospitality branding — signage, collateral, web
- Wellness, spa and beauty brands where geometric-with-softness reads as premium
- Independent F&B packaging, particularly specialty coffee and craft beverage
- Thai-English editorial work that needs real italics rather than a software slant
- Mobile-first Thai e-commerce where friendly UI type outperforms corporate sans
Where it does not fit: Thai government documents, where regulation still expects a looped face such as [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), and technical Thai typography meant to sit beside IBM Plex, where [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) is the better match.
## Pairing Prompt with Latin type in a bilingual layout
**Prompt pairs best with Latin sans-serifs that share its soft geometric bones, and with a looped Thai face when you want contrast between headline and body.** Three strong pairings:
- **Poppins** — a near-sibling geometric Latin, ideal for Thai-English headline and subhead pairing
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped Thai for long-form body text while Prompt handles headlines
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — a neutral fallback with wider character coverage for multilingual copy
Full bilingual pairing logic is in our [Thai-Latin pairing guide](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/).
## Name variants, and what to put in font-family
**The CSS family string is exactly `'Prompt'` — one word, no "Thai" in it, no foundry prefix — and the static file names follow the pattern Prompt-Regular, Prompt-Bold, Prompt-BlackItalic.** The names that trip people up when self-hosting:
- **`font-family: 'Prompt'`** — the only string the Google Fonts CSS returns. "Prompt Thai", "Prompt Sans" and "Cadson Prompt" are not real family names and will silently fall through to your fallback.
- **Prompt-Italic**, not Prompt-RegularItalic — the 400 italic breaks the pattern that the other eight italics follow, per the [METADATA.pb file listing](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/prompt/METADATA.pb).
- **Prompt-ExtraLight / Prompt-ExtraBold** — one word, no space and no hyphen inside "Extra" in the shipped file names.
- **พร้อม** — the Thai word the family is named after, meaning "ready". If this is the spelling you searched for, the [Thai edition of this page](/th/fonts/prompt/) is the one you want.
Worth saying plainly for anyone arriving from an English search: this is a typeface released in 2015, unrelated to the sense of "prompt" used about AI models. If you are auditing a stylesheet and find `font-family: 'Prompt'`, it refers to this Cadson Demak family.
## Licensing
**Prompt is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the original copyright and OFL notice stay with the files.** Verify at the [Google Fonts page](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Prompt) or the [Cadson Demak source repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/prompt), which states OFL-1.1.
To compare before committing, browse [our full Thai font library](/fonts/) or narrow to [loopless Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/loopless/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-chalinda-square.mdx
## What PSL Chalinda Square is
**PSL Chalinda Square is a commercial squared Thai display family from the PSL foundry, designed by Phanlop Thongsuk and sold as a six-font set under per-user commercial licensing.** As its name signals, it is a squared-construction display face aimed at headlines, logos and branding rather than body text.
PSL (PSL SmartLetter) is an established Thai commercial foundry with a catalogue of more than a hundred families. According to the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/), PSL Chalinda Square ships as six fonts starting at 800 baht, giving it more display range than a single-cut novelty face.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), PSL Chalinda Square is a licensed geometric-display option — the kind of squared Thai voice used for tech, sport and modern packaging, chosen when a studio wants PSL's version and can license it.
## Character design and tone
**PSL Chalinda Square is a display Thai face built on squared, geometric letterforms, as its name states, giving Thai headlines a modern, technical, blocky character rather than a traditional handwritten flow.** Squared construction reads as contemporary and structured, which is why the style recurs across tech, gaming and sport branding.
As a display family, it is drawn for impact at large sizes, where the squared silhouette does the work; it is not intended for running text. Because the exact loop treatment, corner radius and proportions are specific to this PSL cut, verify the letterforms against the foundry's specimens before committing — the same due diligence we advise for any [display face](/fonts/categories/display/) in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
Thai and Latin ship together, so PSL Chalinda Square can set bilingual headlines and lockups without a separate Latin display face.
## Weights and availability
**PSL Chalinda Square is sold as a six-font family, licensed and downloaded through the PSL store.** It is delivered as TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) files, per the foundry's [About Our Fonts](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) page.
The font is not on Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts or any free CDN. Buy it from the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/) under the appropriate licence for your use.
## Best use cases
**PSL Chalinda Square is the right pick when a commercial project needs a licensed squared Thai display voice with several cuts.** Strong briefs:
- Tech, gaming and sport branding wanting a modern, structured Thai display
- Logos, lockups and headline systems needing a squared geometric character
- Packaging and posters where a blocky Thai voice signals contemporary and bold
- Bilingual Thai–English display lockups from one licensed family
- Signage and titles that must read as engineered rather than handwritten
Where it doesn't fit: body text (display only), budget and open-source projects (use a free display face), and traditional or elegant briefs that call for a serif or handwritten voice.
## Pairings
**PSL Chalinda Square needs a quiet body face underneath it, since the display face carries the personality.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a neutral OFL body sans for paragraphs beneath Chalinda Square headlines
- **Angsana New** — the Windows-bundled Thai serif where a traditional body contrast is wanted
- **PSL Kittithada** — other PSL families for a unified commercial-print system
## Licensing
**PSL Chalinda Square is commercial proprietary software from the PSL foundry, licensed per user or per computer, with separate educational, personal-home and commercial-use terms.** There is no free tier; embedding, webfont deployment and redistribution require the correct PSL licence, verified directly with the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), or for an open squared/display alternative see [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-display.mdx
## What PSL Display is
**PSL Display is a commercial Thai display typeface from PSL SmartLetter, the foundry and trademark of designer Phanlop Thongsuk, sold today as the four-style PSL Display Pro family.** It is one of the defining "obscure loop" faces of modern Thai typography: consonant heads are not removed, but shrunk to small slab-like nibs.
PSL SmartLetter is a one-designer foundry in the most literal sense — the [foundry's own history](https://psl2.mundesigns.com/our-story/) documents that Phanlop Thongsuk built his catalogue on hands-on experience in sign painting, billboard lettering, and book page layout, and that every PSL typeface ships as a complete family with hand-tuned kerning. That commercial-lettering background shows in PSL Display's confident, sign-ready silhouette.
The foundry currently sells the face as PSL Display Pro (พีเอสแอล ดิสเพลย์ โปร), alongside a reworked PSL Display New Pro family. Within this catalogue it sits next to [PSL Kittithada](/fonts/psl-kittithada/), the foundry's other widely recognised release.
## Character design and tone
**Wikipedia's Thai typography survey places PSL Display in the "obscure loop" subcategory of modern Thai typefaces, describing its character heads as "highly reduced" so they "appear as a small slab or nib".** That puts it in the middle ground between traditional looped text faces and fully loopless designs.
In practice, the loops on consonants such as ถ, ภ, and น contract into compact terminal marks rather than open circles. The result reads as modern and international at display sizes while keeping just enough of the loop's positional cue to stay unambiguously Thai — a different trade-off from fully loopless geometrics like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), which delete the head entirely.
The tone is assertive and commercial: this is lettering-derived display type, built by a designer who painted signs and billboards before digitising fonts. It carries headlines, banners, and promotional layouts rather than paragraphs.
## Weights and availability
**The current retail version, PSL Display Pro, is sold by the foundry as a four-style family — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic — for 500 Thai baht, with single styles at 300 baht.** A reworked PSL Display New Pro family is also offered in the same store.
Files ship as .ttf and .otf, and the foundry's [technical documentation](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) states that its hinting keeps Thai vowels and tone marks from floating away from or colliding with base consonants. Latin support is real, not token: inspection of a publicly hosted PSL Display TTF (a PSLxDisplay derivative, version 1.000, 2004) shows all 26 uppercase and 26 lowercase Latin letters plus 87 Thai codepoints across 378 glyphs.
PSL Display is not on Google Fonts and has no legal free download. Purchase runs through the [official PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/product/psl-display-pro-family/).
## Best use cases
**PSL Display earns its licence fee in Thai display work that wants a modern voice without going fully loopless — headlines, signage, packaging fronts, and promotional layouts.** Strong briefs:
- Retail and promotional signage, where its sign-painting lineage is native territory
- Print headlines and magazine display setting at large sizes
- Packaging and label fronts that need Thai display presence with Latin support in one file
- Thai-Latin bilingual banners and posters, given its full basic Latin set
Where it doesn't fit: body text (it is a display face), open-source or budget-free projects, and web projects that need a webfont licence — for those, open-licensed loopless faces such as [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) are the standard free route, with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for the body copy.
## Pairings
**PSL Display works as the display voice above a quiet, open-licensed Thai body sans.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the default open-licensed Thai body sans; lets PSL Display own the headline tier
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — a lighter, contemporary loopless body sans for cleaner, airier layouts
- **[PSL Kittithada](/fonts/psl-kittithada/)** — same-foundry companion when the whole layout stays inside the PSL catalogue
## Licensing
**PSL Display is paid, per-seat commercial software: the foundry's licensing page states that "one license covers only one user or one computer", with terms running from one year across educational, personal/home, and commercial categories (including print and sign shops).** Verify current pricing and terms on the [PSL licensing page](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) before deploying.
The PSL catalogue also carries historical weight here: per Wikipedia's Thai typography article, the foundry began suing publishers that used its fonts without licences in 2002, and a 2003 Thai court ruling upheld copyright protection for its fonts — a precedent-setting moment for the Thai type industry. Treat PSL licence terms as actively enforced, not theoretical.
If the budget does not support a commercial licence, the free alternatives are [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) for geometric loopless display, [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for a rounder modern voice, and [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for accompanying body text — all open-licensed. More context on Thai letterform anatomy lives in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/) and the full [font library](/fonts/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-freestyle-classic.mdx
## What PSL Freestyle Classic is
**PSL Freestyle Classic is a commercial casual, freestyle Thai display face from the PSL foundry, designed by Phanlop Thongsuk and sold as a small "Pro Family" under per-user commercial licensing.** As its name signals, it is an informal, hand-styled display face for casual headlines rather than a document text face.
PSL (PSL SmartLetter) is an established Thai commercial foundry with a catalogue of more than a hundred families. According to the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/), PSL Freestyle Classic is offered as a two-font family starting at 500 baht — a compact, focused display release.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), PSL Freestyle Classic is the licensed casual-script option in the PSL catalogue, chosen when a project wants an informal Thai display voice with PSL's drawing and is willing to license it rather than use a free handwritten face.
## Character design and tone
**PSL Freestyle Classic is a casual, freestyle Thai display face, as its name states — informal and hand-styled rather than a strict geometric or serif design, built for warmth and personality at display sizes.** The freestyle character suits playful, friendly and lifestyle contexts where a rigid face would feel too corporate.
As a display design, it lives at larger sizes where the hand-made quality reads clearly; it is not intended for long body text. Because the exact stroke treatment and rhythm are specific to this PSL cut, verify the letterforms against the foundry's specimens before committing — the same due diligence we advise for any commercial [handwritten face](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
Thai and Latin ship together, so PSL Freestyle Classic can set informal bilingual headlines without a separate Latin script face.
## Weights and availability
**PSL Freestyle Classic is sold as a compact two-font family, licensed and downloaded through the PSL store.** It is delivered as TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) files, per the foundry's [About Our Fonts](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) page.
The font is not on Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts or any free CDN. Buy it from the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/) under the appropriate licence for your use.
## Best use cases
**PSL Freestyle Classic is the right pick when a commercial project needs a licensed casual, hand-styled Thai display voice.** Strong briefs:
- Lifestyle, food and hospitality branding wanting a warm, informal Thai headline
- Casual packaging, menus and promotional pieces with a friendly tone
- Event and campaign graphics that should feel personal rather than corporate
- Bilingual Thai–English casual headlines from one licensed family
- Social and retail creative needing an approachable, hand-made Thai display
Where it doesn't fit: body text (display only), formal and corporate work (use a sans or serif), and budget or open-source projects that should reach for a free handwritten face.
## Pairings
**PSL Freestyle Classic needs a quiet, legible body face underneath its casual headline voice.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a neutral OFL body sans for paragraphs beneath Freestyle Classic headings
- **TH Sarabun New** — the government-standard body face where a formal contrast is wanted under a casual title
- **PSL Kittithada** — other PSL families for a unified commercial-print system
## Licensing
**PSL Freestyle Classic is commercial proprietary software from the PSL foundry, licensed per user or per computer, with separate educational, personal-home and commercial-use terms.** There is no free tier; embedding, webfont deployment and redistribution require the correct PSL licence, verified directly with the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), or for an open casual/handwritten alternative see [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/) or [Itim](/fonts/itim/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-kanda-modern.mdx
## What PSL Kanda Modern is
**PSL Kanda Modern (sold as PSL Kanda Modern Pro) is a commercial loopless Thai sans by Phanlop Thongsuk of PSL SmartLetter, sold directly from the foundry's store as a six-style family for ฿800.** It is the "modern" — loopless — cut in the PSL Kanda line, one of the most widely seen font families on Thai television.
The Thai name is พีเอสแอล กานดา โมเดิร์น. PSL is an abbreviation of PSL SmartLetter, a pseudonym of designer Phanlop Thongsuk, whose name appears directly in the embedded font metadata: "Copyright (c) Phanlop Thongsuk, 1995-2004. All rights reserved" ([OnlineWebFonts metadata](https://www.onlinewebfonts.com/download/f822ec5dda32d760e655436d1c758b61), accessed 2026-07-04). The foundry markets itself as "The Font Company that sold to Apple" ([PSL SmartLetter homepage](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/), accessed 2026-07-05) and describes its founder as combining experience in font design, signboard writing, and book layout ([PSL SmartLetter — Our Story](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/our-story/)).
The parent PSL Kanda family carries unusual cultural weight: a [Pantip forum thread](https://pantip.com/topic/41811639) documents its use across most Channel 3 news programs, all Channel 5 programming including news tickers, and all Channel 7 programs since 2022, plus advertising and municipal signage. If you have watched Thai broadcast news, you have read this family. For the foundry's display serif counterpart, see [PSL Kittithada](/fonts/psl-kittithada/).
## Character design and tone
**PSL Kanda Modern is a loopless ("modern" style) Thai sans — its letterforms drop the traditional terminal loops of looped Thai text faces — with full Basic Latin (A–Z, a–z) alongside the Thai Unicode block for bilingual setting.** The "modern" label denotes the loopless (Roman-like) category in Thai type classification ([Thai typography, Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography), accessed 2026-07-05), and the published character map shows full Basic Latin alongside the Thai glyphs ([OnlineWebFonts metadata](https://www.onlinewebfonts.com/download/f822ec5dda32d760e655436d1c758b61), accessed 2026-07-05).
The loopless construction is what gives the face its broadcast-era neutrality: without the head loops of a traditional looped face, consonants read as clean strokes that hold up in fast-moving lower thirds and tickers. It is the same design logic that drives contemporary loopless faces like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [DB Helvethaica X](/fonts/db-helvethaica-x/), but with the PSL house character that Thai viewers associate with news graphics.
The foundry states that its families are built as complete regular/italic/bold/bold-italic sets with careful attention to Thai vowels and tonal marks ([PSL SmartLetter — Our Story](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/our-story/)) — the mark positioning matters most exactly where this font lives, in small on-screen text. For the anatomy behind looped versus loopless Thai type, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Weights and availability
**PSL Kanda Modern Pro ships as six styles — Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Extra, and Extra Italic — sold as a family pack for ฿800 or ฿300 per single style on the official PSL SmartLetter store.** Source: [official product page](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/product/psl-kanda-modern-pro-family/), accessed 2026-07-04.
The metadata record for the ExtraSP variant shows Version 1.0 with a release date of October 2004, inside a copyright window of 1995–2004 — this is a mature, long-shipping commercial family, not a recent release. It is not on Google Fonts and there is no legal free download; copies circulating on free-font aggregator sites are unauthorized, a point Pantip repliers stress when identifying the family.
## Best use cases
**PSL Kanda Modern is the right choice when a design needs the exact voice of Thai broadcast news and mainstream commercial signage, and the budget covers a per-user commercial license.** Strong briefs:
- Broadcast-style motion graphics — lower thirds, tickers, and news-parody or documentary work that must read as "Thai TV"
- Advertising and promotional material aimed at a mass Thai audience
- Signage systems in the mainstream commercial register the parent family already occupies in municipal signage
- Bilingual Thai–Latin layouts, since the character map covers full Basic Latin
Where it doesn't fit: open-source or zero-budget projects. For a loopless Thai sans under the SIL OFL, use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) instead — both are free for commercial use, unlike any PSL font.
## Pairings
**PSL Kanda Modern works as a display and interface voice over an open-licensed Thai body sans, or alongside its own foundry siblings.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed Thai body standard; lets PSL Kanda Modern carry headlines and callouts while long text stays free to deploy
- **[PSL Kittithada](/fonts/psl-kittithada/)** — foundry sibling display serif, for print work that stays inside one PSL license purchase
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — open-licensed geometric loopless sans for secondary hierarchy when the PSL license covers only headline use
## Licensing
**PSL Kanda Modern is paid commercial software: PSL fonts are licensed per user or per computer ("One license covers only one user or one computer"), with license duration starting from one year, across educational, personal, and commercial categories.** Terms: [PSL SmartLetter — About Our Fonts](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/), accessed 2026-07-04.
Despite unauthorized copies circulating on free-font sites, this is not a free font — buy it from the [official store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/product/psl-kanda-modern-pro-family/) at ฿800 for the six-style family or ฿300 per style. Free alternatives with a comparable loopless character under the SIL OFL: [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), and for body text [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/). Browse the full [font library](/fonts/) for more open-licensed options.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-kittithada.mdx
## What PSL Kittithada is
**PSL Kittithada (พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา) is a paid Thai typeface from PSL SmartLetter, a Bangkok type foundry, sold as a ten-style pack covering five weights from Thin 35 to Bold 75 with a matching italic for each.** It is not free, it is not on Google Fonts, and the foundry offers no trial cut.
PSL stands for PSL SmartLetter, a type company based in the Min Buri district of Bangkok. Its official site, fontpsl.com, carries the copyright line "copyright PSL SmartLetter 1995-2011" — evidence that the foundry has been selling Thai type since the mid-1990s, longer than most Thai foundries still trading today. Kittithada has its own series page there under the name "Kittithada Special".
The working sales channel today is the PSL online store at psl.mundesigns.com, which names its operators plainly as "PSL SmartLetter and Phanlop Thongsuk". Phanlop Thongsuk is also the name recorded inside the PSL Kittithada Pro font files themselves. The older fontpsl.com site is still online but built in Flash, so it is effectively unusable in current browsers.
## Is PSL Kittithada free to download?
**No. PSL Kittithada is a fully commercial typeface that must be licensed from PSL SmartLetter. There is no free-for-personal-use tier, no trial, and no legitimate free font library that carries it.** Nearly every page advertising a "PSL Kittithada free download" is distributing an unauthorised copy.
That is not only our reading. On f0nt.com, the oldest Thai font community forum, a member asked for the PSL Kittithada files and a moderator refused outright, writing that handing it over would break the law because the real thing is sold commercially only. The thread ends with no download link.
The consequence people overlook is where the risk lands. Commercial Thai fonts are protected works under Thai copyright law, and installing a file from a free-download site and then using it in client work, printed packaging, or an embedded webfont is unlicensed commercial use. That liability sits with the agency and the brand owner, not with whoever uploaded the file. Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) covers how the rules actually work.
If the budget is not there, the correct route is a Thai font under the SIL Open Font License, which really is free for commercial use — we list them all under [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/).
## Every PSL Kittithada weight, including Bold
**The PSL Kittithada Pro Family pack contains ten styles: five weights — Thin 35, Light 45, Roman 55, Medium 65, Bold 75 — each in an upright and an italic cut.** The PSL store lists them with both English and Thai names:
1. PSL Kittithada Pro Thin 35 — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา ทิน 35
2. PSL Kittithada Pro Light 45 — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา ไลท์ 45
3. PSL Kittithada Pro Light 45 Italic — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา ไลท์ 45 เอน
4. PSL Kittithada Pro Roman 55 — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา โรมัน 55
5. PSL Kittithada Pro Roman 55 Italic — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา โรมัน 55 เอน
6. PSL Kittithada Pro Medium 65 — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา มีเดียม 65
7. PSL Kittithada Pro Bold 75 — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา โบลด์ 75
8. PSL Kittithada Pro Thin 35 Italic — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา ทิน 35 เอน
9. PSL Kittithada Pro Medium 65 Italic — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา มีเดียม 65 เอน
10. PSL Kittithada Pro Bold 75 Italic — พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา โบลด์ 75 เอน
**Anyone searching for "PSL Kittithada Bold" wants the file named PSL Kittithada Pro Bold 75, which sells on its own for ฿300.** You do not have to buy the whole pack to get the heavy headline cut.
Note the numbering: 35 / 45 / 55 / 65 / 75 is the classic numeric weight-grading convention, where a higher number is heavier. "Roman 55" therefore means the regular weight, not a Latin-only cut, and เอน is PSL's Thai word for italic.
One detail that lets you verify a genuine file: the ten fonts are OTFs named PSL239pro.otf through PSL248pro.otf. PSL numbers every font in its catalogue rather than naming the files in full. If your files are named differently, they did not come from the foundry.
## Price and how to buy it legitimately
**At the date of checking, the PSL Kittithada Pro Family pack costs ฿1,200 and individual styles cost ฿300, bought directly from the PSL SmartLetter online store.** These are one-off desktop purchases, not a subscription.
That pricing makes PSL Kittithada unexpectedly accessible for a commercial Thai family — ฿300 for a single weight undercuts most commercial Latin licences by a wide margin. For a freelancer who needs Bold 75 for one headline, there is very little reason not to buy it properly.
Check before paying: a desktop licence does not cover webfont embedding via `@font-face`, embedding inside an application, or redistribution. Those uses need separate terms agreed with PSL directly. The store product pages publish no webfont terms, so ask first rather than assuming.
## PSL Kittithada RD Pro versus Pro
**The PSL store sells a second pack called PSL Kittithada RD Pro Family, which also contains ten styles and also costs ฿1,200.** The product page does not explain what RD stands for, and we found no foundry documentation that does, so we are not going to guess.
What is certain is that they are two distinct products. If you are matching files to an old job that opens with missing or substituted fonts, check whether the source used Pro or RD Pro before buying, or line lengths and layout will not match the original.
## Free Thai alternatives to PSL Kittithada
**If the brief is "I want a heavy Thai headline face like PSL Kittithada but I have no licence budget", the lawful answer is a Thai font under the SIL Open Font License — genuinely free for commercial use, no permission needed, no payment.** Four that cover different situations:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — Cadson Demak's loopless Thai sans in nine weights up to Black (900), with an italic at every weight. A wider weight range than PSL Kittithada, and the best pick if you need a full weight system for nothing.
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — another loopless Cadson Demak sans, slightly rounder than Kanit, workable for both headlines and body text.
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the looped Thai sans that is the Thai government document standard, useful as body text under any display headline.
- **[The full free Thai font category](/fonts/categories/free/)** — every family with its licence verified individually.
One caveat: no free font is a drop-in twin for PSL Kittithada. The letterforms differ. If you are reworking an existing file already set in PSL Kittithada and need character-for-character parity, buying the licence is the only route; substituting a different family will shift every line break in the layout.
To compare them with your own text before deciding, use the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Other PSL families in the same catalogue
**If you are already licensing PSL, staying inside one catalogue gives a more coherent type system than mixing foundries.** Worth looking at alongside Kittithada:
- **[PSL Display](/fonts/psl-display/)** — the catalogue's headline-side option
- **[PSL Kanda Modern](/fonts/psl-kanda-modern/)** — a more contemporary register in the same family
- **[PSL Sans Serif](/fonts/psl-sans-serif/)** — the sans option for body text and interface work
- **[PSL Omyim](/fonts/psl-omyim/)** — a casual register for friendlier briefs
For how the Thai foundries position themselves against each other, see the [Thai type foundries map](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/).
## Best use cases
**The structure of PSL Kittithada — five weights from very light to very heavy, each with an italic — is the structure of a family built to run headlines and body text in one system, not a display-only face.** Working guidance by weight:
- **Bold 75** — headlines, signage, magazine covers, promotional copy on packaging that has to read at a distance
- **Medium 65** — subheads, column headers, and labels in layouts with several levels of hierarchy
- **Roman 55** — body text and running paragraphs; the default weight for print
- **Light 45 / Thin 35** — oversized settings, book covers, and anything that needs air; not for small sizes
- **The italics** — emphasis, cited titles, and captions without reaching for a second family
Where it does not fit: open-source projects, anything that requires shipping the font files on to someone else, templates sold for others to use, and web work where a webfont licence has not been negotiated. Use an OFL face for all four.
## Name variants and spellings
**This family is searched for under several names, all referring to the same typeface:**
- **PSL Kittithada** — the official catalogue name
- **กิตติธาดา (Kittithada)** — the Thai name; used alone it still means this face
- **พีเอสแอล กิตติธาดา** — the full Thai name PSL uses in its store
- **PSL Kittithada Pro** — the current OTF release on sale
- **PSL Kittithada RD Pro** — the second pack, a separate product
- **Kittithada 35 / 45 / 55 / 65 / 75** — referring to a cut by its weight number; 75 is Bold
## Licensing
**PSL Kittithada is proprietary software owned by PSL SmartLetter. A licence must be purchased before use, personal or commercial, and no term permits redistributing the files.** Current pricing is ฿1,200 for the ten-style pack or ฿300 for a single style. Verify terms and current prices with the [official PSL SmartLetter store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/product/psl-kittithada-pro-family-2/) before buying.
Webfont embedding, application embedding, and bundling the files into a product you resell all fall outside a standard desktop licence and need separately negotiated terms. For a comparable register under an open licence with none of those restrictions, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), and compare the terms side by side in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-omyim.mdx
## What PSL Omyim is
**PSL Omyim (พีเอสแอล อมยิ้ม) is a commercial Thai display font from PSL SmartLetter with curved, rounded, flowing letterforms the foundry says were inspired by the shapes of lollipops and warm smiles — the Thai name อมยิ้ม plays on both meanings.** First released in 2006, it is sold today in its updated retail form, PSL Omyim Pro.
PSL SmartLetter is a Bangkok foundry whose PSL font copyrights date back to 1995 and whose catalogue exceeds 100 fonts. It credits founder Phanlop Thongsuk, whose background spans font design, signboard writing, and book layout, and its store byline markets it as "The Font Company that sold to Apple." The foundry's legacy catalogue also lists a "PSL Omyim New" series built around the same design.
Within the [Thai display font landscape](/fonts/categories/display/), PSL Omyim sits at the soft, cheerful end of the spectrum — the counterpart to harder-edged advertising display faces. It shares a catalogue with [PSL Kittithada](/fonts/psl-kittithada/), the foundry's better-known workhorse.
## Character design and tone
**PSL Omyim is drawn to convey happiness, cuteness, and cheerfulness while remaining readable, per the foundry's own design brief.** Every stroke curves; the letterforms flow with the rounded softness of a candy shape rather than the straight stems and cut terminals of a corporate Thai sans.
That rounded silhouette is the entire personality of the font. Where a geometric display face projects confidence, PSL Omyim projects friendliness — the typographic equivalent of a smile on a package shelf. It reads as warm at large display sizes and keeps enough structure that short runs of text stay legible rather than dissolving into decoration.
The family ships with Latin glyphs alongside the Thai range, so bilingual packaging lockups and Thai-English logo work stay within one file. For the mechanics of setting Thai and Latin together, see our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Weights and availability
**The current PSL Omyim Pro family contains four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic — sold on the official PSL SmartLetter web store at 300 baht per style or 500 baht for the family pack.** That gives two weights (Regular and Bold), each with an italic companion.
The version history runs in two eras. The original PSL-Omyim fonts (Regular, Bold, Italic) were version 1.000, marked "2006 initial release"; the updated PSL Omyim Pro Regular is version 3.001, released July 2016. Purchase runs through the [official product page](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/product/psl-omyim-pro-family/).
PSL Omyim is not on Google Fonts and has no legal free download. Any "free download" of the font circulating outside the official store is unlicensed — PSL cites a NECTEC legal confirmation that its fonts are copyrighted software.
## Best use cases
**The foundry positions PSL Omyim for applications that need a soft, cute feel: packaging for cosmetics, skincare, baby products, school products, and maternity products, plus logos, social media graphics, and brand design.** Strong briefs:
- Baby and children's product packaging where the type itself must smile
- Cosmetics and skincare lines aimed at a sweet, approachable shelf presence
- School and stationery products — notebooks, supplies, kids' brands
- Café, dessert, and snack branding that wants candy-shop warmth
- Social media graphics and promotional creative for friendly consumer brands
Where it doesn't fit: body text at reading sizes, corporate identity work that needs authority, and open-source or no-budget projects — for those, free rounded-friendly alternatives like [Mali](/fonts/mali/), [Itim](/fonts/itim/), and [Kodchasan](/fonts/kodchasan/) cover similar cheerful territory under open licenses.
## Pairings
**PSL Omyim carries the display layer; pair it with a quiet, open-licensed Thai body sans so the cuteness stays a headline act.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the neutral open-licensed Thai body sans; lets PSL Omyim's rounded display voice own the hierarchy
- **Anuphan** — a lighter, modern Thai sans for UI text and captions under playful display headers
- **[Mali](/fonts/mali/)** — a handwritten-style Google Font for secondary accents when the brief leans fully cute
## Licensing
**PSL Omyim is paid, per-user commercial software: one license covers one user or one computer, across three tiers — educational use, home/personal use, and commercial use (including print shops, sign shops, and organizations) — with license duration starting from one year.** Verify current terms and pricing on the [PSL SmartLetter licensing page](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) before deploying in client work.
Because licensing is per-user and time-bound, agencies should budget seats per designer rather than treating a single purchase as a studio-wide asset. If the budget doesn't support commercial licensing, the honest route is an open alternative: [Mali](/fonts/mali/), [Itim](/fonts/itim/), or [Kodchasan](/fonts/kodchasan/) for the cute display layer, with [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) as the body companion — all free for commercial use. Browse the full [Thai font library](/fonts/) for more options.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-praewsuda-serif.mdx
## What PSL Praewsuda Serif is
**PSL Praewsuda Serif is a commercial Thai serif family from the PSL foundry, designed by Phanlop Thongsuk and sold under per-user commercial licensing with roman, italic and bold cuts.** It is PSL's serif entry for editorial and formal Thai settings, distributed through the PSL store rather than any free channel.
PSL (PSL SmartLetter) is an established Thai commercial type house with a catalogue of more than a hundred families. The [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/) lists Praewsuda Serif Pro at 500 baht and offers a Bold Italic cut, which confirms a full roman/italic/bold/bold-italic complement typical of PSL's "Pro" families.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), PSL Praewsuda Serif is the licensed alternative to free Thai serifs — chosen when a project wants PSL's specific serif drawing and spacing across a complete style set.
## Character design and tone
**PSL Praewsuda Serif is, as the name states, a serif Thai family, drawn in PSL's refined, standardised house style rather than as a decorative display face.** Serif construction gives Thai text a more formal, editorial tone than a sans, which suits books, documents and traditional print.
The family's roman, italic and bold styles let it carry hierarchy and emphasis within running text — the everyday requirement for a text serif that free single-weight faces cannot always meet. Because exact loop treatment and contrast vary between PSL cuts, check the specific letterforms against the foundry's specimens before committing, the same due diligence we advise for any commercial face in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
Thai and Latin are bundled together, so PSL Praewsuda Serif can set mixed Thai–English editorial text without a separate Latin serif, the usual expectation for a full [serif Thai](/fonts/categories/serif/) family.
## Weights and availability
**PSL Praewsuda Serif is sold as a "Pro" family including Bold Italic, licensed and downloaded through the PSL store.** It is delivered as TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) files, per the foundry's [About Our Fonts](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) page.
The font is not on Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts or any free CDN. Buy it from the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/) under the appropriate licence for your use.
## Best use cases
**PSL Praewsuda Serif is the right pick when a commercial Thai project needs a licensed serif with a full roman/italic/bold range.** Strong briefs:
- Thai book and editorial typesetting requiring true italic and bold within text
- Formal documents, certificates and programmes wanting a refined serif tone
- Magazine and long-form layouts standardised on the PSL catalogue
- Bilingual Thai–English editorial work needing one licensed serif for both scripts
- Traditional and heritage brands where a serif reads as trusted and established
Where it doesn't fit: budget and open-source projects (use a free serif), and web-first products where licensing cost is the deciding factor.
## Pairings
**PSL Praewsuda Serif pairs with a quiet body sans or with other PSL families for catalogue consistency.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — an OFL body sans for captions and tables beneath a Praewsuda serif text setting
- **Angsana New** — the Windows-bundled Thai serif for legacy office and print workflows
- **PSL Kittithada** — other PSL families for a unified commercial-print system
## Licensing
**PSL Praewsuda Serif is commercial proprietary software from the PSL foundry, licensed per user or per computer, with separate educational, personal-home and commercial-use terms.** There is no free tier; embedding, webfont deployment and redistribution require the correct PSL licence, verified directly with the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), or for an open serif alternative see [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) or [Charm](/fonts/charm/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/psl-sans-serif.mdx
## What PSL Sans Serif is
**PSL Sans Serif is a commercial Thai sans-serif family from the long-running PSL foundry, designed by Phanlop Thongsuk and sold as a ten-font set under per-user commercial licensing.** It is PSL's general-purpose modern Thai sans, positioned for print, corporate and commercial design rather than free web distribution.
PSL (PSL SmartLetter) is one of Thailand's established commercial type houses, and its catalogue runs to more than a hundred families. According to the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/), PSL Sans Serif ships as ten fonts starting at 1,200 baht, placing it among the foundry's larger, fuller families.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), PSL Sans Serif is the paid-catalogue counterpart to the free Thai sans faces — chosen when a studio wants PSL's specific drawing and spacing across a full weight set and is willing to license it.
## Character design and tone
**PSL Sans Serif is, as the name states, a sans-serif Thai family, drawn in the clean, standardised style PSL applies across its catalogue rather than as a decorative display face.** PSL's own materials emphasise careful character spacing and consistent construction across a complete family of roman, italic and bold styles.
As a modern Thai sans, it prioritises clarity and even colour on the page over ornament, which suits body and interface roles as well as headings. Because loop treatment and exact proportions vary between PSL cuts, verify the specific look against the foundry's specimens before committing — the same due diligence we recommend for any commercial face in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/).
The family bundles Thai and Latin, so it can set mixed Thai–English text without a separate Latin companion, the usual expectation for a full [sans-serif Thai](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) release.
## Weights and availability
**PSL Sans Serif is sold as a ten-font family, licensed and downloaded through the PSL store rather than any free channel.** It is delivered as TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) files, per the foundry's [About Our Fonts](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/) page.
The font is not on Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts or any free CDN. Buy it from the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/home/) under the appropriate licence for your use. Because it is a large family, it gives more weight range than most single-purchase Thai sans faces.
## Best use cases
**PSL Sans Serif is the right pick when a commercial Thai project needs a full, professionally spaced sans family and can license it.** Strong briefs:
- Corporate identity and brand systems that need a consistent Thai sans across weights
- Print collateral, reports and packaging where PSL's spacing and finish are wanted
- Advertising and editorial work already standardised on the PSL catalogue
- Bilingual Thai–English layouts needing one licensed family for both scripts
- Signage and wayfinding requiring clear, even Thai sans at a range of sizes
Where it doesn't fit: budget and open-source projects (use a free face), and web deployments where licensing cost is the deciding factor.
## Pairings
**PSL Sans Serif pairs with a quiet body face or with other PSL families for catalogue consistency.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — an OFL body sans for contexts where part of the layout must stay licence-free
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — a loopless OFL display sans for headlines over a PSL Sans Serif text setting
- **PSL Kittithada** — other PSL families for a unified commercial-print system
## Licensing
**PSL Sans Serif is commercial proprietary software from the PSL foundry, licensed per user or per computer, with separate educational, personal-home and commercial-use terms.** There is no free tier; embedding, webfont deployment and redistribution require the correct PSL licence, verified directly with the [PSL store](https://www.psl.mundesigns.com/en/about-our-fonts/). See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how commercial terms compare, or use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) where an open licence is required.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/purisa.mdx
## What Purisa is
**Purisa is a free, GPL-licensed casual handwritten Thai face by Poonlap Veerathanabutr, distributed as part of the TLWG National Fonts package.** It brings an informal, hand-drawn tone to the otherwise document-focused National Fonts, and it is free to download and redistribute.
According to [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Purisa carries the copyright "Poonlap Veerathanabutr, 2003, 2004" and is released under the GNU GPL by the Thai Linux Working Group. It is the informal, personality-forward member of the free National set — the one you reach for when a layout should feel handwritten rather than typeset.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Purisa fills the casual-script slot in the free Thai catalogue, a role otherwise dominated by newer OFL faces.
## Character design and tone
**Purisa is a looped (มีหัว) Thai face drawn in a relaxed, casual hand — irregular strokes, a friendly bounce and terminals that read as pen-made rather than mechanical.** The tone is informal and warm, closer to a marker or ballpoint than to a formal type design.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ keep the traditional Thai structure explained in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/), but the strokes wobble just enough to signal a human hand. That casual quality is the whole point: Purisa is for warmth, not precision.
The Latin companion follows the same relaxed, handwritten logic, so bilingual settings keep a consistent informal voice across both scripts.
## Weights and availability
**Purisa ships Regular and Bold, each with an oblique companion — four TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the rest of the TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and installed on most Linux systems, making it a readily available free handwritten Thai option.
## Best use cases
**Purisa is the right choice when a Thai layout needs a free, informal, hand-drawn voice.** Strong briefs:
- Children's materials, worksheets and educational content wanting a friendly tone
- Casual invitations, greeting cards and personal notes
- Community, school and non-profit design that should feel human and approachable
- Craft, market and homemade-product labels with a handmade feel
- Annotations and callouts that need to read as handwritten within a document
Where it doesn't fit: body text at length (the casual strokes tire the eye), and formal or corporate work — for those, a document face like [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the correct tool.
## Pairings
**Purisa works as a display or accent hand over a neutral Thai body face.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL body sans to carry paragraphs while Purisa handles headings and notes
- **TH Sarabun New** — the standard Thai document face for the serious text around a casual title
- **[Itim](/fonts/itim/)** — an OFL casual-handwritten Thai alternative if you want a webfont build
## Licensing
**Purisa is free software by Poonlap Veerathanabutr, released under the GNU General Public License and distributed by TLWG, so it is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL casual Thai hand with webfont support, see [Itim](/fonts/itim/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/sarabun.mdx
## Sarabun on Google Fonts is not TH Sarabun PSK, and not TH Sarabun New
**If you are looking for the Thai government font — the one a ministry template, a thesis guideline or a regulation names as "TH Sarabun PSK" — this is not the page you need. Go to [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) (the 2007 original that Thai regulations name) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) (the 2011 revision, and our hub page for the whole family). The Sarabun on this page is the later web-oriented redraw published on Google Fonts: a different set of files, a different family name and a different licence.** Word matches fonts by the exact family-name string, so "Sarabun" never satisfies a template that asks for "TH Sarabun PSK", however similar the two look.
The three names side by side:
| | TH Sarabun PSK | TH Sarabun New | Sarabun (this page) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publisher | Department of Intellectual Property + SIPA via f0nt.com (2007) | SIPA via f0nt.com (2011) | Google Fonts, from Cadson Demak's repository (added 28 October 2013) |
| Cuts | 4 | 4 | 16 (8 weights Thin–ExtraBold, each with italic) |
| Licence | DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement | GPL 2.0 or later + font-embedding exception | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Named in Thai regulations | Yes | No | No |
| In Microsoft 365 as a cloud font | Yes | No | No |
| In Google Docs | No | No | Yes (since 7 February 2019) |
| Right tool for | Word, PDF, official correspondence | Word, PDF, Office on Mac | Web, apps, UI, Google Docs |
Google's own description says Sarabun "is the 'TH Sarabun New' font, made available under the Open Font License" — same lineage, but the files you download from Google Fonts carry "Copyright 2018 The Sarabun Project Authors" under OFL 1.1, not SIPA's copyright. We checked the full Google Fonts family list: neither TH Sarabun PSK nor TH Sarabun New is in it. If you are producing a document for a Thai agency, do it in Word with the name the template specifies. If you are building a website or working in Google Docs, use this Sarabun. The [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) works through the licence differences; the Thai version of this page is at [Sarabun (ภาษาไทย)](/th/fonts/sarabun/).
## What Sarabun is
**Sarabun is a looped humanist Thai sans-serif designed by Suppakit Chalermlarp that evolved from TH Sarabun New into the de facto standard for Thai government documents, public-sector branding, and long-form reading on screen.** It ships in eight weights with matching italics and covers Thai, Latin, and Vietnamese glyphs. The Google Fonts release in 2013 pushed its reach far beyond Thailand's civil service. One precision matters: "standard for government documents" describes the Sarabun lineage as a whole; the name Thai regulations actually specify is TH Sarabun PSK, as the section above sets out.
The font sits in the same family tree as TH Sarabun PSK, the original national font released by the Department of Intellectual Property and SIPA in 2007 and made the government standard by cabinet resolution in 2010 as part of the [13-font National Fonts collection](/fonts/categories/national-fonts/) — often called a "royal gift" set, which is inaccurate: the thirteen were competition winners selected by the Department of Intellectual Property. Suppakit redrew the typeface for screen and web use, tightened the spacing, and added a broader weight range while keeping the familiar looped consonant heads that Thai readers trust for body text; the upstream repository is maintained by Cadson Demak.
In practice, if you are reading a Thai PDF from a ministry, a university, a hospital or a Thai airline boarding pass, you are most likely reading Sarabun or one of its direct siblings. That ubiquity makes it the safest default when a Thai designer needs a font that simply disappears into the page.
## Character design and tone
**Sarabun uses a generous x-height, low stroke contrast, and clearly drawn loops on consonants like ก, ถ and ภ, which keeps the typeface readable at 10-12pt on low-resolution laser output.** The loop terminals are slightly ovoid rather than perfectly circular, which gives a softer reading rhythm than older bureaucratic faces.
Stroke weights are nearly monolinear, with subtle tapering where the pen would naturally lift. Vowel marks (สระอี, สระอา) and tone marks (ไม้เอก, ไม้โท) sit at a conservative distance above the base line — far enough to avoid collision with ascenders like ป and ฝ, close enough to track with the word. Thai numerals are full-height and match the cap height of the Latin.
The Latin companion is an unassuming humanist sans in the lineage of PT Sans, with open apertures and a two-storey a. It pairs cleanly with the Thai rather than competing with it, which is why Sarabun is so often used for bilingual forms.
## Weights and availability
**Sarabun ships in eight weights from Thin to ExtraBold with matching italics, making it one of the most flexible free Thai type systems currently in distribution.** It is available on [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Sarabun), on f0nt.com in its original TH Sarabun form, and as a self-hosted web font from many Thai hosting providers.
Subsetting is straightforward: the Thai subset weighs roughly 35-50KB per weight in WOFF2 format, so a four-weight deployment fits comfortably under 250KB before Brotli compression. For government use, TH Sarabun New (the non-Google original) remains the canonical file for Word and PDF workflows.
## Best use cases
**Sarabun earns its keep on long Thai text blocks where neutrality and screen readability matter more than personality.** Strong briefs include:
- Government and NGO reports, policy papers, annual reports
- University course pages and academic PDFs with mixed Thai-English content
- Healthcare and insurance forms that must remain readable at small sizes
- Bilingual invoices, receipts and admin UI for Thai SaaS products
- News websites where the body text must stay calm and legible
Where it doesn't fit: luxury packaging, cinematic posters, fashion editorial. Sarabun is the opposite of expressive — anyone trying to sell emotion or prestige should reach for [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/), [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) or a display face.
## Pairings
**Sarabun pairs best with Latin humanist sans or slab serifs that share its moderate x-height and low contrast.** Three pairings that work in production:
- **Inter** — identical humanist skeleton and near-matching x-height, ideal for Thai-English product UI
- **Source Serif Pro** — quiet serif that adds editorial weight when Sarabun handles the UI text
- **IBM Plex Mono** — tabular companion for code or data tables inside bilingual documents
## Licensing
**Sarabun is released under the SIL Open Font License, which permits free commercial use, bundling, and modification provided the original copyright notice is preserved.** That OFL grant covers the Google Fonts release (and Cadson Demak's 2018 revisions of all thirteen National Fonts for Google Fonts) only. SIPA's original files use different licences: [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) embeds GPL 2.0-or-later with a font-embedding exception in the font files themselves, and [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) ships with the Department of Intellectual Property and SIPA's own "DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement" — we read both from the official zips on 8 September 2026. An earlier version of this page said all three shared the OFL; that was wrong. Verify the current Sarabun license file at the [Google Fonts specimen page](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Sarabun) or on the [fonts directory](/fonts/). For government PDFs, use TH Sarabun PSK or TH Sarabun New, whichever the template names.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/sawasdee.mdx
## What Sawasdee is
**Sawasdee is a free, GPL-licensed loopless (ไม่มีหัว) Thai sans by Pol Udomwittayanukul, distributed with the TLWG National Fonts.** It is one of the few free loopless Thai faces from the National Fonts era, giving open-source projects a modern, headless Thai voice long before the OFL loopless boom.
According to [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Sawasdee carries the copyright "Pol Udomwittayanukul, 2007" and is released under the GNU GPL by the Thai Linux Working Group. Where Garuda and Loma are looped document faces, Sawasdee drops the loops for a cleaner, more contemporary silhouette.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Sawasdee is the free National set's answer to the loopless trend that later defined faces like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/).
## Character design and tone
**Sawasdee is a loopless Thai sans that removes the traditional consonant loops in favour of open, terminal-cut forms, giving Thai text a cleaner and more modern silhouette than the looped National faces.** The tone is simple and contemporary rather than decorative.
Dropping the loop on consonants like ก, ถ and ภ is the defining move of loopless Thai, a category we cover in the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/); it modernises the texture but demands open apertures to stay legible, which Sawasdee generally maintains at reading sizes. Strokes are close to monoline, keeping the overall feel plain and functional.
The Latin companion is a simple sans, adequate for mixed Thai–English text where a headless, modern look is wanted without paying for a commercial family.
## Weights and availability
**Sawasdee ships Regular and Bold, each with an oblique companion — four TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the rest of the TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and installed on most Linux systems, so it is a broadly available free loopless Thai option.
## Best use cases
**Sawasdee is the right choice when a project needs a free, modern, loopless Thai voice without a commercial licence.** Strong briefs:
- Open-source software and Linux localisation wanting a headless, modern Thai UI face
- Budget branding and signage that need a loopless look for free
- Simple headings and short display text in non-profit and community design
- Bilingual layouts that want a clean, contemporary Thai–Latin pairing at no cost
- Prototypes and drafts standing in for a commercial loopless family
Where it doesn't fit: premium branding and long-form web deployment — for those, an OFL loopless face like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) brings wider weights and webfont builds.
## Pairings
**Sawasdee pairs with a looped Thai body face for contrast or with a modern loopless sans for consistency.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a looped OFL body sans to carry paragraphs beneath loopless Sawasdee headings
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — a rounder OFL loopless sans for a modern headline over Sawasdee text
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — the geometric OFL loopless standard when you outgrow Sawasdee's two weights
## Licensing
**Sawasdee is free software by Pol Udomwittayanukul, released under the GNU General Public License and distributed by TLWG, so it is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL loopless Thai sans with webfont support, see [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or browse the [loopless category](/fonts/categories/loopless/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/silom.mdx
## What Silom is
**Silom is Apple's loopless Thai display system font, first bundled with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003 and still shipping with macOS today — Apple's official font list for macOS Monterey records it as "Silom 14.0d1e1".** It is preinstalled on every Mac, so Thai designers on Apple hardware have had it available for free-at-point-of-use display work for over two decades.
The name (สีลม) comes from Si Lom Road, the spine of Bangkok's main business district. That fits the naming pattern of Apple's Thai system font family, which reads like a Bangkok street map: Krungthep, Thonburi, Sathu, Ayutthaya, and later [Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/).
One disambiguation matters. A free-for-personal-use "Silom" by Tom Tor circulates on font download sites — that is an unrelated 8px Latin-only bitmap font that merely shares the name. Its license and designer credit do not apply to Apple's Thai Silom.
## Character design and tone
**Silom pairs a loopless Thai character set with Latin letters taken directly from Chicago, the 1984 Macintosh UI typeface from the Susan Kare era — Wikipedia notes that Krungthep and Silom "use Chicago for their Latin letters and hence can be used as modern replacements" for that historic face.** The result is a chunky, retro-interface display voice that no other Thai system font has.
The Thai set is loopless: consonants drop the traditional หัว (loop terminals), giving the face a simplified, modern silhouette even though its lineage reaches back to Apple's early-1990s Thai localization work (the embedded copyright reads 1992–2011). Strokes are heavy and evenly weighted, matching Chicago's bold bitmap-era proportions, so mixed Thai-Latin settings like "สวัสดี Macintosh" sit on one visual rhythm.
Per the ThaiFaces specimen, coverage includes the full Thai consonant, vowel, tone-mark, and Thai-numeral set, so running Thai text renders completely — it is the tone of the face, not missing glyphs, that limits it to display sizes.
## Weights and availability
**Silom ships in a single Regular weight, preinstalled with macOS — there is no legal standalone download, and Apple does not sell it separately.** A 2004 review of Thai support on the Mac confirms this was true from the start: Panther's five additional Thai fonts (Ayutthaya, Bangkok/Krungthep, Sathu, Silom, Thonburi) were all supplied in regular weight only.
One weight means no typographic hierarchy within the family. If a project needs Light-to-Black range in a loopless Thai voice, use an open-licensed family such as [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) instead — see our [typography guide](/learn/typography/) for building Thai type hierarchies.
## Best use cases
**Silom fits retro-Mac and nostalgia-driven Thai display work on Apple platforms, where its Chicago Latin reads as a deliberate design reference.** Sensible briefs:
- Retro interface homages and pixel-era visual identities for Thai audiences
- Display headlines in Mac-native design, video, and motion work
- Bilingual Thai-Latin lockups that trade on classic Macintosh character
- Personal and internal projects produced entirely on licensed macOS machines
Where it doesn't fit: web embedding and cross-platform products (the font cannot legally be redistributed with a site or app), any project needing multiple weights, and long-form body text — for those, reach for [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), or another open-licensed [display family](/fonts/categories/display/).
## Pairings
**Silom carries the display layer; pair it with a quieter Thai text family for everything below the headline.** Three pairings:
- **[Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/)** — Apple's modern Thai UI family, the natural body companion inside the same macOS ecosystem
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — open-licensed Thai body sans when the project must also ship on the web
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless sans for mid-level hierarchy that echoes Silom's simplified forms
## Licensing
**Silom is proprietary Apple software, bundled with macOS under Apple's software license agreement — it is not separately sold, and there is no legal free download.** The embedded notice reads "Copyright (c) 1992-2011 by Apple Inc. All rights reserved." Use it within the terms of your macOS license; do not embed it in websites, apps, or products, and do not download "Silom" files from free-font sites, which carry the unrelated Tom Tor bitmap font. For a loopless Thai display voice under an open license that you can deploy anywhere, use [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), both free for commercial use.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/sriracha.mdx
## What Sriracha is
**Sriracha is a casual handwritten Thai display typeface from Cadson Demak with relaxed, informal stroke character — closer to felt-tip marker handwriting than to calligraphic script.** It ships as a single Regular weight under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
Where [Pattaya](/fonts/pattaya/) is loud and commercial, and [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) is formal and romantic, Sriracha is everyday casual — the kind of handwriting a Thai designer might scrawl on a sticky note or a cafe chalkboard. The name references the city (and the hot sauce), carrying an implied tone of approachable, unpretentious casualness.
Among free Thai handwritten fonts, Sriracha fills the "casual marker" niche that Architect's Daughter or Patrick Hand fill in Latin. It is recognisably informal without being novelty.
## Character design and tone
**Sriracha uses even, medium-weight strokes with slight irregularities that mimic felt-tip or marker pen handwriting, with looped consonants drawn in a relaxed, unpolished hand.** Stroke weight is relatively consistent across characters — no dramatic contrast, no calligraphic pressure variation.
Loops on ก, ถ, ภ are drawn as slightly irregular circles, as though sketched quickly. Stems wobble very slightly from perfectly vertical, reinforcing the handwritten character. Terminals end with small rounded caps rather than sharp points or brushes.
Tone marks and vowel signs follow the casual tone, drawn with the same medium-weight stroke and slight irregularity. The Latin companion is a matching marker-style handwritten sans in the Kalam / Architects Daughter territory.
## Weights and availability
**Sriracha ships only one weight — Regular — consistent with its single-purpose casual display use.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Sriracha) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/sriracha).
File size is approximately 50-65KB in WOFF2 with Thai + Latin subset. Single-weight script fonts are typically deployed on headline, logo, and short-text use only — body text is not the use case.
## Best use cases
**Sriracha is the right Thai font for projects that need casual, friendly, handwritten character.** Strong briefs:
- Cafe and casual restaurant chalkboard-style branding
- Social media graphics where handwritten reads as authentic and approachable
- DIY, craft, and maker-market branding — farmers' markets, artisan fairs
- School and classroom materials where a teacher's-handwriting feel is appropriate
- Personal and lifestyle blog design, journal-style content
Where it doesn't fit: any body text use, corporate communications, luxury or premium branding, and formal publications.
## Pairings
**Sriracha pairs with clean body sans that give its handwritten personality room to show.** Three pairings:
- **Sarabun** — neutral Thai body sans for paragraphs under Sriracha headlines
- **Kalam** — matching Latin marker-style handwritten for bilingual casual pairing
- **[Mitr](/fonts/mitr/)** — humanist loopless Thai for subheads under Sriracha display
## Licensing
**Sriracha is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Sriracha) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/sriracha). No paid tier exists.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/srisakdi.mdx
## Srisakdi and TH Srisakdi are the same typeface
**Yes — Srisakdi on Google Fonts and TH Srisakdi (ศรีศักดิ์) from Thailand's 13 National Fonts are the same design; only the distribution build differs, and Google Fonts drops the TH prefix.** Both come in two weights, Regular and Bold, and both are free.
The TH prefix is the National Fonts project's naming convention — all thirteen faces carry it: TH Sarabun PSK, TH Charmonman, TH Kodchasan and the rest. In practice that means if a government document template names the font "TH Srisakdi", you need the SIPA build, not the Google Fonts one, because the internal family names differ and Word will not find a match.
The name is what sets this font apart from most free releases. **Prof. Srisakdi Charmonman Ph.D** produced the original design, then commissioned Akarameytee — Pairoj Peamjakapong and Bavorn Joradol — to finish the drawing for SIPA's National Fonts project. The font carries the professor's given name; [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) carries his surname. Two fonts in the same set, named after the same man.
On 7 September 2010 the Thai cabinet adopted the 13 National Fonts as the official fonts for government agencies, with implementation required by 5 December 2010. In 2018 Cadson Demak reworked the whole set with Google Fonts, and Srisakdi entered the library on 22 August 2018.
## TH Srisakdi Bold and the full weight list
**Srisakdi ships exactly two weights — Regular (400) and Bold (700) — in upright cuts only. No italics, no intermediate weights, and both arrive in the same download.** There is no separate Bold file to find.
Two weights is the smallest family in Cadson Demak's National Fonts revision, and it is a real constraint: there is no Light for oversized title settings and no Medium to step through between the two. If a layout needs more than two levels, build the hierarchy from size and spacing rather than weight.
The Google Fonts build is two TTF files of roughly 102 KB each, with no variable-font build. Character coverage spans Thai, Latin, Latin Extended, and Vietnamese.
**Choosing a weight:** Srisakdi is a high-contrast handwriting face, so the thin strokes in Regular thin out when scaled down or shown on a low-resolution display. For titles over a colour field or a photograph, start with Bold.
## How to download TH Srisakdi free
**Srisakdi is a legitimate free download from Google Fonts — the family ZIP contains both TTF weights, no registration, no payment.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Srisakdi specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Srisakdi), click "Get font", and download the family.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Srisakdi:wght@400;700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Srisakdi', serif;`. Reserve it for headings in the stylesheet; body text is not its job.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Srisakdi repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Srisakdi) holds the font files, project documentation, and the OFL notice.
**For government work:** the original TH Srisakdi is still distributed through the National Fonts project and the f0nt.com release page for the thirteen fonts. Use that build when opening or editing documents laid out against a departmental template.
To see the letterforms with your own text first, use the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Name variants and spellings
**The name is a romanised Thai personal name, so it is written several ways.** All of these mean the same font:
- **TH Srisakdi** — the National Fonts name, used in government document templates
- **Srisakdi** — the Google Fonts name, with the TH prefix dropped
- **ศรีศักดิ์** — the Thai name, after Prof. Srisakdi Charmonman
- **TH-Srisakdi** — the hyphenated form, common in filenames
- **TH Srisakdi Bold** — the Bold (700) cut, included in the same download
## Character design and tone
**The project repository describes Srisakdi as imitating "early Thai Ratanakosin style of controlled handwriting using western ink and paper" — a clerk's hand, regularised into a typeface.** The letterforms keep the slant and flicked tail of period manuscript writing, which gives every line a documentary, old-world cast.
The foundry's own framing is generous: the repository calls Srisakdi "an ideal of old style long reading Thai text face for retrospective occasions." That claim deserves a caveat. Google Fonts categorises the family as display rather than text, it ships only two weights, and the handwriting detail that charms at 40px clots at 14px. Treat Srisakdi as a headline and titling instrument.
**For paragraph-length retrospective text, the face built for exactly that job is [Thasadith](/fonts/thasadith/).** Its repository records that Thasadith was originally developed as part of the Srisakdi family and only later spun off, built on the question of what Srisakdi would have been had it been born as an upright typeface during the hot metal period, with letterforms readjusted to suit typesetting conditions. That is why Thasadith is the correct text partner for Srisakdi rather than merely a face that happens to look compatible.
The Latin is styled to match the Thai manuscript flavour, so bilingual title cards stay in period.
## Best use cases
**Srisakdi belongs on anything that needs to read as a Thai historical document: exhibition titles, ceremony print, and retrospective editorial covers.** Strong briefs:
- Museum and heritage exhibition titling, especially Rattanakosin-era subject matter
- Certificates, invitations, and ceremonial print
- Period film and book title treatments
- Restaurant and spirits branding trading on pre-modern Thai identity
- Headings in government documents that must stay inside the mandated National Fonts set
Where it fails: interface text and body copy at screen sizes, corporate identity of any contemporary kind, and data-heavy layouts. It is a costume, and costumes do not belong in spreadsheets. For the same voice at text sizes, use [Thasadith](/fonts/thasadith/); for a looser script feel, [Sriracha](/fonts/sriracha/).
## Pairings and near neighbours
**Srisakdi sets the headline; everything else on the page should stand back.** Three pairings:
- **[Thasadith](/fonts/thasadith/)** — the partner by descent: the family that split off from Srisakdi and was reworked to typeset as running text, for body copy under Srisakdi titles
- **[Maitree](/fonts/maitree/)** — looped serif body when the page should stay antique throughout
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral body that lets the display face do all the talking, or [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) when the whole document must stay inside the National Fonts set
For other free Thai handwriting faces worth comparing, see [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) and the [Thai display font category](/fonts/categories/display/).
## Licensing
**Srisakdi is released under the SIL Open Font License — free for commercial use, web embedding, modification, and bundling, provided the OFL notice stays with the files.** The copyright line reads "Copyright 2018 The Srisakdi Project Authors." Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Srisakdi) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Srisakdi).
The original TH Srisakdi was likewise distributed free under the National Fonts project, so neither generation of the design has ever cost anything. Compare the terms against commercial Thai families in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), or browse everything free in the [free Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/sukhumvit-set.mdx
Sukhumvit Set (ฟอนต์สุขุมวิท) is the loopless Thai sans that ships with the Mac. If you searched because you want it on Windows, iPhone or Android, the first section says exactly where it lives and what you can do. Its origins, the Sukhumvit Tadmai difference, weights, licence and the free substitute follow.
## Can you use Sukhumvit Set on Windows, iPhone and Android?
**Sukhumvit Set ships only with macOS. On iPhone and iPad it is available to documents but is not the system font (the Thai system font on iOS is Thonburi). Windows and Android do not have it and there is no legitimate way to add it, because section 2.E of [Apple's Software License Agreement](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSequoia.pdf) permits the bundled fonts to be used only "while running the Apple Software". The legitimate routes are to licence Sukhumvit Tadmai from Cadson Demak, or to use Prompt for free.**
| Device | Has Sukhumvit Set? | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Mac | Yes — six weights in Font Book | Document and design work on that Mac; the file may not be passed on |
| iPhone / iPad | Yes, as "document support" | Usable in document apps; the iOS Thai interface uses Thonburi |
| Windows | No | Licence Sukhumvit Tadmai, or install Prompt for free |
| Samsung / Android | No | Default Thai font is Noto Sans Thai; use Prompt in apps and on the web |
### On Mac
**All six weights of Sukhumvit Set are already on the Mac.** Apple's [Fonts included with macOS Sonoma](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) lists Sukhumvit Set Thin, Light, Text, Medium, Semi Bold and Bold at version 17.0d1e2 and notes that "most of these fonts are installed and enabled automatically". [Apple's System Fonts list](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/) tags all six as "macOS system font".
The scope of use is licence section 2.E: "you may use the fonts included with the Apple Software to display and print content while running the Apple Software; however, you may only embed fonts in content if that is permitted by the embedding restrictions accompanying the font in question". Display and print on the Mac: yes. Embedding in a PDF: as far as the permission shown in Font Book → Show Font Info allows. Copying the file to another machine: no.
### On iPhone and iPad
**Present, but not the system font.** Apple's developer list tags Sukhumvit Set "iOS document support" and "watchOS document support", whereas [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/) is tagged "iOS system font" — so the Thai text in iPhone menus and apps is Thonburi, and Sukhumvit Set is there so documents that specify it render correctly. iOS has no system-font switch; per the [iPhone User Guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-and-manage-fonts-iphb2517689c/ios), fonts added from the App Store are for "documents you create" and are managed under **Settings → General → Fonts**. The 2013 episode in which Apple trialled Sukhumvit as the iOS 7 system font and reversed course is covered under "Character design and tone".
### On Windows
**Windows does not have Sukhumvit Set.** Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list) contains no Sukhumvit entry at all. The Thai fonts on Windows are Leelawadee UI in the default install, plus [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/), [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) and the UPC families in the optional Thai Supplemental Fonts feature — all looped designs, none of them a stylistic stand-in for Sukhumvit Set. Teams that need Sukhumvit on Windows legitimately have two routes: licence Sukhumvit Tadmai from [Cadson Demak](https://fonts.cadsondemak.com/), which covers desktops on every platform per the licence bought, or install Prompt for free.
### On Samsung and Android
**Android does not have Sukhumvit Set.** Android's default Thai face is Noto Sans Thai, per the [Android system font configuration](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/main/data/fonts/fonts.xml) — also loopless. On Samsung, the system font changes only through the Galaxy Store via **Settings → Display → Font size and style → Font style → Download fonts**, per [Samsung's guide](https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-to-adjust-the-font-size-and-style-on-your-galaxy-phone/). Sukhumvit Set files extracted from macOS and pushed in through third-party font apps sit outside Apple's licence.
### The free font that installs everywhere: Prompt
**The properly licensed substitute that installs on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android alike is [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) — a loopless Thai sans from the same foundry, Cadson Demak, in nine weights with italics under the SIL Open Font License, [free from Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Prompt).** To install:
- **Windows** — right-click the .zip → **Extract**, then right-click the font files → **Install**, per [Microsoft's guide](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-font-b7c5f17c-4426-4b53-967f-455339c564c1)
- **Mac** — double-click the font file in Finder and click **Install**, per [Apple's Font Book guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/font-book/install-and-validate-fonts-fntbk1000/mac)
- **iPhone / iPad** — install through a font-manager app from the App Store and manage under **Settings → General → Fonts**; usable in document apps
- **Android / Samsung and the web** — use it in apps that accept font files, and embed it with `@font-face` or load it from Google Fonts, with full OFL rights
Other free options are compared under "Free alternatives to Sukhumvit Set" below.
## What Sukhumvit Set is
**Sukhumvit Set is the loopless Thai sans bundled with macOS, designed in 2012 by Anuthin Wongsunkakon of Bangkok type foundry Cadson Demak for client Apple Inc.** The AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) record states the brief plainly: a Thai family for marketing communication, assigned to sit side by side with Myriad Pro — the Latin face Apple used across its marketing at the time.
On a Mac, Sukhumvit Set is simply there: six weights in Font Book, no purchase, no download. **That convenience is also the licensing boundary** — the font arrives as part of the operating system, not as a product that can be bought or moved separately. The sections below cover where it comes from and what the licence permits.
It sits on macOS alongside Apple's other Thai faces, [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/), [Krungthep](/fonts/krungthep/) and [Silom](/fonts/silom/), all bundled under the same terms.
## Sukhumvit Set vs Sukhumvit Tadmai
**Sukhumvit Set is the version Apple ships with the system; Sukhumvit Tadmai is the family Cadson Demak developed from the same work and sells through its own catalogue.** If you are looking for a Sukhumvit you can properly licence, the answer is Tadmai, not Set.
Slanted's record of the family states that Sukhumvit Tadmai was developed from Sukhumvit with modified glyph details and recalculated proportions for screen readability. Initial weights were released in 2013; width adjustments plus Lao and Khmer support arrived in 2021. Credited designers are Anuthin Wongsunkakon and Stawix Ruecha for Thai and Latin, Suppakit Chalermlarp for Lao, and Sovichet Tep for Khmer.
**The decisive difference is range.** Sukhumvit Set on macOS gives six weights. Sukhumvit Tadmai runs ten — Air, Ultra Light, Thin, Light, Text, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold, Heavy — with italics throughout. For a brand system that needs both a hairline and a heavy, Tadmai is the only one of the two that gets there.
| | Sukhumvit Set | Sukhumvit Tadmai |
|---|---|---|
| How you get it | Bundled with macOS | Licensed from Cadson Demak |
| Weights | 6 | 10, with italics |
| Italics | None | Every weight |
| Usable on Windows | No | Yes, per licence |
| Usable as a webfont | No | Yes, with a web licence |
## Character design and tone
**Sukhumvit Set is loopless: the small circular heads that traditional Thai faces put on consonants such as ก and ถ are reduced to plain stroke ends.** Typotheque records the convention clearly — in Thai typographic usage, loopless faces with bolder letterforms tended to be cast as headlines, while thinner-stroked looped faces carried long columns of body text. A loopless system default therefore reads modern to some Thai eyes and stripped-down to others.
**That split played out publicly.** Typotheque records that Sukhumvit was used as a new system font in a beta version of iOS 7, drew strong negative feedback from users, and Apple reverted to the previously used [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/). It is the clearest documented case of loopless Thai failing as small-size body text while remaining well liked in display use — and Apple's current font list still reflects the outcome: Thonburi is the "iOS system font", Sukhumvit Set is "iOS document support".
Next to Myriad Pro, the intended Latin partner, Sukhumvit Set reads as a sibling: open counters, even stroke weight, quiet geometry — exactly the side-by-side relationship the AGI brief describes.
## Sukhumvit Set weights (Thin, Semibold, Bold)
**macOS Sonoma lists Sukhumvit Set in six weights — Thin, Light, Text, Medium, Semi Bold, and Bold — with no italics.** "Text" is the body cut; the name signals where Cadson Demak expected continuous reading to happen, rather than at a conventional Regular.
- **Thin** — very large sizes only; key-visual headlines, never small text
- **Light** — subheads and labels that want a lighter register
- **Text** — the intended body cut; use it wherever real paragraphs appear
- **Medium** — mid-weight for UI and buttons
- **Semi Bold** — in-line emphasis without jumping to Bold
- **Bold** — headlines and the family's heaviest available emphasis
The family does not appear on Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, or any open CDN, and Apple sells no standalone copy. A wider range means moving to Sukhumvit Tadmai or to one of the alternatives below.
## Where Sukhumvit Set comes from — can it run on Windows?
**Sukhumvit Set comes with the Mac. There is no separate Apple download, no licensing page, and no retail listing for this exact family. The short answer to "can I use it on Windows" is: not legitimately.** The only legitimate way to design with it is to own Apple hardware running macOS, where the bundled system licence covers normal document and design work on that machine.
The trap: extracted copies of the font files circulate on free-font aggregator sites. **Installing one of those on Windows, or self-hosting the family as a webfont, has no licence behind it at all** — the font ships inside macOS, not under any standalone font EULA a third party can rely on.
Common situations and what actually works:
- **A mixed Mac/Windows team** — pick a family licensed across both from the start: licence Sukhumvit Tadmai, or use [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for free
- **Sending files to a printer** — the printer needs the font too, and has no right to Sukhumvit Set. Convert type to outlines or change the font
- **Building a website** — no webfont licence exists, so Windows and Android visitors fall back to another face regardless. Use an open-licensed family
Teams that need licensed loopless Thai across platforms should contact [Cadson Demak](https://fonts.cadsondemak.com/), whose retail catalogue continues this design line as Sukhumvit Tadmai.
## Free alternatives to Sukhumvit Set
**[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) is the honest substitute: a loopless Thai sans from the same foundry, Cadson Demak, free on Google Fonts with a full weight range and italics.** Same loopless logic, open licensing that covers web embedding. If you only try one replacement, start here.
- **[Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/)** — cooler and slightly condensed, a good match where Sukhumvit Set would have set interface labels. OFL.
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — the heavier-duty option, loopless with sixteen styles, better for display work than quiet text. OFL.
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — nine weights, the most neutral of the group and the safest for cross-device rendering, and already Android's default Thai font. OFL.
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — OFL, drawn as a matched Thai-Latin pair, useful for design systems that must hold both scripts to one tone.
All four remove the platform problem entirely: installable on Mac and Windows, embeddable on the web, shippable to anyone. Compare them on your own copy in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/), or browse [loopless Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/loopless/).
## Best use cases
**Sukhumvit Set fits work that is produced and consumed entirely inside the Apple ecosystem.** Strong briefs:
- Keynote decks, Pages documents, and PDFs authored on macOS for Thai audiences
- UI mockups and prototypes of Apple-platform apps where the deliverable renders on a Mac
- Thai marketing comps that pair with Myriad Pro, the Latin companion the AGI record documents
Where it fails: public websites (no web licence, invisible to Windows and Android users), cross-platform brand systems, jobs that require handing font files to a supplier, and long Thai body text at small sizes — the exact reading complaint that pushed Apple back to [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/).
## Pairings
**Myriad Pro is the documented Latin partner; the AGI record says Sukhumvit Set was assigned to be used beside it.** Three pairings:
- **Myriad Pro** — the Latin face the family was built to accompany
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped open-licence body text under Sukhumvit Set display setting, matching the convention Typotheque records for long columns
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — serif contrast for editorial layouts
See the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) for bilingual system notes and the [fonts directory](/fonts/) for the full catalogue.
## Licensing
**Sukhumvit Set is commercial, bundled software: it ships inside macOS under Apple's system licence, and Apple publishes no separate purchase, web, or redistribution route for it.** It cannot be self-hosted, embedded in cross-platform products, or legitimately installed from third-party download sites. The operative wording is section 2.E of the [macOS licence](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSequoia.pdf): the fonts may be used "to display and print content while running the Apple Software", and embedded only as far as the font's own embedding permission allows.
There are two routes to licensed loopless Thai across platforms: contact [Cadson Demak](https://fonts.cadsondemak.com/) about licensing Sukhumvit Tadmai from its retail catalogue, or use [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) and [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) under the SIL Open Font License at no cost. Apple's [macOS Sonoma font list](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) documents the six bundled weights.
## Frequently asked questions about the Sukhumvit font
**The common questions about the Sukhumvit font are about getting hold of it — whether it can be downloaded free, whether it runs on Windows, and which version can be bought — and the short, sourced answers are below.**
### Can I download the Sukhumvit font for free?
**Sukhumvit Set cannot be downloaded — neither Apple nor Cadson Demak distributes it.** The free, properly licensed download is [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) from Google Fonts, from the same foundry. Sukhumvit Tadmai is the version you can licence from [Cadson Demak](https://fonts.cadsondemak.com/). "Free Sukhumvit Set" files on font sites were extracted from macOS.
### Is the Thai font on iPhone Sukhumvit or Thonburi?
**Thonburi.** [Apple's System Fonts list](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/) tags [Thonburi](/fonts/thonburi/) "iOS system font" and Sukhumvit Set "iOS document support" — present so documents that use it render, not the face in the device's menus. Apple trialled the swap in the iOS 7 beta in 2013 and reverted, as Typotheque records.
### Can I use Sukhumvit Set on Windows?
**Not legitimately.** Windows does not include it, per Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list), and Apple's licence limits use to running Apple software. Licence Sukhumvit Tadmai, which has more weights and full italics, or install [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for free by right-clicking the file → Install.
### Sukhumvit Set or Sukhumvit Tadmai — which one can I buy?
**Only Tadmai.** Sukhumvit Set is not sold at all; Apple commissioned it and ships it with macOS. Sukhumvit Tadmai is the family Cadson Demak developed further and sells itself, in ten weights with italics, usable on Windows and the web per the licence bought. Details are under "Sukhumvit Set vs Sukhumvit Tadmai" above.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/taviraj.mdx
## What Taviraj is
**Taviraj is a looped Thai serif from Cadson Demak with nine weights and matching italics, designed as a comprehensive editorial serif system for long-form reading and display use.** It is released under the SIL Open Font License on Google Fonts.
Among Cadson Demak's serif releases, Taviraj has the broadest weight range — Thin through Black, all with italics — which gives it more hierarchy flexibility than [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) or [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/). The design sits between Pridi's literary restraint and Charm's display ornamentation: quiet enough for body text, confident enough for display.
The tone is contemporary-editorial. Taviraj reads as a modern magazine serif rather than a classical book face, which suits brands that want serif authority with a current register.
## Character design and tone
**Taviraj uses moderate stroke contrast (roughly 1:2.5), fully looped consonants with slightly oval heads, and cleanly drawn terminals that balance restraint and presence across a broad weight range.** The face is drawn to hold its shape at Thin as well as Black, which is not easy to achieve in a Thai serif.
Loops on ก, ถ, ภ are drawn as subtle ovals rather than true circles, which gives the face a soft humanist rhythm. Terminals on ก, ง, and ร are cupped inward with a small, considered curl. At Thin, the face reads as light and elegant; at Black, it carries display weight without collapsing into sludge.
Italic cuts are true italics with a distinct slanted skeleton — not mechanical obliques. The Latin companion is a contemporary transitional serif in the Source Serif / Cormorant neighbourhood, with matching contrast and measured terminals.
## Weights and availability
**Taviraj ships nine weights from Thin (100) to Black (900) with matching italics across the full range — the most complete free Thai serif family currently available.** Download from [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Taviraj) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/taviraj).
File sizes are around 55-70KB per weight in WOFF2. For editorial production, a six-file loadout (Regular, Regular Italic, SemiBold, SemiBold Italic, Bold, Bold Italic) covers most hierarchy needs at around 370KB total.
## Best use cases
**Taviraj is built for contemporary editorial work that needs a full serif weight range.** Strong briefs:
- Thai magazine and digital editorial design — features, profiles, reviews
- Corporate annual reports that want serif authority with modern register
- Book design for non-fiction, business, and contemporary fiction
- Luxury and premium brand editorial collateral — catalogues, lookbooks
- Website body copy for long-form publications with extensive hierarchy needs
Where it doesn't fit: UI and product design, technical documentation, and casual or informal brands where serif feels mismatched.
## Pairings
**Taviraj pairs with contemporary humanist sans and with its own italic for full editorial hierarchy.** Three pairings:
- **Kanit** — geometric Thai sans for captions and subheads above Taviraj body
- **Prompt** — rounded Thai sans for UI elements alongside Taviraj editorial content
- **Source Sans 3** — humanist Latin sans for bilingual captions and pull quotes
See the [typography hub](/learn/typography/) for editorial layout guidance.
## Licensing
**Taviraj is released under the SIL Open Font License and is free for commercial use, modification, and bundling provided the OFL notice travels with the file.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Taviraj) or the [Cadson Demak catalogue](https://github.com/cadsondemak/taviraj). All weights and italics are included in the free licence.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-baijam.mdx
## What TH Baijam is
**TH Baijam (formally TH Bai Jamjuree CP) is one of Thailand's 13 National Fonts — a looped Thai text face in four styles, designed by the PITA team of Rapee Suveeranont and Virot Chiraphadhanakul and released free in 2007 by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property.** Named for the leaf of the rain tree (ใบจามจุรี), it carries the "TH" prefix of the government's royalty-free font set.
Its designers matter: Rapee Suveeranont is one of Thailand's most respected type figures, and the PITA team drew Baijam to make the traditional looped skeleton feel natural and current — heads made more organic, straight sections added into curves so the letters sit comfortably together.
The naming trap is worth flagging. Google Fonts hosts a **loopless**, techno-flavoured family called [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) by Cadson Demak. The original TH Baijam in the National Font package is a **looped** (มีหัว) face — a genuinely different design under the same name. See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for why the looped/loopless distinction changes everything about how a Thai face reads.
## Character design and tone
**TH Baijam keeps the looped Thai structure but relaxes it — consonant heads drawn to feel natural rather than mechanical, with straightened segments added into the curves for an even, settled rhythm.** The result is a looped text face that reads as contemporary without abandoning tradition.
The strokes are near-monolinear and the counters open, so the face holds up at document sizes and in print. Where the loops on many older Thai faces feel rigid, Baijam's read as considered and organic — the mark of a designer's hand rather than a system default.
The tone lands between the neutral document faces and the more expressive members of the National Font set: usable for text, but with enough warmth to give a page character. Its Latin companion is matched in size for even bilingual setting.
## Weights and availability
**TH Baijam ships four cuts — Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic — the standard National Font loadout, distributed as TrueType through f0nt.com.** Download it from the [f0nt.com National Fonts package](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/), the channel SIPA used for all thirteen originals.
If you want the loopless techno family instead, that is the separate Google Fonts [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) — different file, OFL licence, and a very different visual register.
## Best use cases
**TH Baijam suits work that wants a looped Thai face with warmth and a designer's polish, still inside the free National Font set.** Strong briefs:
- Body and heading text for reports and publications that want character, not just neutrality
- Bilingual Thai-English documents needing an even, organic texture
- Editorial and cultural layouts that value traditional looped construction
- General-purpose Thai text where Sarabun feels too plain
Where it does not fit: strict official templates that name Sarabun (use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)), and briefs that specifically want the loopless techno look of the Google [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/).
## Licensing
**TH Baijam is free to use: it is one of the 13 SIPA National Fonts released royalty-free by the Department of Intellectual Property for public and official use.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/). Commercial use, redistribution and embedding are permitted. For a plain-language guide to Thai font licences, see [/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-chakra-petch.mdx
## What TH Chakra Petch is
**TH Chakra Petch is the original SIPA National Font of that name — a modern loopless Thai face in four styles, designed by Thirawat Photwibunsiri and released free in 2007 by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property.** Named "diamond wheel" (จักรเพชร), it carries the "TH" prefix of the government's royalty-free set, and it is a separate file from the later Google Fonts family of the same name.
Chakra Petch is one of the National Font family's contemporary faces. Built on a squared, geometric logic, it strips the loops from the Thai skeleton to produce a clean, modern (ตัวไม่มีหัว) look — a deliberate step away from the traditional looped document faces around it in the set.
The name is now shared by two things, and the distinction is the reason to read this page. The Google Fonts [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/) is a later, OFL multi-weight family. The TH Chakra Petch documented here is the SIPA original, four styles, distributed free inside the National Font package — see [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for how loopless construction reshapes a Thai face.
## Character design and tone
**TH Chakra Petch is a loopless Thai face with a squared, geometric build: the traditional loops are opened out into clean strokes, giving the letters a modern, slightly technical silhouette.** Details that a document face would keep are pared back, which is what makes the face read as contemporary rather than formal.
The strokes are even and the terminals disciplined. Set as headings the geometric structure reads with confidence; the loopless heads keep the face looking current next to the looped members of the National Font family. Latin support sits alongside the full Thai character set.
The tone is modern and structured — a designed, forward-looking Thai face rather than a neutral office default. It signals contemporary intent, which is exactly the register a loopless construction lends.
## Weights and availability
**TH Chakra Petch ships four cuts — Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic — the standard National Font loadout, distributed as TrueType through f0nt.com.** Download it from the [f0nt.com National Fonts package](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/), the single channel SIPA used for all thirteen originals.
If you need the multi-weight webfont version, that is the separate Google Fonts [Chakra Petch](/fonts/chakra-petch/) family — different file, OFL licence, wider weight range and proper web packaging.
## Best use cases
**TH Chakra Petch suits modern, structured layouts that want a loopless Thai face from the free National Font set.** Strong briefs:
- Headings, titles and signage with a contemporary, geometric feel
- Technology, gaming and youth-facing design that wants a loopless look
- Posters and display work needing a modern Thai voice
- Bilingual Thai-English layouts with a clean, squared texture
Where it does not fit: strict official correspondence, which expects [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/), and long-form body reading, where a looped humanist face is easier on the eye.
## Licensing
**TH Chakra Petch is free to use: it is one of the 13 SIPA National Fonts released royalty-free by the Department of Intellectual Property for public and official use.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/). Commercial use, redistribution and embedding are permitted. For a plain-language guide to Thai font licences, see [/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-charm-of-au.mdx
## What TH Charm of AU is
**TH Charm of AU is the handwriting member of Thailand's 13 National Fonts — a script face drawn from traditional Thai certificate penmanship, designed by Kanlayanamit Noraratphutthi and released free in 2007 by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property.** Its name comes from the designer's university email address (charm@ksc.au.edu), and it carries the "TH" prefix of the royalty-free government font set.
Unlike the document faces in the National Font family, Charm of AU is expressive. It reproduces the pointed, flicked tails (หางแหลม) of formal Thai handwriting, the kind seen on hand-lettered certificates and diplomas. That makes it the family's decorative outlier — not a body face but a face for occasions.
Do not confuse it with the Google Fonts [Charm](/fonts/charm/) family or with [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/); those are separate later releases. TH Charm of AU is the original SIPA file, distributed inside the National Font package — see [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for the wider Thai script tradition it draws on.
## Character design and tone
**TH Charm of AU renders Thai letterforms as thin, sharp calligraphic strokes with distinctive pointed tails that flick outward in a hand-lettered flourish.** The strokes are high in contrast and deliberately delicate, which gives the face elegance at large sizes and makes it demanding to read in long runs.
The consonant heads follow the loop structure of formal Thai handwriting rather than the clean circular heads of a document sans. Ascenders and the flicked terminals carry most of the personality; set small, that detail collapses, which is why the face belongs in headings and short lines, not paragraphs.
The tone is ceremonial and traditional — closer to an award certificate than a memo. It reads as Thai penmanship rendered in type, which is exactly the register it was designed for.
## Weights and availability
**TH Charm of AU is distributed primarily as a single decorative Regular cut within the SIPA National Font package, as a TrueType file via f0nt.com.** As a script display face it was never scoped for the multi-weight hierarchy the document members carry; its job is one expressive line, not a type system.
Download it from the [f0nt.com National Fonts package](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/), the channel SIPA used to release all thirteen. Pair it with a plain body face rather than asking it to carry text.
## Best use cases
**TH Charm of AU is a display and occasion face — reach for it when a line needs the feel of formal Thai handwriting.** Strong briefs:
- Certificates, diplomas and awards where hand-lettered elegance is the point
- Invitations, greeting cards and ceremonial headings
- Titles and short display lines in traditional or cultural design
- Any brief that wants Thai calligraphic character without a lettering artist
Where it does not fit: body text of any length (the thin strokes and flicked tails tire the eye), government documents (use [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)), and UI. For a warm looped body companion, set the text in [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) and let Charm of AU carry only the heading.
## Licensing
**TH Charm of AU is free to use: it is one of the 13 SIPA National Fonts released royalty-free by the Department of Intellectual Property for public and official use.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/). Commercial use, redistribution and embedding are permitted. For a plain-language guide to Thai font licences, see [/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-k2d-july8.mdx
## What TH K2D July8 is
**TH K2D July8 is one of Thailand's 13 National Fonts — a looped Thai face in four styles designed by Kant Rodsawat, released free in 2007 by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property.** The "July8" in its name commemorates a creation date; the "TH" prefix marks it as part of the government's royalty-free font set.
The important surprise sits in its construction. The widely used Google Fonts family called [K2D](/fonts/k2d/) is a **loopless** geometric sans by Cadson Demak. The original TH K2D July8 in the National Font package is a **looped** (มีหัว) face — a different design with the same short name. Anyone searching "K2D" for a government document needs to know which file they are actually installing.
That makes TH K2D July8 the more traditional of the two: a looped text-capable face with enough character to read as distinctive rather than neutral. See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for how looped and loopless Thai construction differ and why it matters.
## Character design and tone
**TH K2D July8 keeps the classic looped Thai skeleton but refines it toward a clean, contemporary rhythm — looped consonant heads, even strokes, and a full character set of Thai and Latin.** The loops on ก, ถ and ภ are drawn openly, holding the traditional structure while smoothing the finish.
Compared with the strict document neutrality of Sarabun, K2D July8 carries a touch more personality, which pushes it toward headings and short display lines as much as body text. Its Latin companion sits at a matched size so bilingual settings stay even.
The overall tone is modern-but-rooted: recognisably a looped Thai face, drawn with the tidiness of a digital revival rather than the softness of handwriting.
## Weights and availability
**TH K2D July8 ships four cuts — Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic — the standard National Font loadout, distributed as TrueType through f0nt.com.** Download it from the [f0nt.com National Fonts package](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/), the single channel SIPA used to release all thirteen originals.
If you specifically want the loopless geometric sans, that is the separate Google Fonts [K2D](/fonts/k2d/) family — different file, different licence (OFL), wider weight range.
## Best use cases
**TH K2D July8 works best where a looped Thai face needs a little more character than a plain document sans.** Strong briefs:
- Headings and short display lines that want a traditional looped feel
- Posters, notices and signage with a modern-but-rooted tone
- Bilingual Thai-English layouts needing an even, distinctive text texture
- Editorial titling inside the free National Font set
Where it does not fit: strict official correspondence, which expects [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/), and screen UI, where [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) offers a broader system.
## Licensing
**TH K2D July8 is free to use: it is one of the 13 SIPA National Fonts released royalty-free by the Department of Intellectual Property for public and official use.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/). Commercial use, redistribution and embedding are permitted. For a plain-language guide to Thai font licences, see [/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-mali-grade6.mdx
## What TH Mali Grade 6 is
**TH Mali Grade 6 is the schoolchild-handwriting member of Thailand's 13 National Fonts — a playful, hand-drawn Thai face in four styles, designed by Sudarat Leotsithong and released free in 2007 by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property.** The name (มะลิ, "jasmine") and "Grade 6" nod to the tidy penmanship of a Thai primary-school pupil, and the "TH" prefix marks it as part of the royalty-free government set.
Among thirteen mostly sober document faces, Mali Grade 6 is the warm, friendly outlier. It reads like careful handwriting from a schoolbook — even, rounded, and approachable — which is exactly why it turns up on classroom worksheets, children's material and any layout that wants to feel human rather than official.
It shares a name and a spirit with the later Google Fonts [Mali](/fonts/mali/) family, but they are separate releases: the National Font original is a distinct file with its own licence. See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for where handwriting faces fit in the wider Thai type landscape.
## Character design and tone
**TH Mali Grade 6 imitates neat Thai pupil's handwriting: rounded, even strokes, gently informal consonant heads, and an unhurried, friendly rhythm.** During development its capitals were enlarged and its letter-heads standardised, which keeps the handwritten charm while making the face consistent enough to set as type.
The loops sit softly rather than mechanically, and the whole face carries a light, cheerful tone. Set at body sizes it stays readable in short runs; pushed larger it reads unmistakably as friendly handwriting. Thai vowels and tone marks keep the same relaxed hand so the illusion holds across a line.
The tone is warm and unofficial — the opposite register to Sarabun. It signals approachability, which is its entire reason for existing inside an otherwise formal font set.
## Weights and availability
**TH Mali Grade 6 ships four cuts — Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic — the standard National Font loadout, distributed as TrueType through f0nt.com.** Download it from the [f0nt.com National Fonts package](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/), the channel SIPA used for all thirteen originals.
For web projects that want the same friendly register with proper webfont packaging, the Google Fonts [Mali](/fonts/mali/) family is the OFL counterpart.
## Best use cases
**TH Mali Grade 6 is for anything that should feel handwritten, warm and approachable.** Strong briefs:
- Classroom worksheets, learning materials and children's content
- Friendly notices, greeting cards and informal invitations
- Packaging and branding that wants a hand-drawn, human touch
- Captions and short lines where a personable voice beats a neutral one
Where it does not fit: official documents (use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)), long-form body text, and any brief that needs to read as authoritative rather than friendly.
## Licensing
**TH Mali Grade 6 is free to use: it is one of the 13 SIPA National Fonts released royalty-free by the Department of Intellectual Property for public and official use.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/). Commercial use, redistribution and embedding are permitted. For a plain-language guide to Thai font licences, see [/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-niramit-as.mdx
## What TH Niramit AS is
**TH Niramit AS is one of the 13 National Fonts of Thailand — a four-style Thai text face designed by the Aksaramethi team (Phairot Piamprachakphong and Bowon Chonradon), released in 2007 and distributed free by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property.** It carries the "TH" prefix that marks the government's royalty-free document set, and it ships in Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic.
Niramit (นิรมิต, "created" or "conjured") is one of the readable text members of the National Font family rather than a decorative face. Where [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) became the default for formal correspondence, Niramit AS gave Thai offices a second document-grade option with a slightly softer, more open personality for reports, handouts and internal publications.
One point saves confusion. Google Fonts hosts a later typeface simply called [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/), a redrawn multi-weight OFL family. The original TH Niramit AS in the National Font package is a separate file with a different licence and a different weight set — see [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for how the SIPA originals and their Google descendants relate.
## Character design and tone
**TH Niramit AS is a looped Thai text face with even, near-monolinear strokes and open counters tuned for continuous reading at document sizes.** Its consonant heads are drawn cleanly enough to survive printing and photocopying, the same durability brief every National Font was built to meet.
The tone sits a step warmer than the strict neutrality of Sarabun. Terminals are calm, the rhythm is regular, and the face reads comfortably across long passages without drawing attention to itself. Thai tone marks and vowel signs are placed at a consistent weight so a ไม้เอก or สระอี stays legible above body text.
The Latin companion is a plain humanist sans matched in size to the Thai, keeping bilingual paragraphs even in colour — useful for the mixed Thai-English reports that Thai institutions produce constantly.
## Weights and availability
**TH Niramit AS ships four cuts — Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic — the standard National Font loadout, distributed as TrueType through f0nt.com.** There is no light or display weight; like every SIPA original it was scoped as a document face, not a branding system.
Download it from the [f0nt.com National Fonts package](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/), the channel SIPA used to release all thirteen. For web work, the Google Fonts [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) family offers proper webfont packaging and a wider weight range.
## Best use cases
**TH Niramit AS is a comfortable document face for anything that wants to read a little warmer than Sarabun while staying inside the free National Font set.** Strong briefs:
- Internal reports, handouts and briefing documents for Thai institutions
- Long-form printed material where a softer body face is welcome
- School and university coursework where a National Font is required but Sarabun is not mandated
- Bilingual Thai-English documents that need an even, unfussy body texture
Where it does not fit: display and branding work (four document weights cannot carry a hierarchy) and web UI, where [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) or the OFL [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) redraw package better.
## Licensing
**TH Niramit AS is free to use: it belongs to the 13 SIPA National Fonts that the Department of Intellectual Property released royalty-free for public and official use.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/). Commercial use, redistribution and embedding are permitted. For a plain-language guide to Thai font licences, see [/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-sarabun-new.mdx
## What TH Sarabun New is
**TH Sarabun New is the 2011 revision of TH Sarabun PSK, the looped Thai sans that Thailand's Council of Ministers named a National Font on 7 September 2010, and it is a free download from f0nt.com under GPL 2.0 with a font exception.** Suppakit Chalermlarp (ศุภกิจ เฉลิมลาภ) drew the original; SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property published the revision through f0nt.com on 19 August 2011. That one release page has logged 10,444,940 downloads, read on 22 August 2026.
The name is the job description. สารบรรณ (sarabun) means documentary affairs — the Thai civil-service term for correspondence and filing. This is a face built to set memos, forms and gazette pages, and nothing else.
The National Font project (ฟอนต์แห่งชาติ) released 13 typefaces carrying a TH prefix and ordered state agencies to stop using private-sector fonts by 5 December 2010, King Bhumibol Adulyadej's 83rd birthday. Sarabun was the one singled out for official correspondence, displacing [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), the Windows-bundled serif that had been the de facto standard. You can see the whole set on our [National Fonts category page](/fonts/categories/national-fonts/).
One correction worth making, because it circulates widely and this page previously carried it: the Government Gazette of Thailand (ราชกิจจานุเบกษา) has used **TH Sarabun PSK** since January 2011, not TH Sarabun New. Wikipedia's National Fonts article names PSK explicitly as the Gazette face.
Version 1.35, dated 15 November 2019, is still the current release as of 22 August 2026. There has been no newer version in nearly seven years. We re-checked on 8 September 2026: the download counter had moved to 10,491,320 and the files inside the zip are still Version 1.35.
This is ThaiGraph's hub page for the whole Sarabun family: TH Sarabun New, the 2007 original [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/), the third-party IT๙ variant, the Google Fonts [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), the 2010 cabinet resolution that made Sarabun "the government font", and the Windows-update rendering bug people search for most. The Thai version is at [TH Sarabun New (ภาษาไทย)](/th/fonts/th-sarabun-new/).
## TH Sarabun New or TH Sarabun PSK — which one do I install?
**Install both. Use TH Sarabun PSK whenever a template, form or regulation names it by name, which covers most Thai official work, and use TH Sarabun New when you need the freer licence or when Thai tone marks misbehave in Office on a Mac.** The two files are the same typeface: beartai quoted Suppakit Chalermlarp saying that physically the appearance, the letterspacing and the line spacing are all identical, so a document set in one and reopened in the other does not reflow.
The full side-by-side comparison — what the 2011 revision actually changed, the SIPA statement that argues for standardising on PSK, and what to do with legacy files that already embed it — is on the sibling page for [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/). The table read from the actual files is in the next section.
## What is the difference between TH Sarabun PSK and TH Sarabun New?
**The outlines, sidebearings and line spacing are identical. Three things genuinely differ: the family name embedded in the files (`TH SarabunPSK` versus `TH Sarabun New`), the 2011 fix for rendering on low-resolution screens, and the licence.** We downloaded both official zips from f0nt.com on 8 September 2026 and read the font metadata directly with fontTools, so this table comes from the files rather than from hearsay.
| | TH Sarabun PSK | TH Sarabun New |
|---|---|---|
| Published on f0nt.com | 28 June 2007 (in the 13-font set) | 19 August 2011 |
| Family name inside the files | `TH SarabunPSK` | `TH Sarabun New` |
| Version inside the files | Version 1.1 2006 | Version 1.35 2011 (1.35 dated 15 November 2019) |
| Embedded copyright | Copyright (c) 2006 Department of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Commerce, and SIPA | Copyright (c) 2010-2011 SIPA |
| Licence | DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement (a .txt inside the zip): free use, copying and distribution; no selling the file on its own; adapted versions must notify DIP and SIPA and drop the name | GPL 2.0 or later with a font-embedding exception (embedded in the fonts' own name table) |
| What the 2011 revision changed | — | f0nt.com: "various defects in the original TH Sarabun PSK" fixed, unitemised / beartai quoting the designer: sharper display at small sizes / NSTDA quoting SIPA: fixes thin, faint strokes on Windows XP |
| Filenames in the official zip | `THSarabun.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold.ttf`, `THSarabun Italic.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf` | `THSarabunNew.ttf`, `THSarabunNew Bold.ttf`, `THSarabunNew Italic.ttf`, `THSarabunNew BoldItalic.ttf` |
| Named in Thai regulations and templates | Yes (TH Sarabun PSK, 16 pt) | No |
| Ships with Microsoft 365 as a cloud font | Yes, all four styles | No |
| Embedding permission (OS/2 fsType) | 0 = installable, embed freely | 0 = installable, embed freely |
**When to use which.** Use TH Sarabun PSK whenever the receiving side names it — official correspondence under the sarabun regulations, ministry templates and nearly every thesis template — and whenever the other machine runs Microsoft 365, which already has PSK without an install. Use TH Sarabun New when strokes render thin and faint on old low-resolution Windows screens, when tone marks float in Office on a Mac (1.35 was released for exactly that), or when you are redistributing the font files under the GPL. In every other case install both: the metrics are identical, so holding both names costs nothing and eliminates font substitution entirely.
The common misreading is "New is newer, so it is better". f0nt.com never itemised the defects it fixed, and the SIPA statement relayed by NSTDA asks agencies to return to TH Sarabun PSK alone, because mixing the two forces re-layout every time a document changes hands. The third family, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) on Google Fonts, is yet another set of files; the three-way comparison is below.
## The 13 National Fonts and the cabinet resolution of 7 September 2010
**On 7 September 2010 Thailand's cabinet approved that every state agency install the sarabun font and the other twelve, thirteen fonts in all, from SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property, complete the rollout before 5 December 2010, and report completion to the ICT Ministry. That resolution is why Thais call this "the government font" (ฟอนต์ราชการ) and why TH Sarabun PSK has its special status.** The proposal came from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology as the "Thai Government Standard Font Project". The stated rationale, as MODIFY reported it: ปัจจุบัน ส่วนราชการมีการใช้ฟอนต์อย่างหลากหลาย ไม่มีมาตรฐาน...การใช้มาตรฐานฟอนต์ของบริษัทเอกชนที่ผูกขาดลิขสิทธิ์อาจมีปัญหาเรื่องการฟ้องร้องละเมิดลิขสิทธิ์ได้ — agencies were using fonts inconsistently, and relying on proprietary fonts risked copyright litigation. The fonts pushed out were [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/), [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) and EucrosiaUPC.
A word on sourcing. The resolution wording above comes from Thai Library's reproduction (13 September 2010), which links a 19-page scan; we downloaded it, but it is image-only with no text layer, so we could not extract the original. Nor did an open search find the item in the Cabinet Secretariat's resolution database. Treat the wording as reproduced. The date, 7 September 2010, and the deadline, 5 December 2010, agree across every source we checked: Thai and English Wikipedia, Thai Library and MODIFY.
The thirteen, with designers as credited on f0nt.com's release page (each in four styles — regular, italic, bold, bold italic):
| Font | Designer (per f0nt.com) |
|---|---|
| [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) | Suppakit Chalermlarp (ศุภกิจ เฉลิมลาภ) |
| [TH Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) | Ekkalak Phianphanawet (เอกลักษณ์ เพียรพนาเวช) |
| [TH Krub](/fonts/krub/) | Ekkalak Phianphanawet |
| [TH Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) | Aksaramethi team (ไพโรจน์ เปี่ยมประจักพงษ์, บวร จรดล) |
| [TH Niramit AS](/fonts/th-niramit-as/) | Aksaramethi team |
| [TH Charm of AU](/fonts/th-charm-of-au/) | กัลยาณมิตร นรรัตน์พุทธิ |
| [TH Kodchasal](/fonts/kodchasan/) | กัลย์สุดา เปี่ยมประจักพงษ์ |
| [TH K2D July8](/fonts/th-k2d-july8/) | กานต์ รอดสวัสดิ์ |
| [TH Mali Grade 6](/fonts/th-mali-grade6/) | สุดารัตน์ เลิศสีทอง |
| [TH Chakra Petch](/fonts/th-chakra-petch/) | ธีรวัฒน์ พจน์วิบูลศิริ |
| [TH Baijam](/fonts/th-baijam/) | PITA team (รพี สุวีรานนท์, วิโรจน์ จิรพัฒนกุล) |
| [TH KoHo](/fonts/koho/) | Ko-Ho group (ขาม จาตุรงคกุล, กนกวรรณ แพนไธสง, ขนิษฐา สิทธิแย้ม) |
| [TH Fah Kwang](/fonts/fahkwang/) | Team Eleven (กิตติ ศิริรัตนบุญชัย, นิวัฒน์ ภัทโรวาสน์) |
Of the thirteen, only Sarabun was prescribed for official correspondence: Office of the Prime Minister circular นร 0106/ว 2019, as Thai Library reproduces it, specifies TH Sarabun PSK at 16 points. The other twelve are fonts agencies may use for other work without licensing worries. The whole set is on the [National Fonts category page](/fonts/categories/national-fonts/); f0nt.com distributes them as thirteen separate zips.
## What is TH Sarabun IT๙, and should you use it?
**TH Sarabun IT๙ is a third-party modification of TH Sarabun PSK that makes the Arabic digit keys 0–9 display as Thai numerals ๐–๙. It is not part of the National Font set, appears in no official proclamation, and SIPA has asked agencies to stop using it.** SIPA's statement, as relayed by NSTDA, is blunt: เลิกใช้ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun IT๙ เนื่องจากใช้วิธีแก้ไขตัวเลขไทยไม่ถูกต้องตามหลักการของ Unicode ทำให้เกิดปัญหาในการแลกเปลี่ยนเอกสาร — stop using it, because its Thai-numeral hack does not follow Unicode and breaks document exchange.
The mechanism is the problem. The font simply remaps the glyphs for Arabic digits to draw as Thai numerals. Data Revol puts it as "press 1, get ๑; press 2, get ๒", but the character stored in the file is still 1 (U+0031), not ๑ (U+0E51). Searching, sorting and calculating on those values goes wrong, and the moment the font is changed or the file is opened on a machine without IT๙, every "Thai" numeral silently reverts to an Arabic one.
The misunderstanding traces back to a cabinet resolution of 2 May 2000 about using Buddhist Era years, which Thai Library notes was stretched into "all digits must be Thai". Circular นร 0106/ว 2019 actually treats Thai numerals as promotional, not mandatory, and allows Arabic digits for financial, tabular or foreign-language work. The IT๙ bundles passed around teacher and school websites since late 2014 contain eight files — TH SarabunIT9 in four styles and TH NiramitIT๙ in four — with no maker named. The name is also a licence problem: the PSK licence reserves the Sarabun names and forbids adapted versions from carrying them.
If you need Thai numerals, type real ones — the Unicode characters U+0E50 to U+0E59 — from the Thai keyboard layout or your application's numeral setting, and keep using TH Sarabun PSK or TH Sarabun New. Both already contain the Thai numeral glyphs, and the file will open correctly everywhere. If TH SarabunIT๙ is installed alongside PSK on your machine, RMUTSB's IT office recommends removing it when you fix the Windows-update rendering bug described below.
## TH Sarabun New vs TH Sarabun PSK vs Sarabun on Google Fonts
**Three families share the Sarabun name, they are in the same design lineage, and none of them substitutes for the others in a font menu.** A template that asks for "TH Sarabun PSK" is not satisfied by "Sarabun", because a font-selection dialog matches the family name string, not the family tree.
- **TH SarabunPSK** — the 2007 original from the SIPA National Font set. Four cuts. The string written into Thai regulation and into most government and academic templates.
- **TH Sarabun New** — the 2011 revision. Four cuts. Same outlines as PSK, GPL 2.0 with font exception, and the version whose 1.35 release fixed Office for Mac.
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — a later redraw published on Google Fonts, based on TH Sarabun New. The Google Fonts metadata records it as OFL, 16 variants across eight weights from 100 to 800, added on 28 October 2013, and maintained upstream by Cadson Demak — the Bangkok foundry where Suppakit Chalermlarp later worked. Latin, Latin Extended, Thai and Vietnamese subsets.
The practical division: Word and PDF work that has to match a Thai template takes TH SarabunPSK or TH Sarabun New. Web work takes Sarabun, which is packaged and hinted as a webfont and has the weight range to build a hierarchy. Loading a desktop TTF of TH Sarabun New over `@font-face` is legal under its licence, but you are shipping a document face with two weights when an eight-weight OFL family exists for the same job.
## Is TH Sarabun New free to download?
**Yes, and free for commercial work too. The f0nt.com release page states that SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property jointly revised the licence of this TH Sarabun font to GPL 2.0 with a font exception.** The font exception is the part that matters day to day: it means a document that embeds the font is not itself pulled under the GPL. Embedding in PDFs and Word files, commercial use, and redistribution are all permitted.
Font Library lists the same family under the GNU General Public License in four TrueType styles, which is a second, independent statement of the licence for anyone who cannot read the Thai page.
One caution about scope. The GPL wording is published on the **TH Sarabun New** release page. The older TH SarabunPSK files were distributed royalty-free by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property through f0nt.com, but do not assume the GPL statement reaches back to cover them — if you are redistributing files rather than just using them, redistribute New. For how Thai font licences differ from Latin ones in general, see our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## How to download TH Sarabun New
**The official source is the f0nt.com release page, which serves THSarabunNew.zip containing all four files at version 1.35.** Two routes that are actually legitimate:
1. **f0nt.com** — the [TH Sarabun New release page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/th-sarabun-new/) is the channel SIPA used to distribute the National Fonts. This is the page behind the search "โหลดฟอนต์ th sarabun".
2. **Font Library** — the [THSarabun New entry](https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/thsarabun-new) mirrors the four cuts under the GNU GPL for anyone who prefers an English-language source.
**There is no Homebrew cask for this font.** You will find `brew install --cask font-th-sarabun-new` quoted on other sites; it fails, because no such cask exists. Homebrew's own API returns HTTP 404 for `font-th-sarabun-new`, checked 22 August 2026, and the pull request that proposed adding it was closed without being merged. On macOS, install the files by hand as described below.
Skip the ad-heavy font aggregators. They serve stale versions — and given that v1.35 is the release that fixes Office for Mac, an old copy is not a cosmetic problem. Check the version before you trust a mirror.
## Download TH Sarabun New and TH Sarabun PSK from ThaiGraph (verified mirror)
**ThaiGraph hosts both official f0nt.com zips on our own server. The files are byte-identical to the originals — nothing renamed, re-zipped or modified — and we publish the SHA-256 of every file so you can verify them.** Two reasons for the mirror. f0nt.com refuses downloads that do not originate from its own pages (we received HTTP 403 fetching the file without a referer), so links forwarded by email or chat routinely fail. And the bundles other sites hand out often mix in stale versions or the IT๙ files.
| File | Size | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|
| [THSarabunNew.zip](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/THSarabunNew.zip) (TH Sarabun New 1.35, all four files) | 434,047 bytes | `7a3db732e475b0b8adb10adf4058e7d8161ecef157f56f9711c229c73bedc592` |
| [07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip) (TH Sarabun PSK 1.1, all four files plus the licence file) | 192,670 bytes | `fd7b1596364ab8ae11f50e8abb71eb1189b0aa6275e71c8e25b0187578a26cae` |
| [README.txt](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/README.txt) (source URLs, server dates, versions, SHA-256 of all eight .ttf files) | 3,476 bytes | — |
| [LICENSE-TH-Sarabun-New-GPL-2.0-with-font-exception.txt](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/LICENSE-TH-Sarabun-New-GPL-2.0-with-font-exception.txt) | 19,321 bytes | — |
| [LICENSE-TH-SarabunPSK.txt](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/LICENSE-TH-SarabunPSK.txt) (UTF-8 transcription of the UTF-16 original, which sits in the same folder) | 8,382 bytes | — |
All eight .ttf files sit in the same folder under their original names (`THSarabunNew.ttf`, `THSarabunNew Bold.ttf`, `THSarabunNew Italic.ttf`, `THSarabunNew BoldItalic.ttf`, `THSarabun.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold.ttf`, `THSarabun Italic.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf`) for anyone who wants a single file, but the simplest route is the zip. Verify a download on Windows with `certutil -hashfile THSarabunNew.zip SHA256` and on macOS with `shasum -a 256 THSarabunNew.zip`; the output must match the table character for character. If it does not, do not install.
The licence basis for the mirror: TH Sarabun New is GPL 2.0-or-later with a font-embedding exception, which permits redistribution outright, and we ship the full GPL text with the exception exactly as embedded in the fonts. TH Sarabun PSK ships with a "DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement" whose clause (1) reads "Allow to use without any charges and allow to reproduce, study, adapt and distribute this Font Computer Program", forbidding only the sale of the font file on its own. We do not sell, modify or rename, so we are inside both. f0nt.com's own release page tells readers to go by the licence attached to the font. f0nt.com remains the official source, and both release pages are linked in the previous section.
## How to install TH Sarabun New on Windows
**Unzip the download, select all four .ttf files, right-click, and choose Install for all users.** Microsoft's own instructions for adding a font run: download the files, which often come compressed in .zip folders; unzip by right-clicking the .zip folder and selecting Extract; then right-click the fonts you want and select Install, clicking Yes if Windows asks permission to make changes. Dragging the files into `C:\Windows\Fonts` does the same thing.
Windows 11 adds a wrinkle Microsoft's article does not cover. The right-click menu is condensed, so **"Install for all users" only appears after you click "Show more options"** at the bottom of the menu, or press Shift+F10. That distinction matters on a shared office PC: "Install for all users" writes to `C:\Windows\Fonts` and every program and every account sees the font, while a plain "Install" — and the drag-and-drop area under Settings > Personalization > Fonts — installs for the current user only, and some programs will not see it.
Two things people get wrong here. Install **all four files**, not just the roman, or Word will synthesise a fake bold and a fake italic and your document will not match anyone else's. And if the font does not appear in the font list, close and reopen the Office app; Office reads the font list at launch.
## How to install TH Sarabun New on macOS
**Double-click each .ttf in the Finder and click Install, or drag all four onto the Font Book window.** Apple documents four routes, all current for macOS Tahoe 26 back to High Sierra: File > Add Fonts to Current User in Font Book then double-click the file; drag the file onto the Font Book icon in the Dock and click Install; drag the file into the Font Book window; or double-click the file in the Finder and click Install. TrueType `.ttf`, which is what TH Sarabun New ships as, is on Apple's supported-format list.
The step worth adding for Thai users is **validation**. In Font Book, select the font and choose File > Validate Selection, or File > Validate File and browse to it. Green means passed, yellow is a warning, red is a failure. This is how you catch a duplicate or damaged TH Sarabun install, which is the single most common cause of the tone-mark bug below.
There is no package-manager shortcut on macOS. Do not trust the `brew install --cask font-th-sarabun-new` line that circulates on other sites — that cask does not exist and the command fails.
## Thai tone marks floating in Word and PowerPoint on macOS
**If your Thai tone marks sit above the wrong consonant in Office on macOS Tahoe, update macOS to 26.1 or later and replace your TH Sarabun New with version 1.35 from f0nt.com.** A Microsoft Q&A thread running from 17 September 2025 to 8 January 2026 records the bug appearing after the Tahoe update, macOS 26.1 clearing it in Word but not in PowerPoint, and version 1.35 removing it on Tahoe 26.2.
That is not a coincidence: the f0nt.com update note of 15 November 2019 says Suppakit Chalermlarp released 1.35 specifically to fix Thai-language problems in Microsoft Office for Mac. The full thread-by-thread record, including the fixes that were reported *not* to work and the Font Book steps that clear the duplicate installs behind most reports, is on the [TH Sarabun PSK page](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/).
## Why TH Sarabun PSK breaks after a Windows 10/11 update, and how to fix it
**The symptom: after the October 2023 Windows updates, text set in TH Sarabun PSK in Excel (and on some machines Word) shows in another font or with distorted glyphs. The fix that Thai university IT departments converged on is to remove TH SarabunPSK completely through Control Panel and reinstall all four files with "Install for all users".** This mostly hits PSK, and it is the top reason Thais search for "TH Sarabun PSK เพี้ยน" (broken).
The clearest public record of the cause is a Microsoft Q&A thread of 12 October 2023. The poster names two updates installed just before the breakage — KB5031354 (2023-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 22H2) and KB5031323 (that month's .NET Framework update) — with Thai characters in Excel rendering as if swapped for Tahoma. A 19 October 2023 answer proposes uninstalling KB5031354 from Update history as a temporary workaround. We do not recommend that: it is a security update, and other respondents in the same thread report it did not work for them.
The method published by KMUTNB's Instrumentation and Electrical Energy Engineering department and by RMUTSB's Academic Resources office is the same, and it is what government offices across Thailand use. Three steps:
1. **Remove the old font completely.** Open Control Panel, switch the view to Large icons or Small icons, click Fonts, type `sarabun` in the search box, select TH SarabunPSK and press Delete, then Yes. If TH SarabunIT๙ is present, delete it too. If Windows warns the file is in use, close every Word, Excel, PowerPoint and browser window and retry.
2. **Reinstall all four files.** Extract the zip, select the four .ttf files, right-click, choose Show more options, then Install for all users — on Windows 11 that command is hidden in the second-level menu. This writes to `C:\Windows\Fonts`, so every account and every program sees the same font.
3. **Reopen Office.** Office reads the font list at launch. Existing documents render correctly again without editing, because the font name in them never changed.
One thing to say plainly. Both university pages hand out a file called `Fonts_TH_SarabunPSK_version_1.000.zip` and recommend "version 1.000", yet the official f0nt.com archive (and our mirror above) embeds Version 1.1 2006. We could not trace where the 1.000 build comes from or verify how it differs from 1.1. Our advice is the official set with published hashes. What every source agrees actually clears the fault is the *complete removal and complete reinstall*, not the version number.
A similar-looking case with a different cause: Blognone recorded in October 2019 that after the Windows 10 1903 update "Sarabun New started misbehaving — in Word it turned into another font". The culprit was an incomplete font file; installing the complete file over it ended the problem. That is another reason to check the hash of what you downloaded before installing. Floating tone marks on macOS are a separate issue, covered in the previous section.
## TH Sarabun in Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Canva
**Word under a Microsoft 365 subscription has TH SarabunPSK in all four styles as a cloud font, no install needed. Google Docs has Sarabun — the Google Fonts version — but neither TH Sarabun PSK nor TH Sarabun New.** Microsoft's Cloud fonts in Office page lists "TH SarabunPSK", "TH SarabunPSK Bold", "TH SarabunPSK Bold Italic" and "TH SarabunPSK Italic", and explains that "Cloud fonts are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers". That is Microsoft's own documentation confirming the 2018 Blognone report that an earlier version of this page said we could not find. Two limits: cloud fonts download on first use and need a connection, and perpetual Office (2019, 2021, 2024) does not receive them, so those machines need the files installed by hand as above. TH Sarabun New is not a cloud font anywhere; every machine installs it manually.
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides draw only from the Google Fonts library. On 7 February 2019 Google announced the Thai National Fonts in their Google Fonts editions — Bai Jamjuree, Chakra Petch, Charm, Charmonman, Fah Kwang, K2D, KoHo, Kodchasan, Krub, Mali, Niramit, Sarabun and Srisakdi — in the More fonts menu. All of them are Cadson Demak's OFL redraws, not the original TH files. We checked the complete Google Fonts family list: there is no "TH Sarabun PSK" or "TH Sarabun New". So a template that names TH Sarabun PSK cannot be satisfied inside Docs. The workaround is to draft in Docs with Sarabun, download as .docx, and set the font to TH Sarabun PSK in Word before submitting; the two families are not metric-compatible, so recheck pagination.
Canva: we found no Canva-published list of its Thai fonts, so we do not claim whether Sarabun is available there. Search the font panel for "Sarabun"; if the job requires the name TH Sarabun PSK, produce it in a word processor, since Canva is a graphics tool rather than an official-correspondence tool. On phones, neither iOS nor Android lets a downloaded .ttf become a system font; what you can do is in [how to install a Thai font on your phone](/learn/general/install-thai-fonts-on-phone/).
## Every file in the TH Sarabun New family
**TH Sarabun New ships four TrueType files: two weights, Regular and Bold, each with a true italic.** Font Library lists exactly those four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic — under the GNU GPL. A community GitHub mirror of the SIPA set, epsilonxe/SIPAFonts, carries them under these filenames:
| Style | Filename |
|---|---|
| Regular | `THSarabunNew.ttf` |
| Bold | `THSarabunNew Bold.ttf` |
| Italic | `THSarabunNew Italic.ttf` |
| Bold Italic | `THSarabunNew BoldItalic.ttf` |
That is the whole family — there is no Light, no Medium, no display cut, and no variable version. TH SarabunPSK has the same four-cut structure.
One caveat on the filenames. SIPA publishes no manifest of what is inside the official zip, so the names above come from a community mirror rather than from the distributor. The four *styles* are independently confirmed by Font Library; the exact *filenames* are not, and should be read as indicative.
Update, 8 September 2026: that caveat is now closed. We downloaded THSarabunNew.zip from f0nt.com directly and opened it. The official set contains exactly the files in the table — `THSarabunNew.ttf`, `THSarabunNew Bold.ttf`, `THSarabunNew Italic.ttf`, `THSarabunNew BoldItalic.ttf` — all dated 15 November 2019 and all embedding "Version 1.35 2011". The zip also carries a `__MACOSX` folder with four 210-byte macOS resource files, which are not fonts and can be deleted. The official PSK set, by contrast, uses `THSarabun.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold.ttf`, `THSarabun Italic.ttf` and `THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf`, not the names the community mirror uses. SHA-256 values for every file are in the README of [our mirror](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/README.txt).
Note the filenames have no space after "TH": the family is `THSarabunNew` in the file, even though it displays as "TH Sarabun New".
If you need a Thai family with a real weight range — for a hierarchy rather than a memo — the eight-weight [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) on Google Fonts is the same lineage, and [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) or [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/) offer wider systems. Compare them against your own text in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## What Thai government templates actually require
**Thai official-document rules name the string "TH Sarabun PSK", not "TH Sarabun New".** Thai Library reproduces the Office of the Prime Minister circular นร 0106/ว 2019, "คำอธิบายการพิมพ์หนังสือราชการภาษาไทยด้วยโปรแกรมการพิมพ์ในเครื่องคอมพิวเตอร์", as specifying TH Sarabun PSK at 16 points for typing Thai official documents. We have not been able to read the circular PDF itself — every Thai government host we tried either blocked the request or served an image-only scan — so treat the 16-point figure as reproduced by Thai Library rather than read at source.
The mechanism is worth understanding because it explains why "just install New, it's newer" is bad advice. A Word template stores a font by its exact family name. Open a template that specifies TH SarabunPSK on a machine that only has TH Sarabun New and Word does not quietly swap in the near-identical sibling — it falls back to whatever it likes, and your line breaks move. Since the two files are metrically identical, having both installed costs you nothing and removes the failure entirely.
That is also why the SIPA statement relayed by NSTDA asks agencies to standardise on PSK: not because New is worse, but because a ministry that receives documents in a mix of the two spends its day re-laying-out pages. If you are producing documents for a Thai ministry, a state enterprise, or an academic office, set them in whatever the template names, and do not upgrade the font as a favour.
## Name variants and spellings
**This one typeface is searched for under at least a dozen names, and two of the commonest Thai spellings are misspellings.** All of the following point at the same family or its immediate sibling:
- **TH Sarabun New** — the display name. Written `THSarabunNew` inside the files.
- **TH Sarabun** — the family name without the version; ambiguous between PSK and New.
- **TH SarabunPSK / TH Sarabun PSK / THSarabunPSK** — the 2007 original. Note the official string has no space before PSK.
- **Thai Sarabun font / font Thai Sarabun / Thai Sarabun PSK** — the English word order most non-Thai searchers reach for.
- **ฟอนต์สารบรรณ** — the correct Thai spelling. สารบรรณ means documentary affairs.
- **ฟอนต์ไทยสารบัญ** — a very common misspelling. สารบัญ means table of contents, not documentary affairs; the two words differ by one syllable and Thai keyboards do not object. People typing it are looking for this font.
- **ฟร้อน thai sarabun psk** — ฟร้อน is a widespread phonetic misspelling of ฟอนต์. Same font.
- **โหลดฟอนต์ th sarabun** — the Thai phrasing of "download TH Sarabun".
- **Sarabun** — on its own, this usually means the [Google Fonts family](/fonts/sarabun/), which is a different set of files.
**What does the "PSK" in TH SarabunPSK stand for? No published source we could find says.** We checked the English and Thai Wikipedia articles on the National Fonts, both f0nt.com release pages — the distributor's own — the MATTER's origin piece on the typeface, and the Thai Linux Working Group archives. None of them expands the initials. Anyone telling you confidently what PSK means is guessing, and so would we be.
## Character design and tone
**TH Sarabun New is a looped (มีหัว) humanist sans with near-monolinear strokes, clear circular consonant heads, and generous counters.** The following is our own reading of the letterforms rather than an attributed claim — the designer's specimen notes are not reachable online.
The loops on ก, ถ and ภ stay open at 14–16pt, which is where Thai official documents set their body text, so the face survives laser printing and photocopying without the loops filling in. Against [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), the serif it displaced, it drops the stroke contrast and the dated terminal detailing and reads cleaner at the same size.
The tone is deliberate bureaucratic neutrality. It expresses nothing, which for a form, a memo or a gazette page is the entire job. The Latin companion is a plain humanist sans sized to sit evenly with the Thai, so bilingual documents — visa forms, transcripts, ministry letterheads — hold a consistent texture across both scripts. More on setting Thai body text in our [typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Best use cases
**TH Sarabun New is the correct choice whenever a document must match Thai government conventions and you are free to choose between the two Sarabun files.** Strong briefs:
- Official correspondence, memos and reports where the template does not hard-code a font name
- University theses and coursework where the template says "TH Sarabun" without specifying PSK
- Anything you will redistribute with the font embedded, where GPL 2.0 with font exception is the cleaner ground
- Documents produced in Office on macOS, where v1.35 is the release that renders Thai correctly
Where it does not fit: templates that name TH Sarabun PSK explicitly — use [that file](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) instead — plus branding and display work, which two weights cannot carry, and web projects, where [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) is the packaged equivalent.
## Free alternatives and neighbours
**Every alternative worth naming here is also free, because the National Font set and the Google Fonts Thai library between them cover most document work at no cost.** Four directions:
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — not an alternative so much as the other half. Same outlines, the name templates ask for.
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the OFL Google Fonts redraw, eight weights, the right answer for the web.
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — broader coverage and a full weight system for interface work.
- **[IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)** — a corporate-neutral looped alternative with a matching Latin.
The other twelve National Fonts sit on the [National Fonts category page](/fonts/categories/national-fonts/), and the wider set of no-cost Thai families is under [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/). For the looped register specifically — the มีหัว letterform family Sarabun belongs to — see [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/).
## Pairings
**TH Sarabun New rarely needs a pairing, because Thai official documents set everything in one face, but mixed workflows have three natural partners.**
- **[Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/)** — the legacy serif, still present in older templates that mix both
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the web counterpart from the same lineage, for sites that mirror printed documents
- **[Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/)** — fallback-stack insurance for screens where neither is installed
## Licensing
**TH Sarabun New is free software under GPL 2.0 with a font exception: documents that embed the font are not themselves covered by the GPL.** The f0nt.com release page states that SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property jointly revised the licence of this TH Sarabun font to those terms, so commercial use, redistribution, and embedding in PDFs and Word files are all permitted. [Font Library](https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/thsarabun-new) independently records the family under the GNU General Public License and credits the foundry as "Mr.Suppakit Chalermlarp, RSAD.Design LTD."
Two practical notes. If you redistribute the font files themselves — inside a template pack, an app, or a client handoff — ship TH Sarabun New rather than the older PSK files, because the GPL statement is published on the New release. And if your project needs an SIL Open Font Licence specifically, which some corporate legal teams insist on, use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) from Google Fonts instead; it is OFL, and it is the same design lineage. The [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out how the two licences differ in practice.
**What the files actually embed (checked 8 September 2026).** All four TH Sarabun New files carry the licence in their own name table. It opens "This font is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." and closes with the embedding exception: "As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License." Note "or any later version", which is broader than the "GPL 2.0" summary on f0nt.com. The zip has no separate licence file, so this embedded text is the licence that travels with the files; we reproduce it with the full GPL text in [the mirror's licence file](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/LICENSE-TH-Sarabun-New-GPL-2.0-with-font-exception.txt).
The caution above about not assuming the GPL reaches back to the 2007 PSK files still stands, but we have now read PSK's actual licence. The PSK zip ships "DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement.txt", dated 21 September 2006, in Thai and English. In substance: (1) free use, copying, study, adaptation and distribution, but the font file may not be sold on its own, original or adapted, except bundled with a computer program; (2) anyone adapting it must notify the Department of Intellectual Property and SIPA in writing; (3) adapted versions may not use the reserved names, which include all four TH Sarabun PSK styles, nor the owners' or designer's names in promotion; (4) adapted versions stay under the same licence. That is the origin of the 2010 Thai Linux mailing-list complaint that a modified version "cannot keep the original name", and it is why TH Sarabun IT๙ — adapted from PSK yet still carrying Sarabun in its name — is a licence problem as well as a technical one. For anyone who simply types documents, embeds PDFs or shares files, both PSK and New are fully usable with no further conditions.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/th-sarabun-psk.mdx
## What TH Sarabun PSK is
**TH Sarabun PSK is the original looped Thai text font that Thailand's government adopted as its document standard: published free on f0nt.com on 28 June 2007, designed by Suppakit Chalermlarp, and named by the Council of Ministers on 7 September 2010 as the font state agencies must use in their papers.** It is one of the thirteen National Fonts (ฟอนต์แห่งชาติ) released by SIPA with the Department of Intellectual Property.
The 2010 resolution was not a recommendation. Agencies were ordered to stop using private-sector fonts by 5 December 2010, and the fonts being pushed out were named: Microsoft's [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/), [Browallia New](/fonts/browallia-new/), [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/) and EucrosiaUPC. The name itself explains the brief. สารบรรณ means documentary affairs.
Two things follow from that history, and they are the reason this page exists. The Government Gazette (ราชกิจจานุเบกษา) has been set in TH Sarabun PSK since January 2011, starting with volume 128, part 1 A of 7 January 2011. And the string written into Thai regulations, ministry templates and university thesis forms is "TH Sarabun PSK", not the name of the later revision. See [/learn/typography/](/learn/typography/) for how Thai document conventions settled into their current shape.
This page stays on PSK: download, install, the Windows-update rendering bug, and what separates PSK from its successor. Everything that concerns the Sarabun family as a whole — the thirteen National Fonts and the 2010 cabinet resolution, the TH Sarabun IT๙ variant, Google Docs and Canva, and the detailed three-way comparison — lives on our hub page for [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/). The Thai version of this page is at [TH Sarabun PSK (ภาษาไทย)](/th/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/).
## Is TH Sarabun PSK free to download?
**Yes. TH Sarabun PSK is free. SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property released all thirteen National Fonts at no cost through f0nt.com, and the TH Sarabun PSK release page there had logged over 2.6 million downloads as of 22 August 2026.** There is no paid tier, no trial, and no reason to buy it from anyone.
Free is not the same as unrestricted, and this is where PSK and its successor genuinely differ. The 2007 PSK files were distributed under SIPA's own terms rather than a standard free-software licence. In September 2010, on the Thai Linux Working Group developer list, a contributor writing as "wd" noted that SarabunPSK's metrics sat close to the Windows fonts but that its licence was a problem, because once you modified the font you could not keep the original name, which held back wider distribution.
That is the restriction SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property removed in 2011. f0nt.com states plainly that the two agencies rewrote the licence to GPL 2.0 with a font exception เพื่อให้เป็นฟอนต์ที่เสรียิ่งขึ้น — to make it a freer font. That relicensing shipped attached to [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/). Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) works through what each licence actually permits.
## Every TH Sarabun PSK weight
**TH Sarabun PSK ships four cuts: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. There is no Light, no Medium, no Black and no display cut.** The National Fonts were commissioned as document faces, so two weights with a slope each was the whole specification.
| Cut | Role in a document | Typical setting |
|---|---|---|
| Regular | Body text, form fields, table cells | 16pt for Thai official correspondence |
| Italic | Cited titles, foreign terms, editorial notes | Same size as body |
| Bold | Headings, subject lines, table headers, emphasis | 16–18pt |
| Bold Italic | Emphasis inside an already italic passage | Same size as body |
A community mirror of the PSK files on GitHub confirms the same four-file structure — a roman, an italic, a bold and a bold italic. We are not publishing the official zip's internal filenames, because SIPA's own package contents are not documented anywhere we could verify, and the mirror is not an official distribution.
Update, 8 September 2026: we downloaded `07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip` from f0nt.com directly and opened it. The official set holds five files: `THSarabun.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold.ttf`, `THSarabun Italic.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf` (all dated 2 October 2006) and `DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement.txt`. Note that the filenames carry no "PSK"; the family name embedded in the files is `TH SarabunPSK` (no space before PSK) and the embedded version is "Version 1.1 2006". The `THSarabunPSK Regular.ttf`-style names used by the community mirror are therefore renamings, not the originals. SHA-256 values for every file are in the download section below.
For comparison, [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) has the same four-style structure: Font Library lists it under the GNU GPL in Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic. Same structure, different family name. Browse the rest of the set under [National Fonts](/fonts/categories/national-fonts/), or the [full Thai font directory](/fonts/).
## What does "PSK" stand for?
**No published source we could find explains what the letters PSK mean.** We checked the English and Thai Wikipedia articles on the National Fonts, the f0nt.com release page for the thirteen SIPA fonts, and the f0nt.com release page for TH Sarabun New. None of them defines the acronym, including the distributor that published the font.
This matters more than it looks. The suffix is the only thing separating two font names that behave differently inside a template, so people reasonably assume it must mean something specific. It may well be an internal identifier from the 2007 competition entry. We are not going to guess, and you should treat any page that confidently expands PSK into three words as unsourced until it shows you where the expansion came from.
What the letters do reliably tell you is which file you have. "TH Sarabun PSK" is the 2007 original. "TH Sarabun New" is the 2011 revision. "Sarabun" with no prefix is the later Google Fonts redraw. A font menu treats all three as unrelated families.
## TH Sarabun PSK vs TH Sarabun New
**Install both, and pick by job: use TH Sarabun PSK whenever a template, form or regulation names it, and TH Sarabun New when you need the freer GPL licence or you are fighting the Thai rendering bugs in Office on macOS.** The common advice to simply replace PSK with New is not supported by the sources.
Start with what is actually different. Suppakit Chalermlarp, quoted by beartai in 2016, said the revision improved display sharpness at small sizes but that physically the font is entirely the same: ไม่ว่าจะเป็นหน้าตา ช่องไฟ ระยะบรรทัดฯ ทุกอย่างเหมือนกันทั้งหมด — appearance, sidebearings and line spacing all identical. The drawings did not change. The screen rendering did.
That rendering fix had a specific target. An NSTDA government publication relaying a SIPA statement describes TH Sarabun New as the answer to text coming out thin and faint on genuine Windows XP. The same publication says that for official documents under the Office of the Prime Minister's Sarabun regulations only TH Sarabun PSK is permitted, and asks agencies to กลับมาใช้ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun PSK เพียงฟอนต์เดียว — return to TH Sarabun PSK alone. Its stated reason is practical: when agencies mix the two, documents have to be re-laid out every time they change hands.
| | TH Sarabun PSK | TH Sarabun New |
|---|---|---|
| Released | 28 June 2007 | 19 August 2011 |
| Outlines, sidebearings, line spacing | Identical to New | Identical to PSK |
| Licence | SIPA terms, royalty-free, naming restriction on modified versions | GPL 2.0 + font exception |
| Named in Thai regulations and templates | Yes | No |
| Current version fixing Office for Mac Thai text | — | 1.35, 15 November 2019 |
| Cuts | 4 | 4 |
One more practical asymmetry. Blognone reported in July 2018, quoting a Microsoft press statement, that Thai Sarabun PSK had become available in Office 365. We could not find a Microsoft-published page confirming that today, so treat it as a 2018 press claim rather than current Microsoft documentation. If it holds, it means the PSK name resolves on a stock Office install where the New name may not.
Update, 8 September 2026: found. Microsoft's own Cloud fonts in Office page lists "TH SarabunPSK", "TH SarabunPSK Bold", "TH SarabunPSK Bold Italic" and "TH SarabunPSK Italic" among its cloud fonts and explains that "Cloud fonts are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers". The 2018 report is therefore confirmed by Microsoft documentation. In practice, Microsoft 365 users can pick TH SarabunPSK without installing anything (it downloads on first use); perpetual Office, and TH Sarabun New on every machine, still need the files installed by hand.
## What breaks if you swap PSK for New in an existing document
**Nothing reflows. The two fonts share outlines, sidebearings and line spacing, so line breaks, page counts and pagination survive the swap intact. What breaks is name matching.** That distinction is the whole risk profile.
Because the metrics are identical, replacing TH Sarabun PSK with TH Sarabun New inside a document will not shift a single line break. This is unusual and worth knowing. Substituting almost any other Thai font into a government template will move text across pages and break a signature block onto its own sheet.
The failures are all about the string "TH Sarabun PSK":
- A template, style or form field that specifies TH Sarabun PSK by name will not match a document set in TH Sarabun New. It is a different family name, not a different style of the same family.
- A submission checked against a regulation that names TH Sarabun PSK can be rejected on the font name alone, regardless of how the page looks.
- On a machine that has only one of the two installed, opening the other file triggers a font substitution, and the substitute may not be metric-compatible at all.
- A PDF exported with New embedded is not identifiable as PSK by anyone auditing the file's fonts.
The safe pattern for anyone working with Thai institutions: install both families, set the document in whichever one the receiving side names, and never rely on the assumption that an application will silently treat PSK and New as interchangeable. It will not.
## How to download and install TH Sarabun PSK
**Download TH Sarabun PSK from the f0nt.com release page for the thirteen SIPA National Fonts, unzip it, and install all four cuts rather than just the roman.** f0nt.com is the channel SIPA used to distribute the set; the ad-heavy font aggregators carry older files and there is nothing to gain from them. If the f0nt.com link will not open — the site refuses direct downloads that do not come through its own pages — use ThaiGraph's mirror in the section "Download the original TH Sarabun PSK files from ThaiGraph" below, which is the same file byte for byte, with published hashes.
On Windows, Microsoft's documented route is: download the font files, which usually arrive compressed in .zip folders; right-click the .zip folder and select Extract; right-click the fonts you want and select Install; and if you are prompted to allow the program to make changes to your computer, and you trust the source, click Yes. Microsoft also documents dragging the files into `C:\Windows\Fonts`, where Windows installs them automatically. Close and reopen Word afterwards so it re-reads the font list, then set 16pt.
The detailed Windows 11 route, which is where most people get stuck:
1. Extract `07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip`. You get four .ttf files (`THSarabun.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold.ttf`, `THSarabun Italic.ttf`, `THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf`) and one licence text file.
2. Click the first .ttf, hold Shift and click the last, so all four are selected.
3. Right-click, choose **Show more options** (or press Shift+F10), then **Install for all users**. The command is hidden in Windows 11's second-level menu, and it is the right one for an office PC: it writes to `C:\Windows\Fonts`, so every account and every program sees the same font. Plain "Install" is per-user, and some programs will not see it.
4. Close every Word, Excel and PowerPoint window and reopen. Office reads the font list at launch.
5. Check that the font list shows "TH SarabunPSK" and that pressing Bold uses the real Bold file rather than a synthesised one. If bold looks unusually heavy or blurred, not all four files went in.
On macOS, Apple documents four routes in Font Book: File > Add Fonts to Current User and then double-click the file; drag the file onto the Font Book icon in the Dock and click Install; drag the file into the Font Book window; or double-click the file in the Finder and click Install. macOS supports TrueType, which is what TH Sarabun ships. Apple's article covers macOS Tahoe 26 back to High Sierra.
On a phone, none of the above applies: neither iOS nor stock Android lets a `.ttf` you downloaded become a system font, and what you can actually do is documented in [how to install a Thai font on your phone](/learn/general/install-thai-fonts-on-phone/).
If a Thai font misbehaves after installing, run Font Book's File > Validate Selection first. A green icon means the font passed, yellow is a warning and red is a failure. Duplicate or corrupt installs are the usual cause, and validation finds them before you start blaming the application.
## Download the original TH Sarabun PSK files from ThaiGraph
**ThaiGraph hosts f0nt.com's `07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip` on our own server. The file is byte-identical to the original — nothing renamed or modified — and we publish the SHA-256 of every file so you can verify it.** The licence shipped inside the zip permits this: clause (1) allows anyone to "reproduce, study, adapt and distribute this Font Computer Program", forbidding only the sale of the font file on its own. We do not sell or modify it, and the original licence file travels with it.
| File | Size | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|
| [07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip) (official set, all four files plus the licence file) | 192,670 bytes | `fd7b1596364ab8ae11f50e8abb71eb1189b0aa6275e71c8e25b0187578a26cae` |
| `THSarabun.ttf` (Regular) | 99,980 bytes | `51a071f55fe0b21d05334bea94d6e13393edd23e4bf775fd6b1f829bece967f4` |
| `THSarabun Bold.ttf` | 118,964 bytes | `7457675c19186491cae40957f07d2426f0fe9633379fa0198b78fc0db753702b` |
| `THSarabun Italic.ttf` | 104,352 bytes | `79ba913cdb90bac50e312875823e55322f7b80c5a5ab8a0e4d351ee215840004` |
| `THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf` | 117,644 bytes | `8a8731b6bed21f1a0b6788162239d4390974e1ad379462235d55a6377e8b1689` |
| [LICENSE-TH-SarabunPSK.txt](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/LICENSE-TH-SarabunPSK.txt) (UTF-8 transcription of the UTF-16 original, which sits in the same folder) | 8,382 bytes | — |
| [README.txt](/downloads/fonts/th-sarabun/README.txt) (source URLs, dates, versions, hashes of every file including TH Sarabun New) | 3,476 bytes | — |
The four .ttf files are in the same folder under their original names, but the simplest route is the zip. Verify on Windows with `certutil -hashfile 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip SHA256` and on macOS with `shasum -a 256 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip`; if the output does not match the table, do not install. The [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) 1.35 set is in the same folder and documented on that page.
## Why TH Sarabun PSK breaks after a Windows 10/11 update, and how to fix it
**The symptom: after the October 2023 Windows updates, text set in TH Sarabun PSK in Excel (and on some machines Word) turns into another font or shows distorted glyphs. The fix Thai university IT departments converged on is to remove TH SarabunPSK completely through Control Panel and reinstall all four files with "Install for all users".** This is the most-searched question about PSK, and it is a PSK-specific problem.
The clearest public record of the cause is a Microsoft Q&A thread of 12 October 2023. The poster names the updates installed just before the breakage — KB5031354 (2023-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 22H2) and KB5031323 (that month's .NET Framework update) — with Thai characters in Excel rendering as if swapped for Tahoma. A 19 October 2023 answer proposes uninstalling KB5031354 from Update history as a temporary workaround. We do not recommend that: it is a security update, and other respondents in the same thread report it did not work for them.
The method published by KMUTNB's Instrumentation and Electrical Energy Engineering department and by RMUTSB's Academic Resources office is the same, in three steps:
1. **Remove the old font completely.** Open Control Panel, switch to Large icons or Small icons, click Fonts, type `sarabun` in the search box, select TH SarabunPSK, press Delete, then Yes. If TH SarabunIT๙ is present, delete it too — SIPA has asked agencies to stop using it, and it often compounds the problem. If Windows warns the file is in use, close every Word, Excel, PowerPoint and browser window and retry.
2. **Reinstall all four files** following the Windows 11 steps in the previous section: select all four, right-click, Show more options, Install for all users.
3. **Reopen Office.** Existing documents render correctly again without editing, because the font name stored in them never changed.
One thing to say plainly. Both university pages hand out a file called `Fonts_TH_SarabunPSK_version_1.000.zip` and recommend "version 1.000", yet the official f0nt.com archive (and our mirror above) embeds Version 1.1 2006. We could not trace where the 1.000 build comes from or verify how it differs from 1.1. Our advice is the official set with published hashes. What every source agrees actually clears the fault is the *complete removal and complete reinstall*, not the version number.
A similar-looking case with a different cause: Blognone recorded in October 2019 that after the Windows 10 1903 update "Sarabun New started misbehaving — in Word it turned into another font". The culprit was an incomplete font file; installing the complete file over it ended the problem. That is one more reason to check the hash before installing. Floating tone marks on macOS are a separate issue, covered next.
## Fixing floating Thai tone marks in Office on macOS
**If tone marks float above the wrong consonant in Word or PowerPoint on macOS, this is a known and partly unresolved problem, and TH Sarabun New version 1.35 is currently the file that works.** It is the strongest practical argument for keeping New installed alongside PSK.
The record on Microsoft Q&A is specific. On 17 September 2025 a user on Office 2024 reported that TH Sarabun New tone marks began floating (วรรณยุกต์ลอย) immediately after updating to macOS Tahoe, with no Thai font problems before the update. On 26 September 2025 the same user reported that macOS 26.1 beta fixed the problem in Word but that PowerPoint was still broken. On 8 January 2026 another user reported that switching to TH Sarabun New version 1.35 from f0nt.com removed the problem on macOS Tahoe 26.2.
Version 1.35, dated 15 November 2019, was itself released to fix Thai-language problems in Microsoft Office for Mac, which is why it is the file that resolves this. There is no equivalent updated release of TH Sarabun PSK. In order: update macOS, install TH Sarabun New 1.35 from f0nt.com, validate your fonts in Font Book to clear duplicates, and expect PowerPoint to lag behind Word.
## The web version, and free alternatives
**For anything rendered in a browser, do not use TH Sarabun PSK. Use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) on Google Fonts, which is the same design lineage packaged properly as a webfont under the SIL Open Font License.** The Google Fonts repository lists it as OFL, Thai as its primary script, added on 28 October 2013, and developed at github.com/cadsondemak/Sarabun.
Sarabun ships sixteen variants: eight weights from Thin 100 to ExtraBold 800, each with a matching italic. That is four times the weight range of PSK, with hinting, `latin-ext` and `vietnamese` coverage, and hosting. Wikipedia's National Fonts article records the lineage plainly: Sarabun is based on TH Sarabun New, which is based on TH SarabunPSK. In 2018 Cadson Demak, the foundry Suppakit Chalermlarp went on to work with, revised all thirteen National Fonts for Google Fonts with more hinting, wider weight ranges and better Unicode support.
The trap is the family name. `Sarabun`, `TH Sarabun New` and `TH SarabunPSK` are three unrelated entries in any font menu. Google's Sarabun will never satisfy a Word template that specifies TH Sarabun PSK, however similar it looks on screen. Other free options for screen and interface work sit in [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/) and the wider [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) and [looped Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/looped/) categories. Compare any of them with your own text in the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Name variants and spellings
**TH Sarabun PSK is searched under a long list of names, spacings and transliterations. All of the following refer to the same 2007 file:**
- **TH Sarabun PSK** — the form used in regulations and templates
- **TH SarabunPSK** — the closed-up form, which is how Wikipedia writes it and how it often appears in font menus
- **Thai Sarabun PSK** — the form Microsoft used in its 2018 Office 365 announcement
- **ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun PSK** — the everyday Thai search phrase
- **ฟอนต์สารบรรณ / สารบรรณ** — the Thai name; สารบรรณ means documentary affairs
- **ฟร้อน thai sarabun psk** — a very common Thai misspelling of ฟอนต์, and a real search phrase
- **TH Saraban PSK** — an RTGS-flavoured spelling; สารบรรณ romanises as Saraban
- **THSarabunPSK** — the filename form, with no spaces
Names that are **not** this font, despite looking close: **TH Sarabun New** is the [2011 revision](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/), and **Sarabun** with no prefix is the [Google Fonts family](/fonts/sarabun/). If a template names one of those, install that one instead — a font menu will not treat them as the same family.
## Best use cases
**TH Sarabun PSK is the right file whenever the receiving side names it — which covers most Thai official work — and the wrong file for anything on the web.** Concrete briefs:
- Official correspondence, memos and reports produced under the Office of the Prime Minister's Sarabun regulations
- Ministry and agency Word templates, tender documents and PDF forms that specify the font by name
- University thesis and coursework templates that hard-code TH Sarabun PSK
- Opening, editing and auditing older government files already set in it, where you need the font name to match on export
- Anything destined for the Government Gazette workflow, which has used TH Sarabun PSK since January 2011
Where it does not fit: web and app work, which should load [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) from Google Fonts; anything needing a weight range, since four cuts cannot carry a display hierarchy; and branding, which is not what a document face is for. If you are on macOS and hitting Thai rendering bugs, work in [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) 1.35 and only convert to the PSK name if the recipient requires it.
## Licensing
**TH Sarabun PSK is free of charge for public and official use: SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property released the thirteen National Fonts royalty-free through f0nt.com.** Verify the distribution on the [f0nt.com National Fonts page](https://www.f0nt.com/release/13-free-fonts-from-sipa/) before relying on any other download source.
The formal licence text is where PSK and New separate. The GPL 2.0 with font exception statement published by f0nt.com is attached to the 2011 [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) release, not to the 2007 PSK files, and f0nt.com's own wording is that the agencies rewrote the licence to make the font freer than it had been. The 2010 Thai Linux Working Group thread records what the earlier terms cost in practice: a modified version could not keep the original name.
The practical consequence: if your use is embedding in a PDF or Word file, or setting documents for a Thai agency, PSK is fine and is the name you are expected to use. If your use involves modifying the font, redistributing it inside a product, or shipping it under an open-source licence, work from TH Sarabun New under GPL 2.0 with the font exception, or from [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) under the OFL. Compare the terms side by side in the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
**The actual PSK licence text (read from the file inside the zip on 8 September 2026).** The official set ships "DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement.txt", dated 21 September 2006, in Thai and English; its Thai title is สัญญาอนุญาตให้ใช้โปรแกรมคอมพิวเตอร์ฟอนต์, and the copyright owners are the Department of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Commerce, and SIPA. Four terms: (1) "Allow to use without any charges and allow to reproduce, study, adapt and distribute this Font Computer Program. Neither the original version nor adapted version of Font Computer Program may be sold by itself, except bundled and/or sold with any computer program."; (2) anyone adapting it must notify DIP and SIPA in writing; (3) adapted versions may not use the reserved names — all four TH Sarabun PSK styles are listed — nor the owners' or designer's names in promotion; (4) adapted versions stay under the same licence. The same text is embedded in the name table of all four font files.
What this changes from what this page used to say: PSK is explicitly **redistributable**, not merely "free to use". The real restrictions are two — no selling the file on its own, and adapted versions must be renamed and the owners notified. The 2010 Thai Linux mailing-list complaint that a modified version "cannot keep the original name" is clause (3) exactly, and it is why TH Sarabun IT๙, adapted from PSK yet still carrying Sarabun in its name, is a licence problem as well as a technical one (see the [TH Sarabun New hub](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/)). This is the legal footing on which we mirror the unmodified original on our own server, with the original licence file alongside.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/thaigraph-condensed.mdx
## What ThaiGraph Condensed is
**ThaiGraph Condensed is a free condensed loopless Thai+Latin sans-serif in four weights (Light 300, Regular 400, Medium 500, Bold 700), produced in-house by ThaiGraph as a condensed derivative of [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) by Cadson Demak, and released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.** The download on this page includes TTF files for desktop install, WOFF2 files for self-hosted web use, and the OFL license text — free for commercial work, no registration required.
The family exists because condensed cuts are close to nonexistent in free Thai type. Latin designers reach for a condensed grotesque the moment a headline runs tight; Thai designers have had no free equivalent, so headlines either shrink or track negative until the vowel marks collide. ThaiGraph Condensed narrows the letterforms themselves, keeping the marks where they belong.
Because it inherits Anuphan's engineered skeleton — every Thai outline in the parent family was drawn from the Latin logic of IBM Plex Sans — the condensed cut keeps a single, even texture across mixed Thai-English headlines, which is where condensed type spends most of its life.
## Why condensed Thai fonts are rare
**None of the widely used free loopless Thai families ship a condensed width: Prompt has no condensed cut, Kanit has none, and [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) carries only a weight axis (100–700) with no width axis in its variable file.** That absence is documented in each family's Google Fonts metadata — see the [Anuphan METADATA.pb](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/anuphan/METADATA.pb) for the single-axis declaration.
There is a structural reason. Thai stacks vowel signs and tone marks above and below the consonant line, so narrowing a Thai letterform is not a simple horizontal scale — the marks need room, and careless compression crushes ไม้โท into ascenders like ป and ฝ. Commercial Thai foundries sell condensed display faces to advertising agencies precisely because the drawing work is real. ThaiGraph Condensed does that work once and gives the result away under the OFL, alongside the rest of the [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) we cover.
## Weights and files
**ThaiGraph Condensed ships four static weights — Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), and Bold (700) — each provided as both TTF and WOFF2 in a single zip with the OFL license file.** No italics and no variable file in this release.
| Weight | CSS value | Files |
|---|---|---|
| ThaiGraph Condensed Light | 300 | TTF + WOFF2 |
| ThaiGraph Condensed Regular | 400 | TTF + WOFF2 |
| ThaiGraph Condensed Medium | 500 | TTF + WOFF2 |
| ThaiGraph Condensed Bold | 700 | TTF + WOFF2 |
The four-step range covers the condensed use case: Light for oversized editorial headlines, Regular and Medium for posters and packaging hierarchy, Bold for the hardest-working retail and campaign headlines. Weights above 700 are deliberately absent — extreme weight plus extreme narrowness is where Thai mark positioning breaks down.
## Where to download ThaiGraph Condensed free
**Download the complete family directly from this page using the download panel above — one zip, all four weights, TTF + WOFF2 + OFL.txt, free for commercial use.** There is no paid tier, no weight held back, and no license upsell.
Install is the same as any Thai font: unzip, then install the TTF files (right-click → Install on Windows, Font Book on macOS). For the web, self-host the WOFF2 files with an `@font-face` rule — the live specimen on this page renders those exact files. To compare it against other Thai faces with your own copy, use the [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/).
## Is ThaiGraph Condensed free for commercial use?
**Yes. ThaiGraph Condensed is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which permits commercial use, embedding, modification, and redistribution at no cost — the [same license](https://openfontlicense.org) that covers Anuphan itself.** Client work, packaging, signage, webfonts, and app embedding are all allowed.
Two OFL obligations carry over: the font files cannot be sold by themselves, and further derivatives must stay under the OFL. The full terms travel inside the zip as OFL.txt. For the practical detail of what the OFL does and does not allow in Thai client work, see our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## Derived from Anuphan — provenance and credit
**ThaiGraph Condensed is a condensed derivative of Anuphan, the loopless Thai sans designed by Mint Tantisuwanna at Cadson Demak and published as open source under OFL-1.1 in the [cadsondemak/Anuphan repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Anuphan).** We narrowed the family's widths, rebuilt the spacing for condensed setting, and instanced four static weights from the original's 100–700 weight range.
The OFL is what makes this legal and honest: it explicitly permits modified versions, provided they are renamed and remain under the same license. This family is renamed accordingly — it carries no "Anuphan" in its name — and the original copyright notice ("Copyright 2019 The Anuphan Project Authors") stays in the shipped license file. The design credit belongs to Cadson Demak; the condensing is ours. If you need the original proportions, [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) remains free on Google Fonts in seven weights.
## Best use cases
**ThaiGraph Condensed is a display family for headlines, posters, packaging, and tight UI — anywhere Thai text must occupy less horizontal space without shrinking.** Strong briefs:
- Poster and event headlines where a full-width loopless sans overflows the grid
- Packaging front-of-pack text on narrow formats — bottles, cans, sachets
- Editorial and campaign headlines in mixed Thai-English lockups
- Space-starved UI: navigation bars, data tables, mobile headers with long Thai labels
- Motion graphics lower-thirds where character count fights safe margins
Where it does not fit: long-form body text (condensed widths tire the eye — use [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or another body face), and formal documents that expect looped letterforms. Browse the [loopless category](/fonts/categories/loopless/) and the [display category](/fonts/categories/display/) for the neighbouring options.
## Pairings
**ThaiGraph Condensed does its work at display sizes, so pair it with a normal-width text face rather than another condensed cut.** Three combinations that hold:
- **[Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/)** — the parent family at text sizes gives a perfectly matched skeleton between headline and body
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — looped Thai body text under condensed loopless headlines, the highest-contrast pairing
- **[Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/)** — editorial serif body when the condensed headline needs a literary counterweight
The rest of the field is in the [full Thai font library](/fonts/).
## Licensing
**ThaiGraph Condensed is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: free for commercial use, modification, embedding, and bundling, provided the license file stays with the fonts and derivatives keep the OFL.** The license text ships in the zip and is published at [openfontlicense.org](https://openfontlicense.org). The family is a renamed condensed derivative of [Anuphan by Cadson Demak](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Anuphan), whose copyright notice is preserved in the shipped OFL.txt.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/thasadith.mdx
## What Thasadith is
**Thasadith is a humanist Thai sans serif with rounded corners by Cadson Demak, released on Google Fonts in 2018 in two weights, each with a true italic, under the SIL Open Font License.** It is a spin-off from [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/), the Rattanakosin handwriting revival in the same release.
The origin story is unusually specific. Cadson Demak's repository describes Thasadith as a thought experiment: what if Srisakdi had been born as an upright typeface during the hot metal type period? The design work consisted of translating that slanted 19th-century handwriting into formal letterforms that fit typesetting conditions — a conservative text face, in the foundry's words, "inspired by an old style handwriting without the end tail flare." The repository notes the family "accidentally became a new spin off" during Srisakdi's development.
The italic closes the loop: it was drawn to take the font back to the slanted form the handwriting started from.
## Character design and tone
**Thasadith reads as a text sans with a manuscript memory — humanist skeletons, rounded corners, and proportions inherited from pen-written Thai rather than from geometry.** Where [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) is compass-and-ruler, Thasadith is a clerk's hand standing up straight.
The rounded corners soften the page without tipping into the toy-like register of fully rounded faces. Because the letterforms were readjusted from handwriting for typesetting, counters stay open and the rhythm is even at paragraph length. The flicked tail flare of the parent Srisakdi is gone; what remains is the underlying ductus.
The italic deserves its own mention. It is a designed return to the family's slanted source, not an afterthought, which makes Thasadith useful in editorial settings where Thai text needs genuine emphasis styles alongside Latin.
## Weights and availability
**Thasadith ships four styles: Regular (400), Italic, Bold (700), and Bold Italic — two weights, each with an italic companion.** Subsets cover Latin, Latin Extended, Thai, and Vietnamese. It entered Google Fonts on 22 August 2018, the same day as Srisakdi.
Two weights is the honest limitation here. There is no Light, no Medium, no SemiBold — the 400-to-700 jump is the only hierarchy move available inside the family, so complex editorial systems will need a second face for intermediate levels.
## How to download Thasadith
**Thasadith is a free download from Google Fonts — the family ZIP contains all four TTF styles, no registration required.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts ZIP** — open the [Thasadith specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Thasadith), click "Get font", and download the family.
2. **CSS embed** — load `https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Thasadith:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400;1,700&display=swap` in a `` tag, then set `font-family: 'Thasadith', sans-serif;`. Drop the italic axes from the URL if the design never uses them; each style is a separate file.
3. **GitHub source** — the [cadsondemak/Thasadith repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Thasadith) holds the font files and the project notes on the Srisakdi spin-off.
## Best use cases
**Thasadith is the body face for retrospective Thai editorial — the running text under a Srisakdi headline, or any layout that wants period flavour at reading sizes.** Strong briefs:
- Heritage and museum publishing where [Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/) sets the titles
- Cultural magazines and essays on pre-modern Thai subjects
- Packaging for craft and tradition-led brands that need legible back-of-pack text
- Mixed Thai-Latin editorial that needs working italics in both scripts
Where it fails: data-dense interfaces and design systems, where two weights cannot carry the hierarchy; contemporary tech branding, where the manuscript undertone works against the message — [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) or [Bai Jamjuree](/fonts/bai-jamjuree/) fit that brief better.
## Pairings
**Thasadith pairs upward with its parent display face and sideways with neutral sans for utility text.** Three pairings:
- **[Srisakdi](/fonts/srisakdi/)** — the family pairing: Rattanakosin handwriting for titles, Thasadith for everything readable
- **[Maitree](/fonts/maitree/)** — looped serif for pull quotes and captions inside the same antique register
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric sans for navigation and tables when Thasadith carries the prose
Pairing logic for display-text systems is in the [typography guide](/learn/typography/).
## Licensing
**Thasadith is released under the SIL Open Font License — free for commercial use, web embedding, modification, and bundling, provided the OFL notice travels with the files.** Verify at the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Thasadith) or the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/cadsondemak/Thasadith). All four styles, including both italics, carry identical terms; there is no paid cut anywhere in the family.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/thonburi.mdx
Thonburi (ธนบุรี) is Apple's Thai system font on iPhone, iPad and Mac. If you searched because you want it on a Samsung phone or a Windows PC, the answer is in the first section. Its origins, weights, licence, and the *other* font called Thonburi that really is a free download follow below.
## Can you use Thonburi on iPhone, Samsung and Windows?
**Only on Apple devices. Thonburi ships inside iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS as a system font; Samsung, Android and Windows do not have it, and there is no legitimate way to add it, because section 2.E of [Apple's Software License Agreement](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSequoia.pdf) permits the bundled fonts to be used only "while running the Apple Software".** In one table:
| Device | Has Thonburi? | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone / iPad | Yes — iOS system font | Thai text renders in it automatically; nothing to download; no system-wide font switch |
| Mac | Yes — three weights in Font Book | Document and design work on that Mac; the file may not be passed on |
| Samsung / Android | No | Default Thai font is Noto Sans Thai; system fonts change only via the Galaxy Store |
| Windows | No | The system's Thai font is Leelawadee UI; install a free looped Thai font instead |
### On iPhone and iPad
**Thonburi is already working out of the box; there is nothing to download.** [Apple's System Fonts list](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/) records Thonburi, Thonburi Bold and Thonburi Light at version 18.0d1e1 tagged "iOS system font", "macOS system font", "tvOS system font" and "watchOS system font". It is the face the system picks for Thai characters in menus, Messages and every app. If your iPhone displays Thai, you are reading Thonburi — on iOS 16, 17 or the current release.
What iOS does not offer is a system-wide font switch. The only route Apple documents in the [iPhone User Guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-and-manage-fonts-iphb2517689c/ios) is installing fonts from an App Store app to "use them in documents you create on iPhone", managed under **Settings → General → Fonts**. Fonts added that way work in document apps; they do not restyle the interface.
The name "SF Thonburi" that many people search for is not an official one. In Apple's documentation the font is simply Thonburi; SF (San Francisco) is the Latin family shown beside it on the same screen, and the [Apple Developer Fonts page](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/) offers no Thai SF for download. More in "What Thai font does iPhone use?" below.
### On Mac
**Every Mac has all three Thonburi weights in Font Book.** Apple's [Fonts included with macOS Sonoma](https://support.apple.com/en-us/108939) lists Thonburi, Thonburi Bold and Thonburi Light 18.0d1e1 and notes that "most of these fonts are installed and enabled automatically"; fonts in the System Library folder "are required by your Mac and can't be disabled in Font Book".
The scope of use is set by licence section 2.E: "you may use the fonts included with the Apple Software to display and print content while running the Apple Software; however, you may only embed fonts in content if that is permitted by the embedding restrictions accompanying the font in question". Display and print on the Mac: yes. Embedding in a PDF: as far as the permission shown in Font Book → Show Font Info allows. Copying the file to another machine: outside the licence.
### On Samsung and Android
**Android does not include Thonburi and there is no legitimate way to add it.** Android's default Thai face is Noto Sans Thai — the [Android Open Source Project's system font configuration](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/main/data/fonts/fonts.xml) maps the Thai script family (`lang="und-Thai"`) to NotoSansThai-Regular and NotoSansThai-Bold, a loopless design. That is why Thai text on Android and iPhone feels different.
On Samsung, the one supported way to change the system font, per [Samsung's own guide](https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-to-adjust-the-font-size-and-style-on-your-galaxy-phone/), is **Settings → Display → Font size and style → Font style → Download fonts**, which opens the Galaxy Store. Samsung documents no step for installing your own font file, so the viral "change your Samsung font to SF Thonburi" videos depend on third-party font apps plus files extracted from iOS or macOS, which breaches Apple's section 2.E. We do not recommend or link to them. If you want looped Thai on a Samsung, look at the Thai fonts in the Galaxy Store, or use the free font in the next section wherever you control the typography — websites and apps that accept font files.
### On Windows
**Windows does not have Thonburi — it is in neither the default install nor the optional Thai Supplemental Fonts feature.** Per Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list), the Thai font that ships with the system is **Leelawadee UI** (Leelawui.ttf 5.05, with Semilight and Bold), also a looped design. [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/), [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/), [Angsana New](/fonts/angsana-new/) and eleven UPC families sit in an optional feature you enable yourself: right-click **Start → Settings → System → Optional features → View features**, tick **Thai Supplemental Fonts → Next → Add**, per [Microsoft's documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-missing-fonts) (on some Windows 11 builds the pane is under Settings → Apps; the shortcut is Run → `ms-settings:optionalfeatures`).
If you want the Thonburi feel on Windows, do not hunt for a Thonburi.ttf — install the free font below.
### The free font that installs everywhere: Noto Sans Thai Looped and Sarabun
**The properly licensed substitute that installs on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android alike is [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) — a looped Thai family in nine weights under the SIL Open Font License, [free from Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai+Looped).** The second choice is [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) (OFL, eight weights, [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Sarabun)), which Apple itself lists in its System Fonts table as "iOS downloadable" and "macOS downloadable" — on a Mac you can fetch it through Font Book without leaving Apple's ecosystem.
How to install:
- **Windows** — download from Google Fonts, right-click the .zip → **Extract**, then right-click the font files → **Install**, per [Microsoft's guide](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-font-b7c5f17c-4426-4b53-967f-455339c564c1)
- **Mac** — double-click the font file in Finder and click **Install**, per [Apple's Font Book guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/font-book/install-and-validate-fonts-fntbk1000/mac); or search Font Book for Sarabun and download it straight from Apple
- **iPhone / iPad** — install through a font-manager app from the App Store, then check **Settings → General → Fonts**; usable in document apps (the system font stays)
- **Android / Samsung** — use it in apps that accept font files, and embed it on the web with `@font-face` with full OFL rights; the system-wide font still has to come from the Galaxy Store
Other free Thai fonts with a similar feel are listed under "Getting the iPhone Thai look on Windows or Android" below.
## What Thonburi is
**Thonburi is Apple's looped Thai system sans, bundled with Mac OS X since 10.3 Panther (2003, B.E. 2546) and used as the Thai system font on iPhone and iPad.** According to the [ThaiFaces specimen](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/thonburi/), it is credited to Apple (Singapore), ships in three weights, and covers the full Thai consonant, vowel, tone-mark and numeral set plus the Latin alphabet.
One disambiguation before going further: in Thai, ฟอนต์ธนบุรี points at two completely different typefaces. The next section sorts out which is which.
The name follows Apple's convention of christening its bundled Thai fonts after Bangkok places and districts — Krungthep, Ayuthaya, Sathu, Silom and [Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/) are its siblings, as catalogued in [Jeff McNeill's Thai font collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/blob/master/apple-and-microsoft-thai-fonts.md). ธนบุรี (Thonburi) itself is the historic west-bank district across the Chao Phraya from Bangkok, and a former Thai capital.
Its lineage predates its Mac OS X debut: the metadata of Thonburi Bold (version 13.0d1e1) reads "Copyright 1992-2011 by Apple Inc.", tracing the typeface back to Apple's early-1990s Thai language support. One caveat the record forces on us: Thai foundry PSL SmartLetter markets itself as "The Font Company that sold to Apple", but no public source connects Thonburi to PSL, so the often-repeated PSL origin story remains unverified. No named human designer is documented — only the corporate Apple (Singapore) credit.
## Two different fonts are called Thonburi
**In Thai search results, ฟอนต์ธนบุรี can mean either Apple's system font, which cannot be downloaded, or a display typeface called SOV_ThonBuri, which is a free download from f0nt.com.** They are unrelated:
| | Thonburi (Apple) | ธนบุรี / SOV_ThonBuri |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Apple (Singapore) | uvSOV — Worawut Thanawatanawanich |
| Released | 2003, with Mac OS X 10.3 | 8 December 2024 |
| Type | Looped system face for reading | Display face in an old-signage style |
| Origin | Drawn as an interface typeface | Traced from old signs at Wat Nang, from when Thonburi was still a province |
| Weights | Light, Regular, Bold | Not stated on the release page |
| Download | No — bundled with macOS/iOS only | Yes, free from [f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/sov-thonburi/) |
If you arrived here after noticing the Thai text on an iPhone, you want Apple's Thonburi. If you are hunting for the old Thonburi shophouse-signage lettering to use in design work, you want uvSOV's SOV_ThonBuri, whose [release page on f0nt.com](https://www.f0nt.com/release/sov-thonburi/) states it was drawn from old signage at Wat Nang and files it under display / traditional / signage.
On licensing for SOV_ThonBuri: the [f0nt.com licence page](https://www.f0nt.com/about/license/) states that fonts on the site can be downloaded free and used in commercial design work, unless the individual designer sets different terms; the font files themselves may not be redistributed, and distributing a modified version needs the designer's permission. Always re-read the terms on the specific release page before client work — the same principle we set out in our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## Can you download Apple's Thonburi?
**No. Apple's Thonburi is not sold, not distributed, and not on Google Fonts or any CDN. The right to use it travels with macOS and iOS under [Apple's Software License Agreement](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/).** If you design on a Mac, it is already in your font menu. If you do not, there is no legal way to obtain it on its own.
Thonburi files floating around general font-download sites have been extracted from the operating system, which breaches Apple's licence. Using them in client work, print, or as an embedded webfont carries real legal exposure, and we do not recommend it.
The correct move is a free looped Thai font that actually carries distribution rights. The full list is in our [free Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
## What Thai font does iPhone use?
**The Thai text you see in menus, Messages and apps across iPhone, iPad and Mac is Thonburi, a looped face; English text on the same devices uses the San Francisco family (SF Pro).** The two scripts come from different typefaces, not one unified family.
Apple publishes some of its system fonts for free download on the [Apple Developer Fonts page](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/), but the list is SF Pro, SF Compact, SF Mono, New York, and four script extensions — SF Arabic, SF Armenian, SF Georgian and SF Hebrew. **There is no Thai script extension of San Francisco offered for download.** Apple's Thai type stays inside the operating system.
How much Thonburi matters to Thai users became obvious in 2013, when the iOS 7 beta swapped the Thai system font from Thonburi to Sukhumvit, the loopless face designed by Cadson Demak. The backlash was strong enough that Apple reverted to Thonburi in iOS 7.0.1 — an episode [Typotheque's history of Thai typography](https://www.typotheque.com/articles/history-of-thai-typography) records in detail, and one that [Wikipedia's Thai typography article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography) treats as a landmark in the looped-versus-loopless debate.
## Getting the iPhone Thai look on Windows or Android
**You cannot do it legally with Apple's file, but several free, properly licensed looped Thai fonts read almost the same.** Four that actually substitute:
- **[Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/)** — Google's looped Thai under the OFL, nine weights, the closest thing to a neutral system face and embeddable on the web
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed looped Thai workhorse in eight weights, good for both UI and documents
- **[TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/)** — the Thai government document standard, free, installs on Windows and macOS
- **[Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/)** — the looped Thai bundled with Windows, Microsoft's counterpart to Thonburi
A note on the other direction: guides circulate for modifying Android or Samsung devices to install Apple's Thai font files. That requires copying Apple's licensed software, so it is not a legitimate route and we do not recommend it.
## Character design and tone
**Thonburi is a looped (มีหัว) Thai sans: every consonant that traditionally carries a loop keeps it, which is exactly why Thai users defended it so fiercely in 2013.** The loops are what let a Thai reader separate consonants fastest at small sizes.
Because it was drawn as an interface font, the design priorities are legibility ones: open loops that survive small pixel sizes, clearly differentiated lookalike pairs, and tone marks that stay distinct at UI text sizes. The Latin companion is a plain humanist sans built to sit quietly next to the Thai, not to star on its own.
The overall tone is neutral civic infrastructure — Thonburi is the Thai text most iPhone and Mac users have read every day for two decades, which makes it feel less like a designed voice and more like the default voice of the platform. For the Windows-side equivalent of that default, see [Cordia New](/fonts/cordia-new/).
## Weights and availability
**Thonburi ships in three weights — Light, Regular and Bold — bundled with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and later, per the [ThaiFaces specimen](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/thonburi/).** It arrives with the operating system; there is nothing to install and nothing to buy separately.
There is no italic, no variable axis, and no webfont distribution. Any brief that needs more range — a headline heavier than Bold, or a Thin for large numerals — has to start from a different family rather than mixing with Thonburi. Browse [our full Thai font library](/fonts/) for fonts you can actually self-host.
## Best use cases
**Thonburi is the right choice when you are designing for Apple platforms and want the native looped Thai reading experience users already trust.** Strong briefs:
- Native iOS and macOS app interfaces rendering Thai text with the system stack
- UI mockups and prototypes that must match what Thai users actually see on Apple devices
- Keynote and Pages documents produced and shared inside the Apple ecosystem
- Design QA — checking how Thai copy will really render on iPhones without custom fonts
Where it doesn't fit: websites and cross-platform products (you cannot embed it), print identity work (no extended weights, no licence path), and any project that needs distribution rights.
## Pairings
**Thonburi pairs most naturally with fonts from its own Apple habitat or with open looped Thai text faces.** Three pairings:
- **[Sukhumvit Set](/fonts/sukhumvit-set/)** — Apple's bundled loopless sibling; the two cover the looped/loopless register within one system, and their 2013 role swap is part of Thai type history
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — the open-licensed looped Thai workhorse, the natural stand-in wherever Thonburi's reading feel is wanted but embedding rights are needed
- **[Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)** — an open loopless geometric sans for display hierarchy above Thonburi body text in Apple-platform mockups
## Licensing
**Thonburi is proprietary Apple software, licensed to you only as part of macOS and iOS under [Apple's Software License Agreement](https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/).** As the [ThaiFaces specimen](https://thaifaces.com/specimen/thonburi/) puts it, it is free to use for system owners — but that permission travels with the operating system, not with the font file. You may not extract, redistribute, or serve it as a webfont. The operative wording is section 2.E of the agreement: the fonts may be used "to display and print content while running the Apple Software", and embedded in content only as far as the font's own embedding permission allows.
For projects that need distributable Thai fonts, the free alternatives are strong: [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) and [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) for looped sans under an open licence, [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/) for Thai government documents, and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/) for a modern loopless voice — all self-hostable without a licence conversation.
## Frequently asked questions about Thonburi
**The questions people searching for Thonburi ask most are platform questions — whether a Samsung can switch to it, whether an iPhone needs to download it, and what "SF Thonburi" is — and the short, sourced answers are below.**
### Can I change my Samsung font to Thonburi?
**Not legitimately.** [Samsung's guide](https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-to-adjust-the-font-size-and-style-on-your-galaxy-phone/) changes the system font only through the Galaxy Store (Settings → Display → Font size and style → Font style → Download fonts), and Thonburi is not there, because Apple has never licensed anyone to distribute it. The methods in circulating videos rely on files extracted from Apple's systems, which breaches licence section 2.E. For the same looped forms in work you control, use [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/).
### Do I need to download Thonburi on iPhone?
**No.** Thonburi is an iOS system font per [Apple's System Fonts list](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/); the system applies it to Thai text everywhere, from the Home Screen to Messages. What iOS lets you add, per [Apple's guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-and-manage-fonts-iphb2517689c/ios), are fonts for use in documents, installed through App Store apps and managed under Settings → General → Fonts.
### What is "SF Thonburi"?
**A user-coined name, not an official one.** Apple's documentation calls its Thai system font Thonburi; SF Pro is the Latin face shown alongside it on iPhone and Mac, so people run the two together as "SF Thonburi". The [Apple Developer Fonts page](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/) offers SF for Latin, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian and Hebrew only — nothing for Thai.
### Can I download Thonburi for Windows?
**No.** Thonburi is absent from Microsoft's [Windows 11 font list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list), and the files on free-font sites were extracted from macOS. The looped Thai fonts Windows already has are Leelawadee UI and [Leelawadee](/fonts/leelawadee/) (the latter after enabling Thai Supplemental Fonts). For one font that looks identical on Windows and Mac, install [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or [Noto Sans Thai Looped](/fonts/noto-sans-thai-looped/) from Google Fonts.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/trirong.mdx
## What Trirong is
**Trirong (ไตรรงค์) is a looped Thai serif from Cadson Demak, on Google Fonts since 20 June 2016 with nine weights and matching italics — 18 styles in total — free to download and free for commercial use under the SIL Open Font License.** The name means "tricolor flag" in Thai and refers to the red, white and blue flag of Thailand ([Google Fonts metadata](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/trirong/METADATA.pb), accessed 5 August 2026).
Cadson Demak drew Trirong with a narrow, tall structure that echoes traditional Thai typefaces, saving space through an oval-shaped looped terminal. The compressed proportions buy horizontal room without giving up the looped consonant heads Thai readers expect in formal text ([Google Fonts description](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/trirong/DESCRIPTION.en_us.html), accessed 5 August 2026).
Trirong belongs to the same group as [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/), [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) and [Maitree](/fonts/maitree/) — the looped serifs the Bangkok foundry contributed during Google Fonts' Thai expansion of the mid-2010s. Sources are open in the foundry's own repository at [cadsondemak/trirong](https://github.com/cadsondemak/trirong).
## Trirong weights: 9 weights, 18 styles
**Trirong ships nine weights from Thin (100) to Black (900), each with a true italic — 18 styles, all included in the single ZIP you download from Google Fonts** ([METADATA.pb](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/trirong/METADATA.pb), accessed 5 August 2026).
| Weight | CSS value | File name | What it's for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Thin | 100 | Trirong-Thin.ttf | Very large display headlines only |
| ExtraLight | 200 | Trirong-ExtraLight.ttf | Airy headlines, ceremonial print |
| Light | 300 | Trirong-Light.ttf | Standfirsts and large secondary text |
| **Regular** | **400** | **Trirong-Regular.ttf** | **Body text — the most-used cut** |
| Medium | 500 | Trirong-Medium.ttf | Subheads and light emphasis |
| SemiBold | 600 | Trirong-SemiBold.ttf | Editorial headings |
| **Bold** | **700** | **Trirong-Bold.ttf** | **Primary headlines and emphasis** |
| ExtraBold | 800 | Trirong-ExtraBold.ttf | Heavy headlines in narrow columns |
| Black | 900 | Trirong-Black.ttf | Heaviest display use, sparingly |
Italics follow the same file-naming pattern: `Trirong-Italic.ttf` for Regular Italic, `Trirong-BoldItalic.ttf` for Bold Italic, and so on.
For most editorial work **Trirong Regular** carries body text, **SemiBold** takes subheads and **Bold** takes headlines — those three cover the hierarchy. The outer weights are display material. Google Fonts warns in its own notes that formal looped Thai faces carry delicate details heavy weights can obscure, and Black shows it: loops tighten and contrast flattens. At the other end, Thin and ExtraLight run close to hairline.
## How to download Trirong
**Trirong is a free download from Google Fonts — no registration, no payment, full commercial rights under the SIL Open Font License.** Three routes:
1. **Google Fonts download** — open the [Trirong specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Trirong), click "Get font", and download the ZIP with all 18 static styles. Then install: on Windows, right-click the .ttf and choose Install; on macOS, double-click and click Install Font in Font Book.
2. **Google Fonts embed** — put `` in your ``, then set `font-family: 'Trirong', serif;` in CSS.
3. **GitHub source** — the [google/fonts repository](https://github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/trirong) hosts all 18 TTFs plus the OFL license file for self-hosting with `@font-face`; the foundry's upstream repository is [cadsondemak/trirong](https://github.com/cadsondemak/trirong).
There is no reason to use a third-party font-aggregator download. The Google Fonts and GitHub files are the same official set, and always the current version.
## Can Trirong be used commercially?
**Yes. Trirong is released under the SIL Open Font License, so it is free for commercial use — client work, logos, products for sale, websites and apps — with no licence fee and no permission request** ([METADATA.pb lists license: OFL](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/trirong/METADATA.pb), accessed 5 August 2026).
Three OFL conditions are worth knowing:
- You may not sell the font files on their own (selling work made with the font is fine; selling the font is not)
- If you redistribute the font files, the OFL notice must travel with them
- If you modify and release the font, you must rename it, and the derivative stays under the OFL
There is no paid tier and no "Pro" version to buy. See our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) for how OFL, system fonts and commercial foundry licences differ.
## Character design and tone
**Trirong combines thick-and-thin stroke contrast with a narrow, tall letter skeleton; loop terminals are drawn as ovals rather than circles, which keeps counters open at text sizes.** The oval loops on ก, ถ and ภ are the design's signature — they compress the loop vertically so the narrow body still reads clearly.
The contrast gives Trirong a formal register closer to [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) than to any sans, but the condensed skeleton makes it feel more official and less literary. Google's design notes add a second caution: the similarity between glyphs such as ก ถ ภ ฤ ฦ, and between ฎ and ฏ, has to be taken into consideration when typesetting — particularly at small sizes or heavy weights ([DESCRIPTION.en_us.html](https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/trirong/DESCRIPTION.en_us.html), accessed 5 August 2026).
The Latin companion is a serif with matching contrast, and subsets cover latin, latin-ext and Vietnamese alongside Thai. Bilingual formal documents hold together because Thai and Latin share the same stroke logic.
## Trirong compared with the other free Thai serifs
**Among free, commercially usable looped Thai serifs, Trirong offers the most styles and the narrowest letterform.**
| Font | Weights | Italics | Character |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Trirong** | 9 | Yes, all | Narrow, tall, formal, official in register |
| [Taviraj](/fonts/taviraj/) | 9 | Yes, all | Wider formal serif, easier in long body text |
| [Pridi](/fonts/pridi/) | 6 | No | Formal but literary, middling proportions |
| [Maitree](/fonts/maitree/) | 6 | No | Gentle text serif built for sustained reading |
| [Noto Serif Thai](/fonts/noto-serif-thai/) | 9 | No | The most neutral, with the widest glyph coverage |
| [Charm](/fonts/charm/) | 2 | No | Display serif with strong personality, not for body text |
How to choose: pick Trirong when you need italics and narrow columns; Taviraj or Maitree for comfortable long reading; Noto Serif Thai for neutrality and coverage. Full lists sit in the [serif category](/fonts/categories/serif/) and the [free Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
## Best use cases
**Trirong fits formal Thai print where horizontal economy matters: certificates, programmes, institutional reports, and editorial headlines that need looped authority in tight columns.** Strong briefs:
- Certificates, diplomas and ceremonial print where looped Thai signals respect for convention
- Magazine and newspaper headlines where the narrow body buys characters per line
- Bilingual Thai-Latin annual reports and institutional publications
- Government-adjacent identity work that needs formality without Angsana-era nostalgia
- Book covers and chapter openers that want clear stroke contrast
Where it doesn't fit: interface text and small screen sizes, where the hairlines thin and tight counters break down; long body text below Light at print sizes; and modern consumer branding, which usually calls for a loopless sans like [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/).
## Pairings
**Trirong pairs with low-contrast Thai sans faces that let its formal serif texture lead.** Three pairings:
- **[Kanit](/fonts/kanit/)** — geometric loopless sans for subheads and captions under Trirong headlines
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — neutral looped sans for forms, tables and body text below Trirong display
- **[Maitree](/fonts/maitree/)** — a text serif from the same foundry, when headline and body should stay inside one Thai serif tradition
See our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) for pairing guidance and the [fonts directory](/fonts/) for the full catalogue.
## Licensing
**Trirong is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, embedding and bundling, provided the OFL notice stays with the files.** The license file ships in the [google/fonts repository](https://github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/trirong) next to the TTFs, and the [Google Fonts specimen](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Trirong) states the same terms. No paid tier exists.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/umpush.mdx
## What Umpush is
**Umpush is a free, GPL-licensed looped Thai sans-serif from the TLWG National Fonts, notable among the free set for offering a Light weight in addition to Regular and Bold.** It is built for document and interface text and is free to download, modify and redistribute.
According to [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Umpush carries two copyright lines — "NECTEC, 2003" and "Widhaya Trisarnwadhana, 2007" — reflecting a NECTEC origin later developed by Widhaya Trisarnwadhana and released under the GNU GPL by the Thai Linux Working Group.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Umpush is the free National sans with the widest tonal range, thanks to that extra Light cut that lets it read a touch more elegantly than Garuda or Loma.
## Character design and tone
**Umpush is a looped (มีหัว) Thai sans with clean, even strokes and a slightly more refined finish than the plainer National sans faces, helped by its three-weight range.** The tone stays practical, but the Light weight opens up a softer, airier option.
The looped consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ follow the traditional Thai structure discussed in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/), keeping text legible at small sizes. The availability of Light, Regular and Bold means Umpush can carry a small amount of hierarchy on its own, which the two-weight National faces cannot.
The Latin companion is a plain, functional sans covering the basics, suitable for mixed Thai–English documents and interfaces.
## Weights and availability
**Umpush ships in three weights — Light, Regular and Bold — with oblique companions, and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the rest of the TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and installed on most Linux systems, making it one of the more versatile free Thai sans faces available.
## Best use cases
**Umpush is the right choice when a Thai layout needs a free sans with a little more range than the other National faces.** Strong briefs:
- Thai documents and reports that benefit from a Light weight for airier body text
- Linux and open-source UI localisation needing a legible, free Thai sans
- Simple layouts wanting light/regular/bold hierarchy without a commercial licence
- Non-profit and budget branding that needs more than one usable weight for free
- Bilingual documents mixing Thai and Latin at no cost
Where it doesn't fit: display and premium branding — for expressive [sans-serif Thai](/fonts/categories/sans-serif/) with full weight ranges, a Google Fonts release is the better tool.
## Pairings
**Umpush works well on its own across a document or paired with a quieter body face.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL body sans as a modern companion or replacement
- **TH Sarabun New** — the official Thai document face for formal report furniture
- **Leelawadee** — the Windows-bundled Thai sans for cross-platform office layouts
## Licensing
**Umpush is free software from NECTEC and Widhaya Trisarnwadhana, maintained by TLWG under the GNU General Public License, so it is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL Thai sans with more weights, see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/fonts/waree.mdx
## What Waree is
**Waree is a free Thai sans-serif built on the Bitstream Vera Latin design with a Thai script added by the Thai Linux Working Group, giving it unusually solid, well-hinted Latin coverage for a free Thai face.** It ships four styles and is free to download and redistribute.
According to [Wikipedia's National Fonts entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fonts), Waree carries "Copyright (C) 2003 by Bitstream, Inc." for its Vera base, with the TLWG Thai additions placed in the public domain and distributed alongside the other TLWG National Fonts. Its lineage means the Latin side behaves like the widely trusted Vera/DejaVu family.
For designers browsing the [ThaiGraph font library](/fonts/), Waree is the free Thai sans to reach for when the Latin has to be as dependable as the Thai — for example in bilingual technical documents.
## Character design and tone
**Waree marries a looped (มีหัว) Thai script to the Bitstream Vera Latin, so its Latin has the sturdy, humanist-grotesque proportions of Vera while its Thai follows conventional looped construction.** The overall tone is functional and neutral, engineered for clarity rather than character.
The Thai consonant heads on ก, ถ and ภ keep the traditional looped structure covered in our [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/), sitting at a weight that matches the robust Vera Latin. Because the Latin is inherited from a screen-optimised design, Waree renders cleanly at small sizes across both scripts.
The practical upshot is a free Thai–Latin sans where the Latin does not feel like an afterthought — a genuine advantage over many free Thai faces with weak Latin companions.
## Weights and availability
**Waree ships Regular and Bold, each with an oblique companion — four TrueType files in total — and is free to download.** Get it from the [Thai Font Collection on GitHub](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg), packaged with the rest of the TLWG National Fonts.
The font is not on Google Fonts, but it is bundled in the `fonts-tlwg` package and installed on most Linux systems, making it broadly available for free Thai–Latin work.
## Best use cases
**Waree is the right choice when a bilingual Thai–Latin layout needs both scripts to be equally solid and free.** Strong briefs:
- Bilingual technical documents, manuals and specifications with heavy Latin content
- Open-source and Linux localisation needing dependable Thai plus Vera-grade Latin
- Data tables and interfaces mixing Thai text with Latin numerals and code
- Non-profit and budget projects requiring a trustworthy free Thai–Latin sans
- Cross-script documents where Latin quality usually forces a commercial licence
Where it doesn't fit: expressive branding and display — for personality and modern weight ranges, an OFL release is the better tool.
## Pairings
**Waree pairs with other quiet document faces or stands alone across bilingual material.** Three pairings:
- **[Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/)** — OFL body sans as a modern companion or replacement
- **TH Sarabun New** — the government-standard Thai document face for formal layouts
- **Cordia New** — the legacy Windows Thai sans for cross-platform office work
## Licensing
**Waree is free to use: its Bitstream Vera base carries the permissive Vera licence and the TLWG Thai additions are in the public domain, so the font is free to use, modify and redistribute.** Verify the terms in the [fonts-tlwg licence file](https://github.com/tlwg/fonts-tlwg/blob/master/COPYING) and download from the [Thai Font Collection](https://github.com/jeffmcneill/thai-font-collection/tree/master/downloadable-free-thai-fonts/nectec-tlwg). For a modern SIL OFL Thai sans with matching Latin, see [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) or browse the [free fonts category](/fonts/categories/free/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/typography/how-to-make-a-thai-font.mdx
## What this guide answers
**There are exactly three routes to a Thai font — a handwriting-capture tool, a real type-design workflow, or a commission — and the route you can afford is decided by one technical fact: Thai needs OpenType mark positioning, and only two of the three routes produce it.** This is the overview page for Latin type designers extending a family into Thai, and for designers who have been handed a Thai project and discovered that the tooling they know does not transfer. It covers the structural difficulty, the three routes with their real costs and failure modes, why AI and auto-tracing tools do not solve any of it, and what a shipped Thai font actually took to produce in our own pipeline.
If you want to draw the letterforms themselves, start instead with [Thai Font Design: Letterform Basics](/learn/illustrator/thai-font-letterform-basics/). This page is about everything that happens around the drawing.
## Why Thai is structurally harder than Latin
**Latin is a linear script where each glyph advances the pen; Thai is a stacking script where marks attach to a base glyph at up to four levels above and two below, and none of that attachment happens unless the font file explicitly encodes where each mark goes.** Microsoft's Thai shaping documentation defines four above-mark classes — ABOVE1 (U+0E31, U+0E34–U+0E37), ABOVE2 (U+0E47, U+0E4D), ABOVE3 (the four tone marks U+0E48–U+0E4B), ABOVE4 (U+0E4C, U+0E4E) — plus BELOW1 (U+0E38, U+0E39), BELOW2 (U+0E3A), and a distinct AM class for U+0E33. A base consonant can carry a vowel from ABOVE1 with a tone mark from ABOVE3 sitting on top of it. That second attachment is mark-to-mark positioning, and it is the reason Thai cannot be treated as Latin-with-accents.
Microsoft flags 'mark' (mark-to-base) and 'mkmk' (mark-to-mark) as the only two REQUIRED features for a Thai OpenType font. 'ccmp' and 'kern' appear in the same table but carry no required flag. A font that ships without mark and mkmk anchors has given the renderer no instruction, so every vowel and tone mark lands at its own default origin — the failure Thai designers call สระลอย, floating vowels.
The glyph budget is the second surprise. The Thai Unicode block holds 128 code points with 87 assigned. Counting what a font actually needs: 44 consonants, 2 vocalic letters, 16 vowel signs and letters, 4 tone marks, 5 further diacritics, 2 abbreviation signs — 73 for the bare letter inventory. Add 10 Thai digits, the baht sign and Thai punctuation, U+25CC DOTTED CIRCLE (Microsoft is explicit that without it invalid mark sequences render as a white box) and U+200B ZWSP (Thai has no interword space, so ZWSP is what grows during justification), and you are at roughly 90. Then add the positional alternates Theppitak Karoonboonyanan's Thai OpenType spec names — `uni0E0D.descless` and `uni0E10.descless` for ญ and ฐ, the five lowered forms `uni0E48.low` through `uni0E4C.low`, `uni0E4D.high` — and you are near 98 glyphs that exist purely so positioning works. Add the basic Latin set that Thai text mixes with constantly — 95 printable ASCII positions — and a practical Thai+Latin font is heading for 200.
Third, there is a letterform decision with no Latin equivalent. Traditional Thai consonants carry a terminal loop (หัว); the modern loopless tradition drops it. This is not a stylistic axis you can interpolate between — it changes the skeleton of about a third of the alphabet. Decide before you draw, and read [The Loopless Revolution](/learn/typography/loopless-revolution/) if you are choosing for the first time.
## Route 1: handwriting-capture tools
**Handwriting-to-font services will give you a real TTF from your own handwriting in an afternoon, and it will almost certainly show floating vowels, because none of them documents any mark-positioning output in its own feature list.** Calligraphr is the best known of them and the one to understand properly. Its free tier caps at 75 characters per font; Pro raises that to 600, with 20 concurrent fonts, 15 variants per character, ligatures and per-character spacing. It exports standard TTF or OTF, and downloaded fonts keep working after a subscription lapses. Its published documentation never names Thai: the tutorial works through "Minimal English" and "Minimal Number", the features page names no script beyond Latin, and the only script limitation the FAQ states outright is that Calligraphr "cannot handle the high number of characters that would be necessary to create a fully functional Korean or Japanese font". Whatever the template picker offers behind the login, characters can be added one at a time through the "Arbitrary characters" option in the template builder — which is how most people assemble a Thai set there.
Note the arithmetic collision. The bare 73-glyph Thai letter inventory technically fits inside the free 75-character cap. So the honest statement is not "Thai does not fit in the free tier" — it is that Thai fits in 75 characters only with zero Thai numerals, zero punctuation, zero Latin, no dotted circle and none of the positional alternates. A font anyone would actually use starts around 90.
But the cap is not the real blocker. Calligraphr's FAQ documents contextual alternates (for character randomisation) and Pro-tier ligatures as its OpenType output and mentions no mark-to-base positioning, no mark-to-mark positioning, no anchors, and no combining-mark handling — precisely the tables Thai requires. Thai users report the predictable result first-hand: a Pantip thread on making a font with Calligraphr describes vowels that "should sit above or below the consonant" not staying there. The inference we would draw, and label as ours rather than the vendor's, is that upgrading to Pro to fix floating vowels spends money on the wrong problem. More character slots do not create GPOS anchors.
Two tools in this bracket are worth naming. **iFontMaker** (Eiji Nishidai, $7.99 one-time on the App Store, version 3.52) is the one handwriting app we found whose own site explicitly lists Thai among its supported scripts — 2ttf.com states it covers "Latin-1, Greek, Cyrillic, Thai, and Japanese" — and it exports TrueType. Be careful with pricing when you research it: the $19.99/yr and $7.99/mo subscription figures that circulate under that name belong to a different App Store listing (id1591733051, currently titled "Font Creator for Keyboard") by a different developer. **FontForge** is the honest zero-cost answer — free, GPL v3 and 3-clause BSD, current stable release 20251009, cross-platform, and it documents mark-to-base, mark-to-ligature and mark-to-mark positioning. You declare the lookups in the Lookups pane of Element > Font Info, which splits GSUB from GPOS, and place the anchor points with Points > Add Anchor. It is a font editor rather than a handwriting app, and it is the free route that can actually produce a correct Thai font. Birdfont is often listed as free, but its freeware build requires every font you make with it to be released under the SIL OFL and excludes colour fonts, variable fonts and OTF/CFF export; the Commercial edition starts at $4.99 and Plus at $9.99.
The workable Route 1 pattern is therefore hybrid: capture your handwriting outlines in Calligraphr or iFontMaker, then open the result in FontForge and add the anchors and ccmp rules by hand. That is a real afternoon-plus-a-week, not an afternoon.
## Route 2: real type design
**A genuine Thai typeface is drawn glyph by glyph in Glyphs, FontLab or FontForge, and the OpenType layer is roughly half the work — not a post-production formality.** The drawing side is covered in [Thai Font Design: Letterform Basics](/learn/illustrator/thai-font-letterform-basics/). The engineering side has a fixed shape.
Your GSUB layer is smaller than you expect. Theppitak's spec states that ccmp is the only GSUB feature Thai rendering engines use, so every substitution you write is registered under it. Microsoft names two ccmp jobs specifically: decompose Sara Am (U+0E33) so its mark component can be positioned independently, and swap in a descender-less alternate for ญ when a below-base vowel follows, so the vowel does not collide with the consonant's tail. The independent shaping documentation gives the Sara Am decomposition concretely as U+0E33 becoming U+0E4D plus U+0E32.
Your GPOS layer is where the effort goes. Every mark glyph carries an anchor and a mark class; every base glyph defines an anchor for each mark class it can accept; every mark that can host another mark needs mkmk anchors too. The full pipeline the shaping engine runs is GSUB 'locl' then 'ccmp', then GPOS 'kern', 'mark', 'mkmk'. Build against that order and test against it.
Test with `hb-shape` from HarfBuzz rather than by eye in a design app. Design apps hide problems in both directions — some apply shaping your target platform will not, and some fail to apply shaping your font does implement correctly. The specific strings worth keeping in a regression file: ญุ (descender-less alternate), น้ำ (Sara Am decomposition under a tone mark), and any consonant carrying an ABOVE1 vowel plus an ABOVE3 tone mark (mkmk stacking).
## Route 3: commission
**Commissioning is the correct route whenever the font is a brand asset rather than a craft exercise, and the brief matters more than the budget.** ThaiGraph does not publish rate cards we cannot source, so treat what follows as a brief checklist rather than a price guide; the studios themselves are profiled in [Thai Type Foundries](/learn/typography/thai-type-foundries/).
A brief that will not produce disputes specifies: looped or loopless skeleton; the exact glyph set, stated as a codepoint list rather than "Thai"; whether Latin is in scope and whether it must match an existing Latin family's metrics; the weight and width axes, and whether the deliverable is static instances or a variable font; the required OpenType features named individually (ccmp, kern, mark, mkmk at minimum); the licence model and embedding rights; and the source files — UFO or .glyphs — as a named deliverable, not an assumption. If bilingual setting is part of the job, the metric constraints are in our [Thai + Latin bilingual guide](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/), and licence terminology is unpacked in [Thai Font Licensing](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## Why AI generators and auto-tracers fail on Thai
**Outline tracing produces outlines. Thai correctness lives in tables that contain no outlines at all, so a tool that only generates shapes cannot produce a working Thai font regardless of how good the shapes are.** An anchor is a coordinate pair plus a class assignment; a ccmp rule is a substitution instruction. Neither is visible in a bitmap, an SVG, or a vectorised scan, so neither can be inferred by an image model or a tracer. A generated Thai font can look flawless as a specimen sheet of isolated consonants and collapse the moment a vowel is typed.
This is also why the "font generator" results that dominate search for this query are the wrong tool entirely. On our reading of what currently ranks, most of them produce Unicode-styled *text* — characters swapped for lookalikes from other Unicode blocks — not font files. Nothing is installed, nothing is licensed, and no Thai mark ever gets positioned.
Our own survey of commercial AI font-generation tooling in August 2026 found none producing correctly shaped Thai. We record that as a ThaiGraph research finding rather than a vendor statement, and it is a moving target — re-check before relying on it.
## What shipping one actually looked like
**In August 2026 we shipped ThaiGraph Condensed — Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, TTF and WOFF2 — through an automated fontTools pipeline, and the instructive part is how much of the work was positioning data rather than drawing.** The family is derived from [Anuphan](/fonts/anuphan/) v3.002, designed by Mint Tantisuwanna at Cadson Demak and published under SIL OFL 1.1 with no Reserved Font Name, which is what makes a renamed derivative legally clean.
The build has four stages. **Instance** pins the variable source at a heavier weight than the target, so a horizontal condense does not leave the stems looking thin. **Condense** scales every horizontal coordinate by 0.85 — glyf outlines, composite offsets and transforms, hmtx advances and left side bearings, and every GPOS XCoordinate, XPlacement and XAdvance value. That last clause is the whole trick: if you condense outlines but not GPOS anchors, every mark in the font detaches by up to 15% of its base width. Mark and mkmk anchors get the same X treatment and keep their Y untouched. TrueType hints are stripped, because they are stale the moment geometry moves. **Rebrand** applies the OFL-compliant rename, licence name records, and condensed width-class and macStyle bits. **QA** shapes real Thai through HarfBuzz across 40 automated checks: no .notdef anywhere, mark and mkmk attachment identical to the source, ccmp descender-less alternates firing on ญ plus below-vowel, Sara Am decomposing, measured advance-width ratio 0.850 in all four styles, metadata clean.
The reusable lesson for anyone deriving from an OFL Thai family: whatever transformation you apply to outlines, apply the same transformation to the positioning tables, then verify it with a shaper rather than a design app. Derivatives of an OFL font must themselves remain OFL, and if the source declares a Reserved Font Name you must rename. Anuphan declares none, which is why it was the source we chose.
## Choosing a route
**Pick by what happens to the font after it exists, not by budget.** A personal handwriting font for your own notes: Calligraphr or iFontMaker, and accept that สระ placement may be imperfect — or spend the extra week in FontForge adding anchors. A font that ships inside a product or a client identity: Route 2 or Route 3, with no middle ground. Our editorial judgement, and we label it as ours: Thai readers do not file floating vowels in a released brand asset under rendering quirk, they file them under the brand getting Thai wrong. A Latin family extending into Thai: Route 3 with a foundry that has a Thai team, and a brief that names the metric constraints up front.
If what you actually need is an existing font rather than a new one, the [handwritten Thai fonts category](/fonts/categories/handwritten/) and the [loopless category](/fonts/categories/loopless/) list what is already available with verified licences, and the pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/) covers the writing system itself.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/typography/loopless-revolution.mdx
## What you'll learn
**Loopless Thai typography — the letterform style that removes the traditional opening loops from consonants — went from avant-garde provocation to mainstream default over twenty years, led by a single Bangkok foundry and propelled by the readability failure of looped Thai on early digital screens.** This essay traces the movement from its origins at Cadson Demak in 2002 through IBM Plex Thai in 2020 to its current status as the neutral default for Thai product design. It is not a tutorial; it is the context every Thai typographer needs to work confidently with contemporary type.
## The loop as the thousand-year convention
**For roughly seven centuries, from the Sukhothai stone inscriptions to the first digital fonts shipped with Microsoft Office 97, the defining feature of Thai type was the loop.** Open any consonant in Angsana New or Cordia New — the small closed circle at the top-left of ก, the pair of loops on ณ, the ringed opening of ส — and you are looking at the direct descendant of thirteenth-century scribal convention. The loop is not decoration; it is the anchoring element that tells the reader where a consonant begins. Thai handwriting is drawn starting at the loop and flowing outward. Every printed Thai letterform from 1836 (Bradley's first movable Thai type) through 1997 (Microsoft's bundled Angsana) inherited this convention.
The loop had functional value in print. At the 12-point body sizes of Thai textbooks and newspapers, loops rendered as crisp eyes that grounded each consonant visually. Readers parsed them instantly. The rhythmic repetition of loops gave Thai running text its characteristic texture — a texture that defined how Thai looked for a thousand years.
Then screens happened.
## The digital breakpoint
**On pre-retina LCD displays, at the 11–14 pixel UI sizes that dominated 1998–2012, the loops of traditional Thai fonts turned into illegible blobs — which meant Thai websites and Thai apps were structurally harder to read than their English counterparts.** This was the problem Lertsithichai documented at Silpakorn in 2015: the loops that worked at 12-point print became black dots below 14-pixel screen. Anti-aliasing smeared them further. Hinting helped marginally. The fundamental issue was that Thai consonants carried visual information (the loop) that digital rendering could not preserve at small sizes.
Designers noticed. By 2000, Thai UI designers were routinely increasing their body text to 16 pixels while Latin sites shipped at 12 — just to give the loops pixel room to breathe. The result was Thai websites that felt bloated compared to their English equivalents. Or Thai websites shipped at 12 pixel body anyway, with the understanding that Thai users would squint.
## Cadson Demak and the loopless proposition
**In 2002, a small Bangkok foundry called Cadson Demak proposed a radical solution: remove the loops entirely. If the loop could not render at screen sizes, replace it with a simple open curl that worked at every size.** The studio's founders — Ekaluck Peanpanawate and Anuthin Wongsunkakon — had trained in Latin type design in the Netherlands and the UK. They looked at the loop problem and concluded that Thai type could borrow Latin stroke logic without losing Thai identity, because the loop was not identity; the stroke structure was.
The early Cadson Demak releases were controversial. Thai type professors at Silpakorn and Chulalongkorn argued that removing the loop was cultural erasure. Thai readers over 40 found the early loopless fonts alien. The younger design community embraced them — partly because the fonts looked modern, partly because they solved the screen-legibility problem, and partly because they paired cleanly with Latin sans-serifs in a way that looped Thai never did. A bilingual layout with Helvetica + Angsana New always read as mismatched; Helvetica + a loopless Thai read as designed.
## The slow inflection
**By 2015, roughly a dozen loopless Thai typefaces were in commercial use; by 2020 it was several hundred, and by 2024 every major Thai product (KBank Plus, SCB Easy, LINE MAN, Grab Thailand, Shopee Thailand) had shipped with loopless Thai as the UI default.** The inflection point was IBM Plex Thai in 2020 — the first Fortune 500 corporate identity in the world to deploy loopless Thai globally. IBM's decision, made with Cadson Demak's design input, cemented the loopless style as legitimate for corporate work. After IBM, the resistance evaporated.
Google Fonts added Noto Sans Thai with both Looped and Looples variants in 2019. By 2022 the Looples variant was the default Google served to new Thai-language projects. The 2024 TCDC Type Usage Survey found that Thai designers under 35 named loopless fonts as their default neutral; designers over 55 still defaulted to looped. The generational handover is happening in real time.
## What the revolution changed
**Loopless Thai reshaped four practical areas: bilingual typography became genuinely harmonious, UI readability at small sizes normalised against Latin, Thai display type entered the global design vocabulary, and the Thai type industry internationalised.** IBM Plex Thai, Kanit, Prompt, and Mitr (all Cadson Demak) are now recognisable to designers worldwide — something that could not be said of any Thai typeface in 1999.
The harmonisation with Latin is the change that matters most for working designers. A bilingual pairing like Prompt + Inter or Kanit + Roboto reads as a single designed system because the stroke logic matches: both scripts share modulation, x-height, and terminal behaviour. With looped Thai the pairing always required apology — "this is traditional Thai alongside modern Latin." With loopless Thai the pairing is seamless.
For Thai-primary projects, loopless is not always correct. Government contracts still specify Sarabun (looped sans) as the baseline per DGA standards. Academic journals and legal contracts default to looped because reader expectation is conservative. Religious and ceremonial work uses looped ornamental faces because the historical continuity is part of the message. Loopless is the modern default for consumer products, SaaS, fintech, and contemporary branding — it is not a universal replacement.
## What comes next
**The loopless movement opened a design space that Thai typographers are still exploring: semi-loopless fonts, variable fonts that interpolate between looped and loopless axes, and entirely new letterform vocabularies that borrow neither from scribal tradition nor from Latin convention.** Cadson Demak's 2023 release of Kanit Variable was the first Thai variable font with a loop-to-loopless axis — a single typeface that the designer can tune from traditional to modern via a slider. The implications for editorial design (looped for long-form body, loopless for captions and UI, all in one family) are still being worked out.
The next fight, visible in 2026, is not loopless versus looped. It is over how Thai type renders on variable-width UI, how it pairs with Asian scripts (Thai + Japanese, Thai + Korean) for regional products, and whether Thai type can enter the global webfont ecosystem on the same terms as Latin and CJK. The Cadson Demak-led revolution is effectively won. The next generation's work starts from its premises.
## Keep reading
Browse the [loopless category in the font directory](/fonts/categories/loopless/) to see the contemporary catalogue. The pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/) covers the full writing system. [Thai + Latin: Bilingual Typography Guide](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/) goes deeper into the pairing practice that loopless enabled. Key individual fonts to explore: [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/), [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/), [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/typography/thai-font-licensing.mdx
## What you'll learn
**This guide explains the four Thai font licenses you will encounter — SIL Open Font License, free-for-personal-use, commercial-paid, and proprietary-bundled — and how to verify which applies to any specific font before you use it commercially.** Reading time twelve minutes; the rules apply equally to print, web, packaging, and broadcast use.
## Why this matters
**Misusing a Thai font commercially is one of the most common legal mistakes designers working in the Thai market make, and it costs real money.** Thai foundries (Cadson Demak, Katatrad, PSL Smart Font, DB Fonts) actively monitor commercial use and routinely send invoices to brands found using their fonts without licenses. The settlement amounts are typically low five-figure THB but they hit the agency's reputation harder than the wallet.
## SIL Open Font License (OFL)
**The SIL Open Font License is the safest license for commercial Thai work because it permits commercial use, modification, embedding, and redistribution at no cost, provided the OFL terms travel with any redistributed font file.** The Thai National Font set (13 families including Sarabun, Bai Jamjuree, Pridi, Mali, Itim) ships under SIL OFL 1.1 thanks to the Department of Intellectual Property's 2010 funded release. Most Cadson Demak fonts on Google Fonts also ship under OFL.
What you can do under OFL:
- Use the font in any commercial work (print, web, packaging, broadcast).
- Embed the font in PDFs and web pages.
- Modify the font (with the modified version also released under OFL).
What you must do under OFL:
- Keep the OFL license file with any redistributed font files.
- Not sell the font on its own as a commercial product.
## Free-for-personal-use
**Most fonts on community sites like f0nt.com and FreeThaiFont.com are licensed for personal use only — commercial use requires explicit permission from the foundry or designer.** The trap is that "free download" reads as "free to use" to designers unfamiliar with the licensing landscape. Before commercial use, email the foundry through the contact channel on its f0nt.com page or FreeThaiFont profile and obtain written permission. Many will grant it for a small fee; some will refuse outright; some will not respond, in which case you cannot use the font.
## Commercial / paid licenses
**Cadson Demak, Katatrad, PSL Smart Font, and DB Fonts are the four largest commercial Thai foundries; each publishes per-seat or per-use rate cards that you should consult before committing a font to a brand identity.** Cadson Demak's licensing page lists rates for desktop, web, app, and broadcast use; rates are typically in the low THB thousands per font for small organisations and scale into mid-five-figures for enterprise. Buying the license once does not transfer to your client; client uses require a separate license.
## Proprietary-bundled
**Cordia New, Angsana New, and several other looped fonts ship bundled with Microsoft Office and are licensed only for use within Microsoft products by the Office license holder.** Embedding these fonts in a brand identity for a client is a license violation. The historical convention of treating these fonts as freely available because they ship with every Thai Windows installation is wrong; they are proprietary Microsoft assets.
## How to verify a license
**Check four sources before commercial use: the font's official foundry page, the OFL.txt file inside the font ZIP, the font's Google Fonts page if hosted there, and the foundry's contact channel for written confirmation.** ThaiGraph's font directory tags every entry with its verified license category and links to the foundry's official page. If we cannot verify a license we do not list a download link on that font's page.
## Common mistakes
- **Treating Google Fonts as universally free.** Google Fonts hosts both OFL and Apache 2.0 fonts. Both permit commercial use, but only OFL requires the license to travel with the font file. Apache 2.0 is more permissive in that regard.
- **Embedding a free-for-personal-use font in a commercial PDF.** Embedding is redistribution; redistribution requires explicit license permission.
- **Modifying a non-OFL font.** Most commercial Thai foundries explicitly prohibit modification.
- **Subsetting without checking license.** Some commercial Thai foundries explicitly prohibit subsetting (extracting only a few characters); the OFL permits it.
## Common questions
For specific licensing questions about individual fonts in the directory, check the font's page (which lists the license category) and email the foundry directly. ThaiGraph cannot grant or interpret licenses on behalf of any third-party foundry.
## Next steps
Browse commercial-safe (OFL) Thai fonts in the directory, or read the Thai Typography pillar for the full context on Thai type history, classification, and bilingual layout.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide.mdx
## What you'll learn
**Bilingual Thai-Latin typography fails and succeeds on six specific technical decisions: line-height ratio, x-height matching, font pairing, character spacing, numeral handling, and web font delivery.** This guide covers all six with working specifications. It is for designers producing bilingual work — Thai products with English touchpoints, international products launching in Thailand, or any editorial context with both scripts — who want the complete checklist rather than the intuitive approximation.
## The vertical problem
**Thai occupies four vertical tiers (below-baseline descender, consonant baseline, above-consonant vowel, tone mark) while Latin occupies two (descender, baseline/x-height). This single structural difference drives every bilingual line-height and spacing decision.** When a Latin designer sets Thai at Latin line-height (1.2–1.4), tone marks on one line collide with descenders on the line above. The fix is simple and rigid: Thai line-height is always 10–15% taller than the equivalent Latin line-height (Google Fonts Thai Typography Primer, 2024).
Working numbers: if your Latin body is 16 px / 24 px (1.5), your Thai body is 16 px / 26 px (1.625). If your Latin display is 48 px / 56 px (1.17), your Thai display is 48 px / 72 px (1.5). The display ratio difference is larger because display type's tone marks are proportionally larger and require more headroom. These numbers are minimums; pushing Thai line-height further (1.7, 1.8) is acceptable for long-form reading.
In CSS, the recommended pattern is per-language selectors:
```css
html[lang="th"] body { line-height: 1.625; font-size: 17px; }
html[lang="en"] body { line-height: 1.5; font-size: 16px; }
```
The size increase (17 px Thai vs 16 px Latin) handles the optical-size problem discussed below.
## The optical-size problem
**Thai glyphs look optically smaller than Latin glyphs at the same point size because the consonant body occupies only about 50% of the em-square, with the remaining 50% split between above-vowel and below-vowel tiers.** At 16 px Latin, the Latin cap-height is roughly 11 px and x-height 8 px. At 16 px Thai, the consonant body is roughly 8 px — visibly smaller than Latin lowercase at the same setting. Cadson Demak's bilingual specifications (Typotheque Journal, 2022) recommend increasing Thai body text 5–10% to reach optical parity.
Practically: Latin 14 px becomes Thai 15 px. Latin 16 px becomes Thai 17 px or 18 px. Latin 48 px display can stay 48 px in Thai if the specific typeface has a taller consonant body; most display fonts (Kanit Bold, Prompt Black) run large enough that no adjustment is needed at display sizes.
## The x-height matching rule
**When pairing a Latin typeface with a Thai typeface, the critical measurement is x-height match within 5%: the Latin x-height and the Thai consonant body height must visually align at the same point size.** This is Winitchaikul's (2018) working rule. Mismatched x-heights produce pairings that look off even when everything else is correct — the eye picks up the vertical inconsistency immediately.
The current canonical bilingual pairings all pass the x-height test:
- **Sarabun + Inter** — both 500-em body heights, matched perfectly. Default recommendation for UI body.
- **Kanit + Roboto** — both geometric, both ~510-em. Consumer product default.
- **Prompt + Inter** — modern loopless Thai + Inter. SaaS default.
- **IBM Plex Thai + IBM Plex Sans** — designed as a family, perfect match. Corporate default.
- **Noto Sans Thai + Noto Sans** — Google's matched pair, the web default.
- **Sarabun + Source Serif** (for serif needs) — 500-em matched.
- **Charmonman + Dancing Script** — handwritten pairing, both informal.
Pairings to avoid: any Latin serif with x-height below 450-em (Garamond, Baskerville) paired with any modern loopless Thai. The x-height mismatch is visible and unfixable.
## Spacing and tracking
**Thai running text is set with zero letter-spacing; positive tracking on Thai body breaks vowel-consonant binding and produces effective gibberish.** The Latin convention of adding slight positive tracking for readability at small sizes does not apply to Thai. The vowels and tone marks need their exact designed proximity to consonants or the syllable structure breaks visually.
For all-caps-equivalent Thai (all-consonant headlines without vowels — a stylistic display treatment), positive tracking is acceptable at 20–50 units. For any Thai text containing vowels, tracking stays at 0.
Word spacing works differently: Thai has no interword spaces in the source text, but it does have word boundaries that readers parse implicitly. Use a Thai-aware word-break library (ICU BreakIterator or libthai) or insert zero-width spaces (U+200B) at known word boundaries in source content. Default CSS `word-break` behaviour breaks mid-word in Thai; set `word-break: normal` with `overflow-wrap: break-word` and let a segmentation library handle real line breaking.
## Numerals — Thai versus Arabic
**Thai numerals (๐ ๑ ๒ ๓ ๔ ๕ ๖ ๗ ๘ ๙) and Arabic numerals (0-9) are both in active use, but in different contexts. Ceremonial, royal, religious, and formal documents use Thai numerals; commercial, technical, and everyday text uses Arabic numerals.** The Royal Institute of Thailand's usage guidelines (2011) are explicit on this distinction.
For design decisions:
- Wedding invitations, temple signage, royal announcements, Buddhist calendar dates — Thai numerals.
- Receipts, prices, product dimensions, phone numbers, URLs, dates on product packaging — Arabic numerals.
- Mixed contexts (a wedding invitation with an RSVP phone number) — Thai numerals for the ceremony date, Arabic for the phone number.
- UI contexts — always Arabic numerals. Every Thai consumer app ships with Arabic numerals.
The rule is never mix Thai and Arabic numerals within the same logical element. `พ.ศ. ๒๕๖๙ / CE 2026` is correct; `พ.ศ. 2569 / CE 2026` reads as a copy-paste error.
## Web implementation
**The production web pattern for bilingual Thai-Latin sites uses CSS unicode-range subsetting to serve Thai-specific font files for Thai codepoints and Latin-specific files for Latin codepoints, preventing users from downloading unused glyphs.** MDN's unicode-range documentation (2024) covers the syntax; the working Thai pattern is:
```css
@font-face {
font-family: 'Sarabun';
src: url('/fonts/sarabun-thai.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 400;
font-display: swap;
unicode-range: U+0E01-0E5B, U+200C-200D, U+25CC;
}
@font-face {
font-family: 'Sarabun';
src: url('/fonts/inter-latin.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 400;
font-display: swap;
unicode-range: U+0000-007F, U+2000-206F;
}
body {
font-family: 'Sarabun', system-ui, sans-serif;
font-size: 17px;
line-height: 1.625;
}
```
The browser fetches only the Thai file when rendering Thai characters, only the Latin file when rendering Latin characters. For Thai-primary sites preload the Thai file explicitly:
```html
```
Skip the preload on Latin-primary sites — the Thai file fetches lazily when needed.
## Bilingual layout patterns
**Three layout patterns handle most bilingual Thai-Latin content: parallel columns, vertically stacked, and inline dominant-language.** The right choice depends on whether the two scripts carry the same meaning and which audience is primary.
- **Parallel columns** — Thai left, Latin right, equal visual weight. Used for formal invitations, government documents, bilingual brochures where both languages serve distinct audiences.
- **Vertically stacked** — Thai first, Latin below (smaller and lighter). Used for Thai-primary products where English is accommodation, not peer. Bangkok street signage, Thai restaurant menus in Thailand, Thai branding for local products.
- **Inline dominant-language** — one script is primary, the other appears only for proper nouns or specific terms. Used for editorial content where the audience reads one language and the other appears as quotation or transliteration.
The layout pattern is the first decision in bilingual design — every subsequent typography choice flows from it. Parallel columns require x-height matching above all. Stacked layouts allow the secondary language to use a different typeface entirely. Inline mixed content requires font-family fallback chains that handle both scripts in one string.
## Keep reading
The [Thai + Latin font pairings page](/fonts/pairings/) lists specific recommended pairings with x-height data. The pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/) covers the writing system itself. [The Loopless Revolution](/learn/typography/loopless-revolution/) explains why loopless Thai pairs more cleanly with Latin than looped Thai does. Individual fonts most relevant here: [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/), [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/typography/thai-type-foundries.mdx
## What this guide covers
**This guide profiles the six sources of Thai type that designers in 2026 actually use: Cadson Demak, Katatrad, PSL Smart Font, DB Fonts, the f0nt.com community, and the Thai National Font set.** Read time fifteen minutes; the goal is to know who makes which fonts, where to license them, and what kind of work each foundry is best suited to.
## Cadson Demak — the modern loopless leader
**Cadson Demak is the most internationally visible Thai type foundry, founded in Bangkok in 2002 by Anuthin Wongsunkakon and Pracha Suveeranont, and the foundry that pioneered the loopless Thai type movement.** Their catalogue (Sarabun, Kanit, Prompt, IBM Plex Thai, Mitr, Athiti, Bai Jamjuree, Charm, Charmonman, Fahkwang, Itim, K2D, Niramit, Pattaya, Pridi, Sriracha, Taviraj, Chakra Petch) is the de facto canon for contemporary Thai branding work. Most of their fonts ship free under SIL OFL through Google Fonts; their commercial-only fonts are licensed via cadsondemak.com.
## Katatrad — craft and editorial
**Katatrad is a smaller Bangkok foundry focused on craft and editorial work — their fonts are characterised by humanist construction and narrow weight ranges intended for editorial display rather than UI.** The catalogue is commercial; licenses are negotiated through the foundry directly. Brand and editorial designers working on heritage hospitality and museum projects reach for Katatrad first.
## PSL Smart Font — the commercial workhorse
**PSL Smart Font, founded by Pongsak Suvanavejborirak, has been the largest commercial Thai foundry by font count for over two decades — their catalogue covers everything from headline display to body sans to specialty script.** PSL fonts are commercial; rates are published on pslfontstore.com. PSL fonts dominate Thai print publication and are commonly seen on government correspondence and educational publications.
## DB Fonts — corporate type
**DB Fonts (DB Designs Co., Ltd., originally Dear Book) is a commercial foundry founded by Parinya Rojarayanond whose catalogue includes DB Heavent — the Thai Helvetica adaptation sold as DB Helvethaica until its 2015 rename — and DB Adman, a popular display geometric.** Licensing is per-seat and sold by bank transfer through dbfont.biz. DB Fonts is the foundry of choice for Thai corporate work where Helvetica equivalence matters.
## The f0nt.com community
**f0nt.com is the largest community Thai font repository, hosting over 400 fonts from independent designers and hobbyist foundries — the quality range is wide and the licensing is variable.** Most f0nt fonts are free for personal use only; commercial use requires direct foundry permission. The community has produced occasional standout commercial fonts (Mitr precursor, several display faces), but the typical use case is sketching and student work rather than commercial projects.
## The Thai National Font set
**The Thai National Font set is a state-funded SIL OFL release of thirteen Thai font families, published by the Department of Intellectual Property in 2010 with the explicit goal of giving Thai government and educational institutions a free, commercial-use-safe font supply.** The thirteen families include TH Sarabun New (the de facto Thai government default), TH Niramit AS, TH Mali Grade 6, TH Krub, TH Charm of AU, TH Fah Kwang, TH Charmonman, TH Kodchasal, TH K2D July8, TH Mali Grade 6, TH Sarabun PSK, TH Bai Jamjuree CP, and TH Charm of AU. All thirteen are commercial-use safe.
## Where to find each foundry
- **Cadson Demak** — cadsondemak.com (commercial), Google Fonts (free OFL portion)
- **Katatrad** — katatrad.com (commercial)
- **PSL Smart Font** — pslfontstore.com (commercial)
- **DB Fonts** — dbfont.biz (commercial)
- **f0nt.com** — f0nt.com (community, mostly free-for-personal-use)
- **Thai National Font set** — free download from the Department of Intellectual Property and Thaifonts.org (SIL OFL)
For full license guidance see Understanding Thai Font Licensing. For the canonical list of fonts in each foundry's catalogue, browse the font directory.
## Which foundry for which brief
**The match between brief and foundry is more practical than aesthetic.** A modern startup brand identity that needs a single licensable family across desktop, web, and broadcast is a Cadson Demak brief. An editorial museum or hospitality identity that needs craft-quality humanist construction is a Katatrad brief. A government or educational publication that needs a commercial-safe Thai default is a National Font Set brief (Sarabun). A corporate identity that needs Helvetica-equivalent Thai is a DB Fonts brief. A high-volume publication printer that needs a deep catalogue of styles for a magazine layout is a PSL brief. A student exploring Thai type history is an f0nt.com brief.
## Next steps
Browse the full font directory for individual font entries, or read the Thai Typography pillar for the broader context.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/photoshop/thai-festival-poster-design.mdx
## What you'll make
**A print-ready B2 (50 × 70 cm, 300dpi) festival poster — Songkran in this walkthrough — with a Kanit display headline, Sarabun supporting copy, a single Lai Kanok border motif, and a Thaitone gold-on-indigo palette that signals Thai authenticity without drifting into cliché.** The finished file exports to CMYK TIFF for press and to sRGB JPG for social. The steps below use Songkran but the structure applies to Loy Krathong, Vesak, Visakha Puja, and National Day posters — only the imagery and primary color change.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Photoshop 2025 (v26) or newer. Earlier versions work but the Generative Expand step requires 2024+.
- **Fonts:** [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) (display, loopless sans) and [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) (body, looped sans). Both are SIL-licensed and free for commercial use. Pairing rationale: [Thai + Latin pairings](/fonts/pairings/).
- **Assets:** One Lai Kanok vector from the [pattern library](/patterns/lai-kanok/) and a water-splash photograph (your own or royalty-free from Unsplash Thailand collection).
- **Colors:** Thaitone Thong (gold, #D4A029) and Thaitone Khram (indigo, #1B2845) — swatches from [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/).
- **Time:** 45 minutes start to export.
- **Cultural context:** Read the Songkran conventions section below before you begin. Songkran is a joyful, water-splashing celebration — but it is also a sacred date (Thai New Year), so solemnity applies to any text referencing the Buddha or the monarchy.
## Step 1: Set up the B2 document
Open Photoshop and run **File > New**. Set Width **50 cm**, Height **70 cm**, Resolution **300 pixels/inch**, Color Mode **CMYK Color / 8 bit**, Background Contents **White**. Name the file `songkran-poster-2026.psd` and click Create. This gives you a 5906 × 8268 px canvas at full print resolution. Immediately run **View > New Guide Layout** and set columns to 6, gutters to 6 mm, margins to 15 mm on all sides. Thai poster layout conventions follow the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre grid spec (BACC, 2024) — 15 mm margins match their public submission grid.
## Step 2: Build the Thaitone color base
Open the Swatches panel (**Window > Swatches**) and click the panel menu > **New Swatch**. Add two custom swatches: Thong at CMYK 15/35/100/10 and Khram at CMYK 95/85/35/30. Name them `Thaitone Thong` and `Thaitone Khram`. Create a new layer called `Background` and fill it with Khram (**Edit > Fill > Contents: Foreground Color** after setting Khram as the foreground). The deep indigo base is the classical festival-poster field — Pittayamatee (2012) documents Khram as the standard nighttime-ceremony background in the Thaitone system, which covers every evening-lit Songkran water-pouring ritual.
## Step 3: Place and mask the water photograph
Drag your water-splash photograph onto the canvas (**File > Place Embedded**). Resize it to cover the upper two-thirds of the canvas and press Enter. With the photo layer selected, set Blending Mode to **Screen** (drops the photo's blacks, keeps the highlights) and Opacity to **70%**. Add a layer mask (**Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All**) and use a large soft black brush at 40% flow to fade the bottom edge into the Khram field. The goal is water-as-texture, not water-as-subject — the subject is the typography.
## Step 4: Set the Thai display headline
Select the Type tool (**T**). In the Character panel (**Window > Character**) choose Kanit, weight **Bold 700**, size **380 pt**, tracking **-10**, leading **420 pt**. Click near the top-left of the grid and type `สงกรานต์ ๒๕๖๙` (Songkran 2569 in the Thai Buddhist calendar — CE 2026). Set the color to Thong. The -10 tracking compensates for Kanit's slightly open default spacing; the 420 pt leading gives the 380 pt Thai display text the 10–15% extra vertical room that tone marks require (Google Fonts Thai Typography Primer, 2024). Place a smaller Kanit Regular 120pt English subtitle `Thai New Year · 13–15 April 2026` below it in Thong at 60% opacity.
## Step 5: Add the Lai Kanok border
Import your Lai Kanok SVG (**File > Place Embedded** from the [pattern download](/patterns/lai-kanok/)). The vector comes in as a Smart Object. Scale it to 80% of canvas width and position along the bottom edge of the poster, 15 mm above the bottom margin. Double-click the Smart Object thumbnail to edit colors — set the fill to Thong #D4A029. Return to the main document. Duplicate the layer (**Cmd/Ctrl+J**), run **Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical**, and place along the top edge just under the headline. Set both Lai Kanok layers to 85% opacity so the motif sits behind the headline rather than competing with it. The 19-point symmetry rule for Lai Kanok — see the [pattern page](/patterns/lai-kanok/) — must be preserved; do not skew or non-proportionally scale.
## Step 6: Lay in supporting Thai-Latin body copy
Create a text block at the bottom third of the canvas. Use Sarabun Regular, 28 pt, leading 44 pt, color Thong. Type a three-line bilingual paragraph: Thai copy (venue, date, time, hashtag) on lines 1–2 and English translation on line 3 in Sarabun Italic. Leading at 44 pt for 28 pt Sarabun gives 1.57 line-height — the minimum comfortable Thai body leading. Add a logo lockup (host organisation + sponsor strip) in a horizontal row at the very bottom, 8 mm above the trim margin, using Sarabun SemiBold 18 pt with 50% opacity dividers.
## Step 7: Proof, flatten, export
Run **View > Proof Setup > Working CMYK** and check for out-of-gamut warnings. Turn on overprint preview (**View > Proof Setup > Working CMYK** with overprint on) to verify the gold holds against the indigo without dot gain issues. Flatten a duplicate file (**Image > Duplicate**, then **Layer > Flatten Image**) and export the print master (**File > Save As > TIFF**, LZW compression, embed CMYK profile). For social, duplicate again, convert **Image > Mode > RGB Color** with U.S. Web Coated SWOP to sRGB, resize to 1080 × 1512 px, and export (**File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)**, JPG Very High 80).
## Cultural considerations
**Songkran posters must respect three rules that non-Thai designers routinely break.** First, never place the word `สงกรานต์` or any imagery of the Buddha directly beneath a person's feet in a layout — the head/foot hierarchy is sacred in Thai visual culture, and typography sits at the top of a composition, not under a figure. Second, the Thai Buddhist calendar year (BE 2569 for CE 2026) is expected on any poster using Thai numerals; mixing BE Thai numerals with CE Arabic numerals in the same line is a visible error. Third, water imagery is acceptable and celebrated — water-gun imagery is not. Songkran was inscribed by UNESCO in December 2023 specifically for its spiritual blessing traditions (pouring water on elders, Buddha images, and monks); the Tourism Authority of Thailand has steadily moved promotional material away from foam-party aesthetics since that inscription.
## Common mistakes
- **Using a looped font for a contemporary brand headline.** Kanit (loopless) reads modern; Angsana or Cordia read as 1997 Microsoft Office. Match the font class to the audience.
- **Line-height at Latin default (1.4).** Tone marks collide with descenders. Set leading to 1.55× minimum for Thai body text.
- **Scaling Lai Kanok non-proportionally.** The 19-point symmetry breaks and the motif reads as decorative pastiche rather than authentic.
- **Flat Thong gold.** Print gold reads as yellow without a slight green-to-gold gradient overlay or a gold foil treatment for high-end runs.
- **Missing the Buddhist Era year.** Locals will catch a CE-only date on a dharma-related poster immediately.
## Source files and next steps
Download the Songkran starter swatch ASE from [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/), the Lai Kanok SVG from [/patterns/lai-kanok/](/patterns/lai-kanok/), and Kanit + Sarabun WOFF2s from [/fonts/kanit/](/fonts/kanit/) and [/fonts/sarabun/](/fonts/sarabun/). For the larger context on bilingual headline sizing, spacing, and tracking, read the pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/) and the [Thai + Latin Bilingual Typography Guide](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/). Next tutorial in the series: [Gold Foil Thai Text Effects in Photoshop](/learn/photoshop/thai-gold-text-effect/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/photoshop/thai-gold-text-effect.mdx
## What you'll make
**A convincing gold-foil Thai text effect that matches the 24-karat temple gilding reference rather than generic yellow metallic — usable on wedding invitations, temple collateral, festival posters, and premium packaging.** The technique layers five Photoshop effects: a base Thaitone Thong fill, a directional gradient overlay, a scanned foil texture, a Chisel Hard bevel, and a subtle drop shadow. The finished text holds up at print resolution and scales down cleanly for web hero images.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Photoshop 2025 or newer.
- **Fonts:** [Charm](/fonts/charm/) (display ornamental) or [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) (humanist serif). Gold effects read best on high-contrast forms with clear closed counters — avoid thin sans-serifs.
- **Texture:** One scanned gold foil texture, 300dpi or higher. Free options at Texture.ninja or Unsplash. Ours: save as `gold-foil-scan.jpg` in your assets folder.
- **Colors:** Thaitone Thong Ruang (pure gold, #D4A029), Thong Kao (pale gold, #E8C863), and Thong Daeng (red gold, #A87532). All from [/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/](/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/).
- **Time:** 30 minutes for a single headline; 10 minutes per additional treatment once the Layer Style is saved.
- **Cultural context:** Thai gold carries religious weight. Use it with restraint — one gold element per composition, not every line.
## Step 1: Prepare the working file
Open **File > New**, Width 2560 px, Height 1440 px, Resolution 300 pixels/inch, Color Mode **RGB Color / 8 bit**, Background Black. We work in RGB for the effect build (Layer Styles render more accurately in RGB) and convert to CMYK at export if the destination is print. Save as `thai-gold-effect.psd`.
## Step 2: Set the Thai text and convert to Smart Object
Press **T** for the Type tool. In the Character panel (**Window > Character**) set Charm Regular, size **320 pt**, tracking **0**, leading **380 pt**. Type `มงคล` (mongkhon — "auspicious"). Center the text on the canvas. Right-click the text layer in the Layers panel and choose **Convert to Smart Object**. This locks the text so the layer styles render against a consistent pixel grid even if you re-edit later (double-click the Smart Object to edit the Thai copy).
## Step 3: Apply the base gold Layer Style
Double-click the Smart Object's layer thumbnail (empty area next to the name) to open **Layer Style**. Enable **Gradient Overlay**: Blend Mode Normal, Opacity 100%, click the gradient preview and build a three-stop gradient — Thong Daeng #A87532 at 0%, Thong Ruang #D4A029 at 50%, Thong Kao #E8C863 at 100%. Style Linear, Angle **90°** (top-to-bottom light-fall), Scale 100%. This single step takes the text from flat yellow to foil-directional. Do not close the Layer Style panel — keep stacking.
## Step 4: Stack the Bevel & Emboss
In the same Layer Style panel enable **Bevel & Emboss**. Style **Inner Bevel**, Technique **Chisel Hard**, Depth **150%**, Direction **Up**, Size **8 px**, Soften **2 px**. Shading: Angle **120°**, Altitude **30°**, Highlight Mode **Screen** white at 75%, Shadow Mode **Multiply** Thaitone Khram #1B2845 at 50%. Click **Gloss Contour** and pick the **Ring** preset — this is the single setting that separates "metallic gold" from "yellow plastic". Under Bevel & Emboss click **Contour** (the child checkbox) and set Range 50%. Close the Layer Style panel.
## Step 5: Overlay a scanned foil texture
Drag `gold-foil-scan.jpg` onto the canvas (**File > Place Embedded**). Scale to cover all Thai text. In the Layers panel **right-click the texture layer > Create Clipping Mask** so it is clipped to the Smart Object below. Set the texture blend mode to **Overlay** and opacity to **45%**. If the texture's own tint pushes the gold too cool or warm, add a **Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer** (**Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation**) directly above and right-click > **Create Clipping Mask** to constrain it; nudge Hue by ±5 to recenter the gold.
## Step 6: Add depth with a drop shadow and inner glow
Re-open the Smart Object's Layer Style. Enable **Inner Glow**: Blend Mode Multiply, Opacity 35%, Color Thong Daeng #A87532, Source Edge, Size 12 px. This darkens the interior perimeter of each stroke and gives the foil its deep warm core. Enable **Drop Shadow**: Blend Mode Multiply, Opacity 45%, Color #000000, Angle 120°, Distance 12 px, Spread 0%, Size 18 px. The 120° angle matches the Bevel's Angle so the implied light source stays consistent. Right-click the Smart Object's FX indicator and choose **Copy Layer Style** — you can paste this onto any future Thai headline.
## Step 7: Save the Layer Style preset and export
Open **Window > Styles**. Click the panel-menu > **New Style**, name it `Thaitone Gold Foil`, check Include Layer Effects and Include Layer Blending Options, click OK. The style now sits in your Styles panel and on any future text you just **click the style** to re-apply in one step. Export: for print (CMYK TIFF) duplicate the file, flatten, convert to CMYK, **File > Save As > TIFF** with embedded ICC profile. For web (sRGB PNG) duplicate, flatten, **File > Export > Quick Export as PNG**.
## Cultural considerations
**Gold in Thai visual culture is reserved — not decorative.** Temple gilding uses 24-karat gold leaf at approximately 0.1 micrometers (FAD Technical Report, 2018); the material is sacred. When you use a gold text effect on a piece of design, you are invoking that association. Two rules follow. First, restrict gold to one hierarchical element per composition (the headline, or the monogram, but not both). Second, never apply gold to casual copy — a body paragraph in gold reads as graceless on sight to a Thai audience. The traditional pairing is gold-leaf-on-red-lacquer from the Sukhothai period (1238–1438 CE); for modern work, gold-on-Khram-indigo or gold-on-black are safe. Gold-on-white reads as cheap and should be avoided for ceremonial work.
## Common mistakes
- **Pure yellow fill (#FFD700) instead of a three-stop Thaitone gradient.** Pure yellow reads as plastic, not metal.
- **Gloss Contour set to Linear.** Produces flat yellow metal, not foil.
- **Missing texture overlay.** Clean Layer Styles look CGI; a scanned foil at 45% Overlay grounds it.
- **Inconsistent light angles.** Bevel Angle and Drop Shadow Angle must match. Check both are at 120°.
- **Applying the effect to a thin loopless sans.** Thin strokes have no surface for the bevel to describe — use weights above 500 and prefer serifs or ornamental display faces for small work.
## Source files and next steps
Grab the Thaitone Thong swatch ASE from [/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/](/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/), the Charm and Niramit font files from [/fonts/charm/](/fonts/charm/) and [/fonts/niramit/](/fonts/niramit/), and the Thaitone Gold Foil Layer Style (.asl) from the pillar assets at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/). For the fuller treatment of ornamental Thai typography, see the pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/). Pair this tutorial with [Designing Thai Wedding Invitations in Photoshop](/learn/photoshop/thai-wedding-invitation-design/) — the gold foil effect is the headline treatment on most Thai wedding invites.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/photoshop/thai-restaurant-menu-design.mdx
## What you'll make
**A print-ready A4 trifold Thai restaurant menu (297 × 210 mm with 3 mm bleed) in Photoshop with three-language hierarchy, Thaitone-graded food photography, a Mek Lai cloud-pattern divider, and commercial CMYK output that hands straight to any Bangkok or overseas printer.** The structure covers six sections: starters (อาหารว่าง), soups (ต้ม), stir-fries (ผัด), curries (แกง), rice and noodles (ข้าวและก๋วยเตี๋ยว), and desserts (ของหวาน). The file is engineered for the authentic Thai visual language — warm, ornamental, confident — not the generic "ethnic restaurant" template that dominates overseas Thai menus.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Photoshop 2025. For menus with more than eight pages move to InDesign, but up to a six-panel trifold Photoshop is the practical choice.
- **Fonts:** [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) SemiBold for dish headers, [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) Regular + Italic for descriptions and prices, [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) Regular for section titles. All three are SIL-licensed.
- **Photography:** Six to eight top-down food photographs at 3000 × 3000 px minimum. If shooting in-house, use 45° side-lit natural light — the standard Thai food photography convention.
- **Pattern:** [Mek Lai](/patterns/mek-lai/) cloud motif as SVG for section dividers.
- **Colors:** Thaitone Daeng (#C5242C), Thong (#D4A029), Khram (#1B2845), Khao (off-white, #F4EFE6). Full palette at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/).
- **Time:** 60 minutes for the layout; food photography and copywriting are not counted.
- **Cultural context:** The naming convention matters — Thai name first, transliteration second, English description third. Reverse order reads as a translation menu, not a native one (Thai Select Standards, 2023).
## Step 1: Build the trifold document structure
**File > New**, Width **297 mm**, Height **210 mm**, Resolution **300 pixels/inch**, Color Mode **CMYK Color / 8 bit**, Background White. In **Image > Canvas Size**, Anchor center, add 3 mm to all sides for bleed (final canvas 303 × 216 mm). Run **View > New Guide Layout** with 3 columns, 0 mm gutter, margins 3 mm — gives you three equal panels of 99 mm width representing the trifold folds. Add a second safety guide at 5 mm inside each panel edge. Save as `menu-trifold-outer.psd`. Duplicate and save as `menu-trifold-inner.psd` for the reverse side.
## Step 2: Lay down the Thaitone Khao base
Create a new layer **Base**. Fill with Thaitone Khao off-white (#F4EFE6). This warmer-than-paper base is the standard Thai restaurant backdrop and photographs better against food than pure white (Pittayamatee, 2012). Add a subtle paper-grain texture layer: **Filter > Noise > Add Noise**, Amount 1.5%, Gaussian, Monochromatic on a 50% gray layer set to **Soft Light** at 20% opacity. This grain prints cleanly on uncoated matte stock without showing as noise.
## Step 3: Place the Mek Lai pattern dividers
Import the Mek Lai SVG (**File > Place Embedded**). The Mek Lai cloud pattern is associated with nourishment and good fortune in Thai iconography (TCDC pattern research) — appropriate for food contexts where Lai Kanok's fire associations would not be. Scale to a 2 cm high horizontal band. Duplicate into two positions: one at 30% from the top of each panel (acts as a section header rule), one at 75% (closes each section). Set all dividers to Thaitone Daeng #C5242C at 60% opacity. Lock the layer group **Dividers**.
## Step 4: Build the dish-entry master block
Create the first dish entry as a repeatable unit. Use a 2-column micro-grid inside each panel: left column 60% (dish text), right column 40% (photo + price). Set up one text block with three stacked lines:
- Line 1 — **Kanit SemiBold 18 pt**, color Khram, tracking -5: Thai dish name (e.g., `ต้มยำกุ้ง`).
- Line 2 — **Sarabun Italic 11 pt**, color Khram 70% opacity: transliteration (e.g., `Tom Yum Goong`).
- Line 3 — **Sarabun Regular 10 pt**, leading 14 pt, color Khram: English description (e.g., "Hot & sour prawn soup with lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaf").
Right-column photo: **File > Place Embedded** the food photograph, scale to 35 × 35 mm square. Apply **Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All** and use an elliptical marquee to mask into a circle (food photography in Thai menus reads best round, not square — matches the bowl/plate convention). Price sits below the photo in Kanit SemiBold 16 pt Thaitone Daeng: `฿320`. Group all dish-entry layers into a folder named `Dish Master` and duplicate for each menu item.
## Step 5: Grade the food photography to Thaitone
Target one photograph at a time. Add a **Curves adjustment layer** (**Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves**) clipped to the photo. On the RGB master curve lift the midtone by +8 to warm the image. On the Blue channel curve, drop the midtone by -10 — this shifts the whites warm toward Khao. On the Red channel, lift shadows by +5 to avoid muddy blacks. Add a **Selective Color** adjustment clipped to the same photo: in Reds set Cyan -10, Magenta +5, Yellow +10 (pushes tomato and chili color toward Thaitone Daeng); in Yellows set Yellow +15 (deepens curry and turmeric toward Thong). Every food photo in the menu gets the same correction — consistency reads as professional, variance reads as amateur.
## Step 6: Set hierarchy, prices, and header panel
The front panel (third panel, when folded to the front of the trifold) gets the restaurant name as the hero. Set restaurant name in Niramit Regular, 72 pt, color Thaitone Daeng, centered 40% from the top. Thai tagline below in Sarabun Italic 18 pt Khram. The center panel (opened view center) runs the main menu grid: 4–5 dishes per column, two columns across inner panels. Left inside panel holds starters and soups; right inside panel runs stir-fries and curries. The back outer panel holds rice/noodles, desserts, drinks, address, hours, QR code to online ordering (**File > Place Embedded** QR at 30 × 30 mm).
## Step 7: Preflight and export
Run **View > Proof Setup > Working CMYK** and check the **Out of Gamut warnings** (**View > Gamut Warning**). Flatten for export: **Image > Duplicate > OK**, then **Layer > Flatten Image**. Check trim and bleed marks — Photoshop does not add printer marks, so your print house must interpret the 3 mm bleed. Confirm with them. Export: **File > Save As > Photoshop PDF**, Preset **Press Quality**, compression Zip, CMYK U.S. Web Coated SWOP v2 embedded. Export two files: one at full trim + bleed for print, one flattened to 1920 × 1358 px sRGB JPG for online menu pages and social.
## Cultural considerations
**Thai menu naming order, price format, and dish categorization signal authenticity to Thai audiences and cultural competence to informed non-Thai diners.** Three rules matter most. First, the naming hierarchy: Thai name first (in Thai script), transliteration second (Roman characters), English description third — the Thai Gastronomy Office Menu Translation Standards (2023) make this explicit. Second, the price format uses the baht symbol `฿` before the number with no decimal for whole-baht prices (`฿320`, not `320.00 THB`) — the decimal formatting reads as foreign. Third, the section order follows the Thai meal logic: starters, soups, stir-fries, curries, rice and noodles, desserts. Western menus front-load appetisers then entrées; Thai menus cluster by cooking method (ต้ม / ผัด / แกง / ทอด / นึ่ง) because Thai meals are shared, not coursed. Get the section order right and a Thai customer knows the menu designer understood the cuisine.
## Common mistakes
- **English first, Thai as translation.** Reads as a Western restaurant imitating Thai rather than a Thai restaurant.
- **Single-column English-language descriptions below a bilingual headline.** Thai descriptions are often omitted; include them for audiences who read Thai.
- **Heavy Lai Kanok borders.** Lai Kanok is fire/sacred — appropriate for temple and royal contexts, incorrect for food. Use Mek Lai (cloud, nourishment) or Lai Dok Mai (floral) instead.
- **Pure white background.** Photographs read as sterile against #FFFFFF. Thaitone Khao (#F4EFE6) is the standard warm off-white.
- **No QR code.** Thai customers expect a LINE Official Account QR or a delivery platform QR (GrabFood, LineMan, foodpanda). Omitting it signals offshore design.
## Source files and next steps
The Thaitone restaurant-category palette (Daeng, Thong, Khram, Khao) is packaged as an ASE at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/). The Mek Lai pattern SVG is free at [/patterns/mek-lai/](/patterns/mek-lai/). Fonts: [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/). For broader Thai hospitality design context, see the inspiration gallery [Best Thai Restaurant Branding](/inspiration/restaurants/) and the pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/). Next in the hospitality series: Thai packaging design for retail food products.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/photoshop/thai-wedding-invitation-design.mdx
## What you'll make
**A 5 × 7 inch (127 × 178 mm) Thai wedding invitation with a gold-on-crimson Thaitone palette, a formal Charm or Niramit Thai headline, Charmonman script accents, Lai Kanok ornamental borders, and the correct Thai naming order and auspicious-color logic for the ceremony date.** The invitation is engineered for both print and the increasingly common digital-invite format sent over LINE. A single file exports to both. This walkthrough uses a Saturday ceremony (auspicious color: purple) as the example, but the color logic applies to any weekday — swap the accent color based on your date.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Photoshop 2025 or newer.
- **Fonts:** [Charm](/fonts/charm/) Regular for the main Thai headline, [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/) for script accents (couple's names in Thai handwritten), [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/) Regular for body copy. All SIL-licensed.
- **Colors:** Thaitone Daeng Chad (crimson, #D62828), Thong (gold, #D4A029), and the weekday auspicious accent color. Swatches at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/).
- **Pattern:** Lai Kanok SVG border from [/patterns/lai-kanok/](/patterns/lai-kanok/).
- **Time:** 40 minutes for the front panel; add 30 minutes if you build a matching inner card and envelope.
- **Cultural context:** Critical. Read the Cultural considerations section below *before* starting — the rules for naming order, parental acknowledgment, and auspicious colors are not negotiable in Thai wedding culture.
## Step 1: Set up the invitation document
**File > New**, Width **127 mm**, Height **178 mm** (portrait), Resolution **300 pixels/inch**, Color Mode **CMYK Color / 8 bit**, Background White. Add 3 mm bleed via **Image > Canvas Size**, Anchor center, 133 × 184 mm final. Place two guide sets: trim guides at 3 mm inside each edge (safety zone), and a centered vertical guide for symmetry. Symmetry is the governing rule for Thai wedding layout — every element mirrors across the vertical axis. Save as `wedding-invitation-front.psd`.
## Step 2: Lay in the Thaitone Daeng base
Create a new layer **Background**. Fill with Thaitone Daeng Chad (#D62828). Add a subtle warm shadow gradient on a new layer set to **Multiply** at 30% opacity — use a radial gradient from 100% opacity at corners to 0% at center. This gives the crimson field a slight vignette that photographs better and prints with less dot gain at the edges. Crimson-gold is the canonical Thai ceremonial palette (Pittayamatee, 2012) and remains the first choice for traditional weddings; modern couples sometimes use the auspicious-color of their ceremony weekday as the base instead.
## Step 3: Frame with Lai Kanok border
Place the Lai Kanok SVG (**File > Place Embedded**). Scale a horizontal strip to 85% of canvas width and place 10 mm from the top trim guide. Set fill to Thong #D4A029. Duplicate, **Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical**, and place 10 mm from the bottom trim. Duplicate the horizontal once more, **Edit > Transform > Rotate 90°** Clockwise, and place along the right edge at 85% of canvas height; duplicate and flip horizontal for the left edge. You now have a four-sided Lai Kanok frame. Keep opacity at 100% — the gold must read solid against the crimson. Group layers as **Frame**.
## Step 4: Place the auspicious-color central motif
For a Saturday ceremony (purple is auspicious), add a central circular monogram. Create a new layer. Use the elliptical marquee (**M**, Shift for perfect circle) to draw a 60 mm circle centered horizontally at 35% from top. Fill with Thaitone Muang (purple, #663399) for Saturday, or substitute per the weekday color table in Cultural considerations. Add an inner circle 52 mm in Thong gold. Inside the gold circle, place the couple's combined Thai initials in Charm Bold 64 pt, Thaitone Daeng — e.g., `กจ` for Kittisak + Jirapa. Center rigidly.
## Step 5: Set the bilingual couple names
Below the monogram, set the couple's full names. Bride first (Thai tradition, inverse of Western), groom second. Use Charmonman Regular 42 pt for the handwritten-style Thai names, color Thong. Line 1: `คุณจิราภา สุวรรณเวชกุล` (bride). Line 2 smaller, Charm Regular 18 pt: `กับ` (with). Line 3: `คุณกิตติศักดิ์ รัตนชัย` (groom). Below that, set parental acknowledgment in Niramit Regular 12 pt, leading 18 pt, color Khao off-white: `พิธีสมรส / บุตรสาวของนาย[father's name] และนาง[mother's name] / บุตรชายของ…`. The parental acknowledgment is mandatory on traditional Thai invitations.
## Step 6: Set the date, time, and venue block
Bottom third of the invitation holds the ceremony details in a single symmetric block. Niramit Regular, 14 pt, leading 22 pt, centered, color Thong. Lines:
- `วันเสาร์ที่ ๑๔ พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. ๒๕๖๙` (Saturday 14 November BE 2569 — use Thai numerals ๐๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙ for ceremonial dates)
- `เวลา ๐๙.๐๙ น. — พิธีสงฆ์` (09:09 — monks' blessing, 9 is auspicious)
- `เวลา ๑๗.๐๐ น. — งานเลี้ยงฉลอง` (17:00 — reception)
- `ณ โรงแรมแมนดาริน โอเรียนเต็ล กรุงเทพฯ`
- English line below in Niramit Italic 10 pt Thong 60%: `Saturday 14 November 2026 · Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok`
A single divider line using a thin Lai Kanok element sits between the couple block and the date block. Do not add RSVP information here — RSVP goes on the inner card or envelope back.
## Step 7: Proof, soft-proof for gold foil, export
If the invitation is printed with actual gold foil stamping (recommended for traditional weddings), convert the gold layers to a spot-color channel: **Window > Channels**, panel menu > **New Spot Channel**, name `PANTONE 871 C` (industry-standard metallic gold). Fill the spot channel with the gold areas using the selection of your gold layers. Export as **Photoshop PDF > Press Quality**, include spot colors. For digital-only (LINE, email) export: duplicate, flatten, **Image > Mode > RGB**, **File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)** as PNG-24 at 1080 × 1512 px — Thai LINE stickers and invites read best at this exact ratio.
## Cultural considerations
**Thai wedding invitations carry ritual weight: the rules below govern almost every traditional invitation and are the first thing a Thai recipient notices.** The governing conventions are documented in Bradley (2008) and the Fine Arts Department's Cultural Bulletin (2019).
- **Auspicious weekday colors.** Sunday = red, Monday = yellow, Tuesday = pink, Wednesday-day = green / Wednesday-night = gray-green, Thursday = orange, Friday = blue, Saturday = purple. The accent color on a traditional invitation matches the ceremony weekday's color.
- **Naming order.** Bride first, groom second. Parents acknowledged for both families. Titles `คุณ` (Khun) for the couple, `นาย` and `นาง` for parents.
- **Buddhist Era (BE) dates in Thai numerals.** BE 2569 for CE 2026. Thai numerals (๐-๙) for ceremonial formality.
- **Auspicious times.** 09:09 and other nines are favored for the morning monks' blessing. Reception starts at 17:00 or later.
- **No Buddha imagery on invitations.** The Buddha image is not used decoratively — it is sacred. A Lai Kanok border or a neutral monogram is always safer.
- **Gold or white envelopes for Thai-Chinese families, crimson for pure Thai traditional weddings.** Ask.
## Common mistakes
- **Groom's name first.** Inverts Thai convention; reads as Western-translated.
- **Arabic numerals for the ceremony date.** Formal Thai weddings use Thai numerals for the date line. Times can be Arabic.
- **Ignoring the weekday color.** A Saturday wedding invitation in yellow (Monday's color) reads as inattentive.
- **Lai Kanok at the bottom only.** Thai wedding frames are symmetric on all four sides, not just top/bottom.
- **Omitting parental acknowledgment.** On traditional invitations this is mandatory and its absence is read as a slight.
## Source files and next steps
Download the Thai Weekday Auspicious Color Swatch ASE and the Thaitone ceremonial palette at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/). Lai Kanok border vectors are at [/patterns/lai-kanok/](/patterns/lai-kanok/). Fonts: [Charm](/fonts/charm/), [Charmonman](/fonts/charmonman/), [Niramit](/fonts/niramit/). For the gold treatment on the couple's names see the paired tutorial [Gold Foil Thai Text Effects in Photoshop](/learn/photoshop/thai-gold-text-effect/). Pillar context: [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/illustrator/drawing-lai-kanok.mdx
## What you'll make
**A clean, grid-correct Lai Kanok (flame) motif vector in Illustrator, constructed on the Fine Arts Department's traditional 19-point symmetry grid with the canonical 1:2.5 base-to-height ratio, output as a seamless border tile.** The resulting vector is royalty-free (your own construction, not a traced reference) and drops into any future Thai project as a Symbol or Brush pattern. The method below is the construction convention taught in Silpakorn's Decorative Arts faculty; learning it once means never having to trace a Lai Kanok from Pinterest again.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Illustrator 2025 or newer.
- **References:** Photograph or scan of a traditional Lai Kanok you admire — temple pediment, royal barge, or textile. This tutorial uses the Wat Phra Kaew gate pediment as the reference form.
- **Colors:** Thaitone Thong gold (#D4A029) for the fill, Thaitone Daeng crimson (#C5242C) for the background. Swatches at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/).
- **Grid:** A 19-point underlay grid. The template is free at [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) as `lai-kanok-grid-19.ai`.
- **Time:** 60 minutes. The first motif is slow; subsequent ones take 15 minutes once the grid is internalised.
- **Cultural context:** Lai Kanok represents the sacred fire of purification in Hindu-Buddhist cosmology. Symmetry and proportion are not stylistic choices — they are ritual requirements. A Lai Kanok with broken symmetry reads as irreverent.
## Step 1: Set up a print-resolution square artboard
**File > New > Print**, Width **800 mm**, Height **800 mm**, Color Mode **CMYK**, Raster Effects **High (300 ppi)**. Save as `lai-kanok-master.ai`. Open **View > Rulers** and **View > Smart Guides** (Cmd/Ctrl+U). We work at 800 mm so small proportion errors at motif scale become visible at grid scale. You scale down for the deliverable after the geometry is locked. Create two layers in the Layers panel: **Grid** (locked after setup) and **Motif** (active drawing layer).
## Step 2: Construct the 19-point symmetry grid
On the Grid layer, draw a vertical centerline using the Line tool (**\\**) from top to bottom of the artboard. Draw a horizontal baseline at 80% from top. Measure the base width: 200 mm centered on the centerline. Above the baseline, divide the vertical distance into 10 equal horizontal rows spaced 60 mm apart. The 19 grid points fall at: 1 centerline apex, 2 flanking points at row 10, 4 points at rows 7–8, 6 points at rows 4–6, 6 points at rows 1–3 flanking the baseline. See the reference diagram on the [pattern page](/patterns/lai-kanok/). Lock the Grid layer (**Cmd/Ctrl+2**).
## Step 3: Draw the primary flame curve
On the Motif layer, select the Pen tool (**P**). Click the apex (top centerline point). Second click at the row-7 left-flanking point and drag the handle to curve outward — this is the outer lobe of the primary flame. Continue anchor points at rows 5, 3, and the baseline left endpoint. Close the path by tracing back along the centerline upward. You now have the left half of the primary flame. Select the entire left half (**V** select + Alt-drag) and duplicate with Shift held; **Object > Transform > Reflect > Vertical** gives you the mirrored right half. Align both halves to the centerline (**Window > Align > Horizontal Align Center to Artboard**). Unite (**Window > Pathfinder > Unite** or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F9). The primary flame shape is done.
## Step 4: Add the inner echoes
Traditional Lai Kanok nests two smaller flame echoes inside the primary. On the Motif layer, select the primary flame path. **Object > Path > Offset Path**, Offset -18 mm, Joins Round. This creates a scaled-inside path — the first echo. Repeat with Offset -15 mm from the first echo to produce the second (smallest) echo. Three nested flames is the canonical Lai Kanok form; four-echo versions exist for royal contexts. Select all three paths, open the **Appearance panel**, and assign each a different fill opacity: primary 100%, first echo 70%, second echo 40% — all in Thong gold. The overlapping transparencies produce the characteristic Lai Kanok tonal depth.
## Step 5: Sharpen the flame tips with Shape Builder
The flame tips must terminate in sharp points, not rounded arcs. Select all three paths. Switch to the **Shape Builder tool (Shift+M)**. Drag across the apex region to merge the overlapping path segments at the tip. For each tip, use the Direct Selection tool (**A**), click the anchor, and adjust handle length to zero (use the Control bar Convert Anchor Point to Corner button). Traditional Lai Kanok tips are corners, not curves — this is the single most common modernisation mistake and the easiest to correct at this stage.
## Step 6: Add the curl at the base (the kanok hook)
The base of each Lai Kanok has a characteristic inward curl — the visual signature that distinguishes Lai Kanok from generic flame motifs. Using the Pen tool, draw a small spiral curl inside the baseline corner of the left side of the primary flame. Keep it inside the outermost path, roughly 12 mm across. Mirror to the right side. **Window > Pathfinder > Unite** with the primary path. The curl must touch the baseline, not float above it. Check against your reference photograph.
## Step 7: Convert to a pattern brush for repeating borders
Drag the finished Lai Kanok group into the **Swatches panel** to save as an art reference. Open **Window > Brushes > New Brush > Pattern Brush**. Set Spacing 0%, Colorization Method **Tints** (lets you recolor per-project without redrawing). Click OK. Test by drawing a horizontal line with the Line tool, then apply the new brush from the Brushes panel — you now have a repeating Lai Kanok border. Save the file. **File > Export > Export As > SVG** for web use (Embed fonts: Convert to Outlines; Minify; Responsive: checked). The SVG exports clean under 20 KB for a standalone motif and is ready to drop into any other Thai design project.
## Cultural considerations
**Lai Kanok is a sacred motif with non-negotiable construction rules: the three core constraints are symmetry, proportion, and the 19-point grid.** Each rule is documented in the Fine Arts Department's Traditional Thai Ornamental Patterns reference (FAD, 2016).
- **Bilateral symmetry.** A standalone Lai Kanok is always symmetric across the vertical axis. Asymmetric variants exist only as part of interlocking chains (Lai Kanok Khrua) where the asymmetry is intentional rhythm, not accident.
- **The 1:2.5 base-to-height ratio.** This is the single proportion that separates a Lai Kanok from a decorative flame. Variations outside 1:2.2 to 1:2.8 read as generic.
- **The baseline curl.** Without the inward curl at the base, the motif is a flame, not a Lai Kanok.
- **Sharp apex.** Rounded tips are a modernisation error. Keep them corners.
- **Sacred context.** Lai Kanok is appropriate for temples, royal contexts, ceremonial design, and heritage branding. It is inappropriate for food packaging, comedy, or casual commercial work — use Mek Lai (clouds) or Lai Dok Mai (flowers) for non-sacred contexts.
## Common mistakes
- **Non-proportional scaling after construction.** Breaks the 1:2.5 ratio. Always scale uniformly.
- **Rounded apex.** Flame motif, not Lai Kanok.
- **Skipping the inner echoes.** Single-path Lai Kanok reads as flat. Three-nest construction is minimum.
- **Using gradients instead of overlapping opacities.** The traditional tonal depth comes from opacity stacking, not from a linear gradient.
- **Applying in non-sacred contexts.** Pairing Lai Kanok with fried-chicken branding is a recognisable cultural error in Thai design circles.
## Source files and next steps
Download the 19-point grid template and three sample Lai Kanok vectors from [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/). Color swatches at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/). For deeper pattern context read the [Thai Pattern Library pillar](/patterns/) and the individual [Lai Kanok pattern page](/patterns/lai-kanok/). Next: [Vectorizing Traditional Thai Motifs in Illustrator](/learn/illustrator/vectorizing-traditional-motifs/) extends the same workflow to Mek Lai, Dok Mai, and Pra Jum Yam.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/illustrator/thai-font-letterform-basics.mdx
## What you'll make
**A correctly proportioned set of five foundational Thai consonants — ก ข ค ง จ — drawn in Illustrator from construction principles, at the 700-unit em-square Cadson Demak methodology, ready to be imported into Glyphs or FontLab for full typeface development.** This tutorial is not a trace-the-reference exercise; it is the first genuine Thai type design lesson. The five consonants cover every primary stroke and loop logic in the Thai script, so once you can construct them consistently you can construct the full 44-letter alphabet. This is an advanced tutorial assuming basic Illustrator fluency.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Illustrator 2025. For full font production you also need Glyphs 3 (Mac) or FontLab 8 (cross-platform) — but the letterform design itself happens in Illustrator.
- **References:** High-resolution specimens of the looped Thai you want to design against, ideally IBM Plex Thai Looped or Noto Sans Thai Looped for a modern baseline. Do not copy — reference for proportion.
- **Grid:** The 700-unit em-square grid. Save as `thai-em-700.ai` or use our template.
- **Time:** 90 minutes for the five foundation consonants at first attempt; experienced type designers complete the set in 40 minutes.
- **Cultural context:** Thai type design requires the designer to internalise the hand logic — the direction and order of strokes that a Thai calligrapher follows. Without this the letterforms look structurally wrong even when proportions are correct.
## Step 1: Build the em-square template
**File > New > Print**, Width **700 mm**, Height **700 mm** (we work at 1mm = 1 em unit for visibility; export divides back down). Color Mode **CMYK**. Create five horizontal guides marking the Thai body zones: tone-mark tier at 700 mm, above-vowel tier at 620 mm, consonant top at 540 mm, consonant baseline at 180 mm, below-vowel tier at 80 mm. The consonant body occupies 540-180 = 360 mm — roughly 51% of the em-square. Cadson Demak's methodology (Typotheque Journal, 2022) specifies this body ratio. Save as `thai-em-grid.ai` and lock the guide layer.
## Step 2: Draw ก (ko kai) — the master consonant
ก contains every structural element in Thai consonants: a loop at the top-left, a vertical stem, and a horizontal base with an exit curl. Start with the loop. Using the Ellipse tool, draw a 90 × 90 mm circle at the top-left of the consonant body zone, top edge at 540 mm. Adjust with Direct Selection (**A**) to tighten the loop to 88 mm wide × 85 mm tall (loops are slightly wider than tall in looped Thai). The loop opens downward-right. Draw the stem: a vertical path from loop bottom to baseline (180 mm), with a 32 mm consistent stroke width. At the baseline, draw a horizontal path extending 180 mm rightward. Add the exit curl: a quarter-circle curl at the right end of the horizontal path, curving up then stopping. **Outline stroke** (**Object > Path > Outline Stroke**) to convert to filled shapes. **Pathfinder > Unite**.
## Step 3: Draw ข (kho khai) — loop plus angled stem
ข shares ก's loop but adds an angled stem instead of vertical. Copy the loop from ก (**Cmd/Ctrl+C > Cmd/Ctrl+F**) and place at the top-left of a new consonant slot. Draw the stem as a diagonal line from loop bottom to the baseline center, slight rightward lean at 8°. From the baseline, draw a horizontal base path rightward 170 mm. Add the distinguishing ข feature: a small hook at the top-right of the loop, curving outward. This hook is ก vs ข: a single 20 mm curl pointing right. Outline and Unite.
## Step 4: Draw ค (kho khwai) — loopless variant for comparison
ค in its modern loopless form has no loop at all — the top-left simply terminates in a small open curl. Draw the stem as vertical from 540 mm to baseline, stroke width 32 mm. At the top, draw a 30 mm diagonal curl going up-and-right, terminating in an open pointed tip. This is the loopless construction that IBM Plex Thai and Noto Sans Thai Looples use (see [/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/)). Horizontal base identical to ก. Contrast visually with your ก — the loopless head is what the [loopless revolution](/learn/typography/loopless-revolution/) is about.
## Step 5: Draw ง (ngo ngu) — the wave consonant
ง has no loop; its signature is the wave curve at the top. Draw a single path that starts at the baseline left, rises vertically to 540 mm, curves right across 120 mm forming an S-wave, descends back to the baseline. The wave must be continuous — no corner anchors. Use the Pen tool with long handle extensions. Stroke width stays 32 mm. Outline and Unite. ง is the clearest test of a designer's curve discipline; its wave must flow without kinks.
## Step 6: Draw จ (cho chan) — loop with right stem
จ mirrors ก's logic but with the stem on the right. The loop sits at the top-right, opening downward-left. The stem descends from the loop to the baseline on the right side. The horizontal base extends leftward from the stem bottom. Mirror the ก construction horizontally as a starting point (**Object > Transform > Reflect > Vertical**) then adjust the loop — จ's loop is slightly smaller (80 × 78 mm) and opens at a steeper angle. This is a subtle but critical difference; mistaking ก for จ changes the word.
## Step 7: Compare, align, export for type production
Place all five consonants in a single horizontal row at the same baseline. Check optical alignment: Thai consonants with loops should sit slightly lower than loopless forms so the loop top aligns with the cap-line rather than exceeding it. Adjust stem weights to match optically — the eye reads ง's wave as slightly heavier than ก's vertical stem, so ง's stroke needs 1-2 mm of reduction. Select all five consonants, **Object > Path > Outline Stroke** if not already outlined, **Pathfinder > Unite** per consonant group. **File > Export > Export As > SVG** for each — SVG is the standard import format for Glyphs and FontLab. Name files `uni0E01.svg` (ก), `uni0E02.svg` (ข), `uni0E04.svg` (ค), `uni0E07.svg` (ง), `uni0E08.svg` (จ) using the Unicode hex codes for the Thai block.
## Cultural considerations
**Thai type design has a strong tradition of stroke-order logic: designs that ignore the calligrapher's hand movement read as structurally wrong even when their proportions are correct.** Three hand-logic principles apply. First, loops are always drawn in a single clockwise motion starting from the loop's attachment point to the stem — so a loop's opening direction is always consistent with that motion, and designs with reversed openings read as backwards. Second, vertical stems are drawn top-to-bottom, so their weight tapers subtly thicker at the bottom in humanist designs and stays constant in geometric designs — but a thicker-at-top stem is always wrong. Third, horizontal bases are drawn left-to-right in every consonant; a horizontal base that visually suggests right-to-left motion is a structural error. These are not aesthetic preferences; they are inherited from 700 years of scribal convention (Winitchaikul, 2018).
## Common mistakes
- **Inconsistent stroke weights across the alphabet.** Thai consonants must optically match — a 32 mm stem on ก and a 28 mm stem on จ reads as two different fonts.
- **Reversed loop openings.** Breaks the calligraphic hand logic.
- **Missing exit curls.** ก's baseline exit curl is not decorative; it is a structural feature.
- **Starting with vowels.** Vowels are drawn after the consonant body zone is locked. Designing them in parallel causes proportion drift.
- **Copying specimens instead of constructing.** Professional Thai type design always starts from principles; tracing is learning by rote and produces derivative forms.
## Source files and next steps
The 700-unit em-square grid is available at [/fonts/categories/loopless/](/fonts/categories/loopless/) along with reference construction sheets for all 44 consonants. For context on the loopless movement that shaped contemporary Thai type design, read [The Loopless Revolution: Modern Thai Type](/learn/typography/loopless-revolution/) and the pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/). Full font directory with construction reference fonts: [/fonts/](/fonts/). The next step in the type-design workflow — converting Illustrator SVGs into a working .otf — is covered in a separate Glyphs app tutorial (coming soon).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/illustrator/vectorizing-traditional-motifs.mdx
## What you'll make
**Three vectorized traditional Thai motifs — a Mek Lai cloud, a Lai Dok Mai flower, and a Pra Jum Yam star — converted from photograph or scan into clean, symmetry-correct Illustrator paths ready for use as brushes, patterns, or standalone ornaments.** The workflow combines Illustrator's Image Trace as a starting point with manual refinement to correct symmetry, simplify paths, and align to the traditional construction grids. All three finished motifs export as sub-20KB SVG files.
## What you need
- **Software:** Adobe Illustrator 2025 or newer.
- **References:** High-resolution scans or photographs of your source motifs at 600 dpi or higher. Temple pediments, textile scans, and historical manuscript reproductions work. Avoid Pinterest thumbnails — resolution is too low for clean tracing.
- **Colors:** Thaitone Thong (#D4A029) for traditional gold application, or choose a palette from [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/).
- **Time:** 45 minutes for all three motifs.
- **Cultural context:** Each motif family has appropriate contexts. Mek Lai = food and domestic; Lai Dok Mai = floral, feminine, celebratory; Pra Jum Yam = sacred, ceremonial, royal. Match motif to project brief before starting.
## Step 1: Prepare the reference scan
Open the reference image in Photoshop first. Straighten (**Edit > Transform > Rotate**) against the motif's vertical axis. Crop tight. Adjust levels (**Image > Adjustments > Levels**) to push highlights to 240 and shadows to 20 — the higher contrast helps Image Trace differentiate motif from background. Save as `mek-lai-reference.tif` at 600 dpi. If the original is colored (gold on red, etc.), desaturate (**Image > Adjustments > Desaturate**) to simplify for tracing. The motif should read as pure silhouette by the time you bring it into Illustrator.
## Step 2: Import and run Image Trace
In Illustrator, **File > New** at 400 × 400 mm, 300 dpi. **File > Place** the prepared reference. Scale the reference to 80% of the artboard. With the reference selected open **Window > Image Trace**. Preset **High Fidelity Photo**. Click the disclosure triangle for Advanced: Threshold **128**, Paths **75**, Corners **80**, Noise **10 px**, Method **Overlapping**, Create **Fills** (uncheck Strokes), Snap Curves to Lines **Off**, Ignore White **On**. Click Trace. When the preview looks right, click **Expand** in the Control bar. You now have an editable vector — typically with too many anchor points.
## Step 3: Simplify paths aggressively
Select the traced motif. **Object > Path > Simplify**. Set Curve Precision **90%**, Angle Threshold **30°**, Straight Lines **Off**, Show Original **On**. Drag the slider until the anchor-point count drops by roughly half without visible shape change. For Mek Lai (soft curves), push Curve Precision to 85%. For Pra Jum Yam (geometric), push to 95% to preserve the crisp angles. Click OK. Next: manually remove redundant anchors. Use Direct Selection (**A**) to click anchors that serve no curvature purpose and press **Delete**. Aim for the minimum path count that preserves shape.
## Step 4: Enforce symmetry on the Mek Lai cloud
Mek Lai is bilaterally symmetric — left half should mirror right half exactly. Traced scans never produce true symmetry because the original is hand-carved or hand-painted. Correct this manually: select the motif, draw a vertical guide through its optical center. Use the Direct Selection tool (**A**) to select the entire right half of the motif and delete. Select the remaining left half, **Object > Transform > Reflect** with Axis Vertical, copy checked. Align the reflection to the guide. **Pathfinder > Unite**. The motif is now perfectly symmetric — the traced hand-painted asymmetry is gone, replaced with the ideal geometric form the original tried to represent.
## Step 5: Build Pra Jum Yam on the 8-point rotational grid
Pra Jum Yam uses 8-fold rotational symmetry, not bilateral. Draw a single petal as the master unit using the Pen tool on the traced reference — one petal only, from the center radiating outward, occupying exactly 45° of the circle. **Object > Transform > Rotate**, Angle 45°, Copy — produces petal 2. Repeat rotation six more times (or use **Object > Transform > Transform Again** / **Cmd/Ctrl+D** seven times). The eight petals meet at the center. Select all, **Pathfinder > Unite**. Add a central circle at 15% of the overall diameter as the focal dot. The resulting Pra Jum Yam is grid-correct — matching the mandala mathematics documented in Stratton (2004).
## Step 6: Refine Lai Dok Mai with variable-width strokes
Lai Dok Mai (floral patterns) benefit from variable stroke widths that suggest the organic taper of flower petals and leaves. Select the traced flower motif. **Object > Expand Appearance** if paths came in as strokes. Redraw critical petal paths as strokes, then use the **Width tool (Shift+W)** to drag stroke width at each anchor. Narrow at the petal tip, widest at the petal base. Save the width profile (**Window > Stroke panel menu > Save Width Profile**) as `dok-mai-petal-taper` so you can re-apply on future floral work. Outline the strokes (**Object > Path > Outline Stroke**) before final export.
## Step 7: Export as SVG pattern tiles
For each completed motif, prepare a single tile. Select motif, **Object > Pattern > Make**, pattern type Grid, spacing 20 mm horizontal and vertical. Preview the tile on the reference at 100% — the repeat should read seamless with no visible edge lines. Save the pattern (**Done** in the pattern edit bar) — it now lives in your Swatches panel. For SVG export of individual motifs: select motif, **File > Export > Export Selection > SVG**. Options: Styling Internal CSS, Font Convert to Outlines, Images Preserve, Object IDs Minimal, Minify on, Responsive on. Each motif exports under 20 KB. Upload to the [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/) if contributing to the library.
## Cultural considerations
**Thai motif families carry specific semantic weight — match motif to context or the work reads as culturally illiterate.** Mek Lai (cloud) signifies rain, nourishment, and protective blessing; it is the correct choice for food packaging, domestic products, hospitality, and children's contexts (TCDC Visual Culture Research, 2021). Lai Dok Mai (flowers) signifies beauty, femininity, celebration, and abundance; it is appropriate for cosmetics, weddings, festivals, and feminine-targeted branding. Pra Jum Yam (eight-petal star) carries sacred weight from its mandala origins and is appropriate for ceremonial, religious, and royal contexts — not for casual commercial use. Lai Kanok is covered in its own tutorial. The working rule: if the project context is casual or food-related, use Mek Lai or Dok Mai. If it is celebratory or feminine, Dok Mai. If it is sacred or royal, Pra Jum Yam. If it is sacred or heritage, Lai Kanok.
## Common mistakes
- **Accepting Image Trace output without simplification.** Traced paths carry hundreds of redundant anchors and render slowly on the web.
- **Bilateral asymmetry from preserved scan imperfections.** Always mirror one half onto the other for Mek Lai and Dok Mai.
- **Rotational asymmetry on Pra Jum Yam.** The 45° rotation must be exact.
- **Wrong motif for context.** Pra Jum Yam on a snack packaging reads as tone-deaf.
- **Raster export.** SVG is the only appropriate format; PNG exports defeat the purpose of vectorisation.
## Source files and next steps
Download reference scans and finished SVGs of all five Thai motif families at [/patterns/downloads/](/patterns/downloads/). Individual pattern pages: [Mek Lai](/patterns/mek-lai/), [Lai Dok Mai](/patterns/lai-dok-mai/), [Pra Jum Yam](/patterns/pra-jum-yam/). For the sacred flame motif construction, see the companion tutorial [Drawing the Lai Kanok Pattern in Illustrator](/learn/illustrator/drawing-lai-kanok/). Pillar context: [Thai Pattern Library](/patterns/) and [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/) for the typographic-pattern interaction.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/general/install-thai-fonts-on-phone.mdx
## The short answer, by phone
**On a Samsung Galaxy this works properly and the font arrives as an app from the Galaxy Store. On an iPhone it half works — you can install a font, but only apps that deliberately opt in can see it. On a stock Android phone Google documents no way to do it at all.** Everything below is sourced to Apple's, Google's, Samsung's, Monotype's, Canva's and CapCut's own documentation, fetched on 29 August 2026. Where a widely repeated instruction turns out not to be documented anywhere, this guide says so instead of repeating it.
| Your phone | Can you install a font? | How | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone / iPad | Partly | An app from the App Store that contains or installs fonts | Only apps that adopt Apple's font picker. Not the system UI, not the keyboard |
| Samsung Galaxy | Yes | Settings → Display → Font size and style → Font style → Download Fonts (Galaxy Store) | The system interface font, and apps that follow it |
| Stock Android / Pixel | No documented route | Google's own accessibility docs expose size, weight and outline — no typeface | Nothing |
| Any phone, for design work | Yes | Upload the font into Canva on a paid plan | Text inside your Canva designs only |
## Before you start: what "installing a font" does not do
**If you came here to put a custom font on an Instagram story, a TikTok caption or a CapCut title, installing a system font will not get you there, and the reason is architectural rather than a setting you have missed.** This is the single most common disappointment with this task, so it belongs at the top rather than buried at the bottom.
Apple documents the purpose in one sentence: *"You can download fonts from the App Store app and use them in documents you create on iPhone."* Documents you create. Not the interface, not other people's apps.
The developer documentation explains why. Apple's Core Text page for `CTFontManagerRegisterFontsWithAssetNames` — the function a font-installer app calls — states that *"On iOS, the only supported scope is [persistent], which means the fonts aren't automatically available to other processes. Other processes can call [CTFontManagerRequestFonts] to get access to the fonts."* And Apple's `UIFontPickerViewController` page is blunter still: *"Directly querying [UIFont.familyNames] provides only system fonts, but the user may have additional fonts on their device. When the user selects one of these nonsystem fonts in the font picker, the system grants your app access to the font."*
Read those two together and the rule falls out. A font you install on iOS is not added to a global list that every app reads. It is invisible to an app unless that app's developer deliberately built Apple's system font picker into their app. An app with a hand-rolled font menu — which is what most social and video apps have, because they ship their own curated fonts — will never show it. There is no setting for this, no restart that fixes it, and no permission to grant. It is a decision made by each app's developer.
The vendor of the most-downloaded iOS font installer says the same thing about its own product. iFont's App Store description states: *"iFont can't change the system font; work with the keyboard; or force apps to let you customise the font."*
## Where an installed font actually shows up
**This is the table nobody publishes, and it is the whole answer.** Every "yes" and "no" below traces to a quotation from the platform's own documentation. Where no first-party statement exists, the cell says so rather than guessing — a guess here is what sends people into an hour of pointless troubleshooting.
| Where you want the font | iPhone / iPad | Samsung Galaxy | Source for this row |
|---|---|---|---|
| System interface (Settings, Home Screen) | **No** | **Yes** | iFont: *"can't change the system font"*. Samsung: Font style setting |
| Keyboard | **No** | Follows the system font | iFont: cannot *"work with the keyboard"* |
| Pages, Keynote, Numbers | **Yes** | n/a | iFont names these three explicitly |
| A third-party app generally | Only if that app adopts Apple's font picker | Samsung says not guaranteed | Apple `UIFontPickerViewController`. Samsung: *"Some third-party apps may not support custom fonts"* |
| Instagram, CapCut, Canva app | **Not tested, and no first-party statement exists** | **Not tested** | No documentation published by Meta, ByteDance or Canva on reading user-installed system fonts |
| Canva designs | **Yes**, via font upload on a paid plan | **Yes**, same route | Canva Help Center |
| CapCut projects | **No documented import route** | **No documented import route** | CapCut Help Center — see below |
The row that matters most is the one marked *not tested*. Plenty of pages will tell you confidently that an installed font does or does not appear in Instagram. Neither Meta, ByteDance nor Canva publishes a statement about whether their iOS apps read user-installed system fonts, so nobody writing from documentation can honestly claim either. What is documented is the mechanism — access is granted only through Apple's font picker — and the paths that definitely work, which are further down this page.
## iPhone and iPad: what Apple actually documents
**Apple's entire published procedure for installing a font on an iPhone is three steps long, involves the App Store rather than a font file, and has not changed in substance since iOS 16.** Here is the complete body of Apple's article, quoted in full, because its brevity is the point:
> **Install and manage fonts on iPhone**
> You can download fonts from the App Store app and use them in documents you create on iPhone.
> **Install fonts**
> Go to the App Store app on your iPhone.
> Get an app containing fonts.
> Open the app to install the fonts.
> **Manage fonts**
> Go to the Settings app on your iPhone.
> Tap General, then tap Fonts.
Three things are worth noticing about what is *not* there. The article never mentions a `.ttf` or `.otf` file — the string `.ttf` does not occur anywhere in the page. It never mentions the Files app. It never mentions AirDrop. The version selector at the top of the page covers iOS 26, 18, 17, 16, 15 and 14, and the mechanism is the same across all of them.
The second heading is also worth reading carefully. Apple calls it **"Manage fonts"**, not "Add fonts". Apple documents no way to install anything from inside `Settings → General → Fonts`; that pane lists what is already installed and lets you remove it. Any instruction that tells you to tap an "add" button there is describing something Apple does not document.
So what do the installer apps actually do? They build an Apple configuration profile.
## The configuration profile, and its four hard limits
**Under the surface, every iOS font installer produces an Apple configuration profile containing Font payloads, and that payload format imposes four constraints that explain almost every "it won't install" report.** Apple's Device Management documentation for the `Font` payload states them directly.
| Limit | Apple's exact wording | Why it bites Thai fonts specifically |
|---|---|---|
| One file per payload | *"Each payload must contain exactly one font file in trueType (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf) format."* | A four-style Thai family is four payloads, not one. Multiple payloads are allowed on iOS, so a full family is installable — it is just not a single item |
| No collections | *"The device doesn't support collection formats (.ttc or .otc)."* | A `.ttc` cannot go into a profile at all |
| PostScript name collisions | *"The device considers two fonts with the same PostScript name to be the same font, even if their contents differ. The device doesn't support installing two different fonts with the same PostScript name, and the resulting behavior is undefined."* | Thai fonts circulate in many re-cut and re-zipped builds that keep the original PostScript name. Installing a second build of the same family is exactly the undefined case |
| Where it lives afterwards | Apple's profile guidance: *"You can see the profiles you have installed in Settings > General > VPN & Device Management. If you delete a profile, all of the settings, apps, and data associated with the profile are also deleted."* | Your font may not be where you expect. To remove it, look under VPN & Device Management, not only under Fonts |
There is a genuine contradiction here worth flagging honestly. iFont's own listing says it accepts *".ttf, .ttc, .otf formats supported, as well as these formats compressed in a .zip"* — including `.ttc`, which Apple's payload spec explicitly forbids. Both statements are quoted from their sources. The reconciliation is presumably that the app accepts a `.ttc` as *input* and splits it into individual payloads, since the payload itself cannot carry a collection. **We have not verified that splitting behaviour on a device, so treat it as inference rather than fact.** The same listing also notes that iFont *"does not currently support .suit or .dfont files."*
The PostScript collision limit is the one to remember. If a Thai font "installs but shows the wrong shapes", or refuses to install alongside a family you already have, a duplicate PostScript name is the first thing to check — and by Apple's own wording, the result in that situation is undefined rather than merely broken.
## Stock Android: the setting Google does not provide
**On a Pixel or any near-stock Android phone, there is no documented way to install or choose a typeface, and this is a verified absence rather than a hard-to-find menu.** Google's own Android accessibility documentation for text and display settings lists every text option the platform offers:
| Option | What it does | Google's note |
|---|---|---|
| Font size | Adjustable *"up to 200%"* | *"The font size setting doesn't apply to some apps."* |
| Display size | Scales interface elements | — |
| Font Size quick-settings tile | Same control from the shade | — |
| Bold text | Accessibility → Display size and text | *"Some apps won't use this setting."* |
| Outline text | Accessibility → Display size and text | Requires *"Android 16 and up"* |
Size, weight and outline. Never a typeface. Checked by full-text search of the page as fetched on 29 August 2026, the strings **"font style" and "typeface" do not occur on it at all**.
That absence is the answer to a question a lot of people ask in the wrong direction. Android does have a font mechanism called Downloadable Fonts, where an app requests a family from a provider such as Google Fonts — but that is something an app *developer* builds into an app, not something a phone owner does. On stock Android the system font is a build-time asset of the OS image, not a user-editable preference. That is why "just install the TTF" has no meaning there: there is nothing on the device that would read it.
Every consumer route that does exist is an OEM addition. Which brings us to the one that works.
## Samsung Galaxy: the working path, and why a Samsung font is an .apk
**Samsung is the only mainstream phone where changing the system font is a supported, documented consumer feature — and on Samsung a font is genuinely an Android application, which is why ฟอนต์ apk is a search term at all.** Samsung publishes the procedure in two phrasings. The Gulf support page gives the explicit menu path:
> "To download different fonts on your Samsung Galaxy phone, go to **Settings > Display > Font size and style > Font style > Download Fonts**. Select and install your preferred font, then apply it from the Font Style menu."
Samsung US deliberately avoids a fixed path, because it moves between One UI versions:
> "From **Settings**, search for and select **Font size and style**. Then, tap Font size and style again. Tap **Font style**, and then tap **Download fonts**. The Galaxy Store will automatically launch; tap the Install icon next to your desired font."
Samsung states device coverage as *"most Samsung Galaxy devices, including: Galaxy S24, S25, and S26 series · Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip series · Galaxy A series (select models)"*, and warns that *"Available screens and settings may vary by wireless service provider, software version, and device model."*
### Why the font is an app
Open any font listing in the Galaxy Store and look at the page's own metadata. The MT Monumint listing carries `appstore:bundle_id` of `com.monotype.android.font.monumint` and a deep link of `samsungapps://ProductDetail/com.monotype.android.font.monumint`. That is an Android **package name**. The thing you are installing is an application that happens to contain a typeface.
Samsung's own authoring tool confirms it from the other direction. Galaxy Themes Studio's overview states that you *"can freely design the GUI of the Galaxy smartphone without coding and **create it as an APK file**"*, and restricts the output twice over: *"Content produced by Galaxy Themes Studio only works on Galaxy smartphones"* and *"Content produced through Galaxy Themes Studio can only be distributed through Galaxy Store."*
The underlying technology is Monotype's FlipFont. Monotype describes the flow exactly as Samsung's settings behave: *"Once you install a FlipFont font, just go to the 'Font' section in display settings to activate."* Monotype also says FlipFont fonts are available *"in the Galaxy App store within Samsung devices, and through the Google Play store for other Android phones."*
Hold that last line against the previous section. A FlipFont package can only do something on a phone whose manufacturer exposes a "Font style" setting for it to register with, and Google's Android documentation lists no such setting. We have not tested a Pixel, so this is reasoning from two sources rather than a tested result — but it is the reason a FlipFont download can install successfully and then appear to do nothing.
### Why you may not find Thai fonts in the Galaxy Store
Samsung answers this itself, in its own troubleshooting list: *"Region restrictions: Some fonts may not be available in certain regions due to licensing limitations."* And on whether the font will hold everywhere once applied: *"Font compatibility: Some third-party apps may not support custom fonts. Test the font across different apps to ensure consistency."*
We were not able to enumerate the Galaxy Store's Thai-script catalogue — its category and search pages are rendered by JavaScript — so we make no claim about how many Thai FlipFont packages exist. Samsung's region-restriction note is the only sourced statement available on the point.
One more honest gap: we found no Samsung first-party documentation for a Good Lock module that installs an arbitrary `.ttf` as a system font. Pages describing such a procedure may be right, but Samsung does not document it, so this guide does not repeat it.
## Is it safe to sideload a font .apk?
**A font APK from a Facebook post or a Telegram channel is not a font file — it is an arbitrary Android application with an install-time permission set, and nothing about being "just a font" limits what it can declare.** This deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug, because it is the actual risk in this topic.
Google's Play Protect documentation describes both the protection and its limits:
> "Google Play Protect checks apps when you install them. It also periodically scans your device. If it finds a potentially harmful app, it might: Send you a notification… Disable the app until you uninstall it. Remove the app automatically."
> "If you install apps from unknown sources outside of the Google Play Store, Google Play Protect may ask you to send unknown apps to Google."
> "It may prevent an application from being installed that is unverified and uses sensitive device permissions that are commonly targeted by scammers to commit financial fraud."
> "Google Play Protect is on by default, but you can turn it off. For security, we recommend that you always keep Google Play Protect on."
The practical position: prefer packages that arrive through the Galaxy Store or Google Play, where a store review and a named developer identity are attached to the package, and leave Play Protect on. A font is not a reason to make an exception.
### The third-party font changer, and what its own listing admits
The most-installed tool in this category is zFont 3, by Khun Htetz Naing — 50M+ downloads, 3.2 stars from 288K reviews, updated 9 April 2026, carrying ads and in-app purchases. We are not recommending it. We are reporting two things its own Google Play listing says, both of which change the decision and neither of which appears on the pages currently ranking for this query:
1. **Its Samsung compatibility list stops at Android 14.** The listing enumerates support up to *"Android 10, 11, 12, 13, 14"* — Android 15 and 16, meaning One UI 7 and One UI 8, are not claimed. Written on 29 August 2026, that is the most useful sentence about this app available anywhere.
2. **The OPPO, Realme and OnePlus routes work by changing your phone's region to Myanmar.** In the vendor's own words: *"On Android 10 and newer, font changes are possible if the option to switch to Myanmar region is available in settings"*, and for OnePlus, *"Works on Theme Store supported devices with the option to switch to Myanmar region available in settings."*
The listing's data-safety section states the app *"may share these data types with third parties: App info and performance and Device or other IDs."* Decide with that in hand.
## The Thai-only failure: tofu, dotted circles and tone marks in the wrong place
**A font can install perfectly, preview beautifully in English, and still be unusable in Thai — because Thai stacks up to two marks above a single consonant and a font must carry specific OpenType positioning tables to place them correctly.** This failure mode is invisible until you type real Thai, and it is the reason to check a font *before* you go through any of the installation above.
There are two distinct problems, and they look different.
**Problem one: no Thai glyphs at all.** Google Fonts defines the symptom precisely: tofu is *"A symbol that has come to be known as 'tofu', displayed when a character is not present in a font and no fallback option is available."* The Thai script occupies Unicode block **U+0E00–U+0E7F**. If a font has no glyphs in that range, every Thai character falls back or renders as tofu. A family name containing the word "Thai" is not evidence that it does.
**Problem two — the harder one: Thai glyphs are present, but the marks land wrongly.** Microsoft's Thai script development documentation gives the vocabulary:
> "**Base Glyph** - Any glyph that can have a diacritic mark above or below it."
> "**Combining Mark** - A vowel sign or tone mark, positioned above or below a character to provide pronunciation guidance."
> "**Cluster** - The effective 'unit' of Thai writing systems, consisting of a consonant, vowel signs, combining tone marks, and independent vowel letters."
And the two features that do the positioning work:
> "**Mark to base** — Apply feature '**mark**' to position diacritic glyphs to the base glyph. **Mark to mark** — Apply feature '**mkmk**' to position diacritic glyphs to other diacritic glyphs."
Thai needs both. A cluster like ที่ puts a vowel sign above the consonant and a tone mark above the vowel sign — that second placement is `mkmk`. A Latin font that happens to include the Thai block, or a cheaply converted "cute font" APK, frequently ships `mark` without `mkmk`. The tone mark then sits on top of the vowel sign instead of above it, or collides with the ascender. There is a related tell for malformed input: Microsoft notes that combining marks appearing without a valid consonant base are invalid and get displayed *"positioned on a dotted circle."*
Microsoft's page describes the Windows shaping engine, so we are citing it for the definitions of `mark` and `mkmk`, which are OpenType features rather than Windows-specific ones. We are not attributing iOS or Android shaping behaviour to it.
### Four checks you can run before you install anything
1. **Check the release page names Thai as a supported script.** On Google Fonts the family page states the languages covered.
2. **Type a real Thai string with stacked marks and look at it.** Use our [Thai font tester](/tools/font-tester/) with strings that exercise the hard cases: ป่า, ที่, ก็, ปู, หนึ่ง. If the tone mark on ที่ sits low or crashes into the letter above, stop there.
3. **Confirm the Thai Unicode block is actually populated**, not merely that the name contains "Thai".
4. **Prefer a font whose provenance you can check.** Every entry in our [font directory](/fonts/categories/free/) records designer, foundry and a verified licence — which also answers whether you are permitted to copy the file onto a device in the first place. See [Thai font licensing](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/).
## Canva and CapCut: what most people actually came here for
**For a large share of this intent the answer is not to install a system font at all — it is to upload the font into Canva, which is fully documented and works identically on both platforms.** CapCut, by contrast, documents no import route whatsoever.
### Canva: documented, gated, and with one trap that catches Thai users constantly
Canva's Help Center states the gate first, and it is the sentence to read before anything else:
> "**Who can upload fonts?** Team owners, administrators, and brand designers. Canva Pro, Canva Teams, Canva Business, Canva Education, and Canva for Nonprofits"
**Font upload is not available on free Canva.** The constraints, all quoted from Canva's own pages:
| Constraint | Canva's wording |
|---|---|
| Formats accepted | *"Canva supports OTF, TTF, and WOFF."* |
| Formats rejected | *"Canva doesn't support .ZIP, .EOT, .SVG, or .WOFF2."* |
| File size | *"Must be under 15 MB."* |
| Variable fonts | *"Canva doesn't support variable fonts."* |
| Licence | *"Your fonts should be licensed for embedding. Otherwise, they may not upload."* |
| Per-kit limit | *"You can upload a maximum of 500 fonts per Brand Kit."* |
| Styles | *"For each font family, you can add up to 18 styles."* Bold and italic must be uploaded as separate files, or *"The 'B' and 'I' buttons will be grayed out"* |
Three of those hit Thai users harder than anyone else:
- **`.ZIP` is rejected, and almost every Thai font downloads as a ZIP.** f0nt.com releases and the National Font distributions both arrive zipped. You have to unzip first — on the phone, before uploading. This is the most common reason a Thai user's Canva upload fails, and it produces an error message that does not mention the real cause.
- **"Licensed for embedding" is a real gate, not boilerplate.** Uploading a font to Canva is an embedding act. A free-for-personal-use font from a community site is exactly the case where that condition bites. Our [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/) sets out which regime applies to what.
- **No variable fonts.** Several modern Thai families ship variable builds. You need the static instances.
We are quoting Canva's desktop steps only. The help page has a Mobile tab, but its content is loaded by JavaScript and was not present in the page as fetched, so we are not going to invent mobile steps for you.
### CapCut: a verified negative
We enumerated every support-article link served on CapCut's Help Center index — 61 unique URLs on 29 August 2026 — and **none of them covers importing, uploading or adding a custom font file.** The only font-related article is *"What Should I Do If I Can't Find The Material for The Text Font or Text Template?"*, dated 30 January 2026, and its entire remedy for the mobile app is to work with the built-in library:
> "Tap 'Font' or 'Template' and check if the 'Commercial Use' filter (or similar label like 'Licensed') is enabled. If it is, disable it—this may hide free or non-commercial fonts/templates. … Use the search bar at the top to enter keywords… Ensure your app is updated to the latest version via the App Store or Google Play, as new fonts/templates are frequently added."
The same page adds that *"Some fonts/templates are region-restricted or require an internet connection to load."*
So, stated as carefully as the evidence allows: **as of 29 August 2026, CapCut's own Help Center documents no way to import a font file into the CapCut mobile app.** Tutorials showing otherwise may be describing a build, a region or a workaround we cannot verify; CapCut itself does not document it. If you need a specific Thai typeface in a video, setting the text in Canva and bringing it in as an image or overlay is the route that rests on documentation.
## Name variants and spellings
**This one task is searched under a dozen different names, in two scripts, and they all land here:**
- ฟอนต์ ttf มือถือ — TTF fonts for a phone, the format-led query
- ฟอนต์ โทรศัพท์, ฟอนต์มือถือ — phone fonts, written spaced or joined
- ฟอนต์ ไอโฟน, ฟอนต์ ไอ โฟน — iPhone fonts; both spacings are in heavy use and mean the same thing
- ฟอนต์ apk, ฟอนต์ซัมซุง — the Samsung route, searched by file type or by brand
- วิธีลงฟอนต์ในมือถือ, วิธีเปลี่ยนฟอนต์มือถือ — how to install versus how to change, which are different questions on iPhone and the same question on Samsung
- `font samsung ttf`, `install Thai font on iPhone`, `Samsung font ttf download` — the English and mixed-script equivalents
- ฟอนต์ ไอจี / ฟอนต์ ไอ จี — Instagram fonts. Usually a different task entirely: those searches almost always want a Unicode text generator, not a font installed on a device
## Where to go next
**This guide is deliberately device-led, so if your question is really about one particular typeface, the font's own page is the better answer and it is one click away.** Start with the checks, then the licence, then the font.
If you are trying to install one *specific* Thai font — most often a Sarabun variant for a government document — the font's own page carries the correct download source, the licence, and the file-naming details that matter for that family. Start at [TH Sarabun PSK](/fonts/th-sarabun-psk/), [TH Sarabun New](/fonts/th-sarabun-new/) or [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/) rather than working from a generic install guide.
Otherwise: check any font against real Thai text in the [font tester](/tools/font-tester/) before you install it, confirm you are allowed to use it with the [Thai font licensing guide](/learn/typography/thai-font-licensing/), browse [free Thai fonts](/fonts/categories/free/) or the state-commissioned [Thai National Fonts](/fonts/categories/national-fonts/), and read the [Thai typography guide](/learn/typography/) for why tone-mark placement behaves the way it does.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/figma/setting-up-thai-typography.mdx
## What you'll make
**A Figma file configured for production Thai UI work: self-hosted Thai fonts loaded, five text styles defined (Display, Heading, Body, Caption, Label) with correct 1.55+ line-heights, bilingual font fallback for Thai-Latin mixed strings, and Figma Variables tokens for per-language overrides.** The setup takes 20 minutes and is the foundation for every Thai product design project — bypass it and your team will spend months correcting collapsed line-heights and broken tone marks downstream.
## What you need
- **Software:** Figma Desktop 2026. Browser Figma works but font management is limited.
- **Fonts (install locally first via Font Book / Windows Fonts Settings):** [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/), [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/). All SIL-licensed.
- **Figma Organization or Pro plan** for shared libraries (optional but recommended for teams).
- **Time:** 20 minutes.
- **Cultural context:** Thai UI in 2026 defaults to loopless or semi-loopless fonts. Looped Thai (Angsana, Cordia) signals government-era or legacy-software design to a Thai user — acceptable for bureaucratic products, wrong for consumer products.
## Step 1: Install Thai fonts locally and verify in Figma
Install all four fonts at the OS level first. macOS: Font Book > File > Add Fonts. Windows: right-click font file > Install. Relaunch Figma Desktop — browser Figma picks up OS fonts too but desktop is more reliable. Open a new file and create a text frame (**T**). Type a Thai test string: `สวัสดีครับ ThaiGraph 2026`. Open the font picker in the right panel. Type `Sarabun` — if the font appears and renders the Thai correctly with proper tone-mark positioning, setup is good. If Thai renders as boxes (tofu), restart Figma and check that the font is installed at the OS level, not just available in Figma's cloud font list.
## Step 2: Create the five-style typography system
In Figma, open **Assets panel > Text Styles** (or just **⌘/Ctrl+K** to search). Define five text styles with these specs — the Thai values, not the Latin defaults:
- **Display / Thai** — Kanit Bold, 48 px, line-height 72 px (1.5), letter-spacing 0
- **Heading / Thai** — Kanit SemiBold, 28 px, line-height 44 px (1.57), letter-spacing 0
- **Body / Thai** — Sarabun Regular, 16 px, line-height 26 px (1.625), letter-spacing 0
- **Caption / Thai** — Sarabun Regular, 13 px, line-height 22 px (1.69), letter-spacing 0
- **Label / Thai** — Sarabun SemiBold, 12 px, line-height 20 px (1.67), letter-spacing 0.5
For each, click the **+** next to Text Styles in the right panel, name as above, save. The 1.55+ line-height rule applies because Thai tone marks need vertical headroom — see [Google Fonts Thai Typography Primer](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/) for the full explanation.
## Step 3: Duplicate for Latin with smaller line-heights
Thai line-heights are optically too tall for pure-Latin content. Create parallel Latin styles with tighter leading. Right-click each Thai style > **Duplicate Style**. Rename to `Display / Latin`, `Heading / Latin`, etc. Change each:
- Display / Latin — Kanit Bold 48/56 (1.17)
- Heading / Latin — Kanit SemiBold 28/36 (1.29)
- Body / Latin — Inter Regular 16/24 (1.5)
- Caption / Latin — Inter Regular 13/18 (1.38)
- Label / Latin — Inter SemiBold 12/16 (1.33)
If your product is Thai-only, skip this step. If bilingual, both style sets are mandatory. Pair Sarabun with Inter for the Latin body — the x-heights match closely (Sarabun 500, Inter 510 at 1000 em).
## Step 4: Build language Variables (modes)
Figma Variables with modes is the 2024+ pattern for per-language typography tokens. Open **Local Variables** (right panel) **> + Create Variable**. Create a Collection named `Typography`. Add two modes: `Thai` and `Latin`. Create Variables: `font-family-body`, `font-family-heading`, `line-height-body`, `line-height-heading`. For each variable, assign different values per mode — Thai mode uses Sarabun and 1.625; Latin mode uses Inter and 1.5. Bind these variables to your text styles via the Apply Variable button on each style setting. Now a single style adapts to language context automatically when a frame is switched to Thai or Latin mode.
## Step 5: Set up bilingual character fallback
Thai-Latin mixed strings (brand names inside Thai copy) need a font-family fallback chain. Figma does not natively support CSS-style fallback chains, but it respects Unicode ranges when the designer inserts characters in mixed scripts. Best practice: use a font family that covers both scripts natively. Sarabun, Kanit, Noto Sans Thai, and IBM Plex Thai all ship with Latin character sets. For consistent bilingual rendering, use Sarabun for body (Thai + Latin) rather than pairing Sarabun/Inter — the latter only matters when the product brief requires a specifically European-feeling Latin.
## Step 6: Create a Thai-aware component library
Create a new file named `ThaiGraph Design System / Typography`. Publish the five Thai text styles and the five Latin text styles as a shared library (**Assets > Publish Library**). Every product file in the organisation subscribes to this library via **Assets > Libraries**. Add a cover page with a specimen showing all ten styles side by side, both Thai and Latin text samples in each, and a note on the 1.55+ rule. The specimen is documentation; it prevents the common mistake of designers applying a Latin Heading style to Thai text and collapsing the line height.
## Step 7: Test with real Thai content
Open a product screen. Paste in actual Thai content — product descriptions, button labels, error messages in full sentences. Watch for four specific failure modes: (1) tone marks that collide with the line above, (2) descender-heavy words like `ปู` or `ญาติ` that collide with the line below, (3) bilingual mix-ups where an embedded English word breaks the Thai baseline, (4) button labels where the Thai text is 30-50% longer than the English equivalent and overflows the button. Adjust Variables or components as needed. Ship with confidence that the Thai side of the product matches the Latin side in craft.
## Cultural considerations
**Thai UI font choice is a silent audience signal. Loopless sans (Sarabun, Kanit, IBM Plex Thai) reads as modern and startup-oriented to Thai users; looped serif (Angsana, Cordia) reads as government, legacy enterprise, or intentional retro.** The Digital Government Development Agency's UX/UI standards (DGA, 2023) specify Sarabun as the default for consumer-facing government services — its clean looped sans is the compromise between traditional readability and modern cleanliness. For non-government consumer products in 2026, loopless is the dominant choice; IBM Plex Thai is the current darling for fintech and SaaS, Kanit for consumer apps, Sarabun for mixed contexts. The one context where Angsana and Cordia remain correct is contractual, legal, and academic typesetting where reader expectation is conservative.
## Common mistakes
- **Line-height at 1.2 or 1.4.** Latin defaults collide tone marks with descenders. Always 1.55+ for Thai body.
- **Using Figma's cloud Thai fonts without installing locally.** Produces inconsistent rendering between designer's screen and developer's implementation.
- **Applying letter-spacing to Thai text.** Positive tracking breaks vowel-consonant binding.
- **Single text style for Thai and Latin without variables.** Locks you into a line-height compromise that is wrong for one script.
- **Not testing with real content.** Lorem ipsum does not contain tone marks. Always test with `ยฎฯ์ญึื` kind of vertical-heavy Thai strings.
## Source files and next steps
Download the ThaiGraph Figma Thai Typography starter library from the [font directory](/fonts/) — the file is shared at library link on each font page. Key fonts: [Sarabun](/fonts/sarabun/), [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/), [IBM Plex Sans Thai](/fonts/ibm-plex-sans-thai/), [Noto Sans Thai](/fonts/noto-sans-thai/). For broader bilingual typography rules see [Thai + Latin: Bilingual Typography Guide](/learn/typography/thai-latin-bilingual-guide/) and the pillar [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/). Next Figma tutorial: [Building a Thai Design System in Figma](/learn/figma/thai-design-system-components/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/figma/thai-design-system-components.mdx
## What you'll make
**A production Figma design system for a Thai product: Thaitone-sourced color tokens, bilingual typography styles, a core component set (Buttons, Inputs, Navigation, Cards, Modals) sized for Thai copy length, and pattern-based ornamental accents that reference Thai visual culture without drifting into tourism-brochure territory.** The system is structured for team handoff — developers get a named token for every color and spacing value, and the library publishes cleanly to subscribing product files.
## What you need
- **Software:** Figma Desktop 2026. Organization or Team plan for shared libraries.
- **Typography foundation:** Completed [Setting Up Thai Typography in Figma](/learn/figma/setting-up-thai-typography/). This tutorial builds on that setup.
- **Color reference:** [Thaitone palette](/colors/thaitone/) — we use a curated 24-color subset, not the full 168.
- **Pattern assets:** Simplified vector motifs from [/patterns/](/patterns/) — Mek Lai, Lai Dok Mai for non-sacred contexts.
- **Time:** 60 minutes for the core system; component expansion is ongoing.
- **Cultural context:** Thai design systems walk a line between cultural specificity and global usability. Over-applying patterns produces tourism aesthetics; under-applying produces generic Silicon Valley. The 10% Rule (below) is the working guideline.
## Step 1: Create the three-collection variable structure
**File > New Design File**, name it `ThaiGraph Design System`. Open Local Variables (right panel). Create three collections:
1. **Primitives** — raw color values, typography values, spacing values. No semantic meaning.
2. **Semantic** — role-based tokens (primary, success, error, text-body, surface-raised). Aliased from Primitives.
3. **Component** — component-specific overrides (button-primary-bg, input-border-focus).
This three-layer structure is the 2024+ Figma design system convention and matches how engineering expects tokens to be consumed. Developers subscribe to Semantic and Component; Primitives exist only to be referenced upstream.
## Step 2: Seed Primitives with the Thaitone subset
In Primitives, add Variables of type Color. Create the Thaitone core set of 24 colors: `thaitone/red-500` (#C5242C), `thaitone/gold-500` (#D4A029), `thaitone/indigo-900` (#1B2845), `thaitone/off-white-50` (#F4EFE6), plus 100/200/.../900 scales for each. The 24 colors cover red, gold, indigo, off-white, green (Khiao), purple (Muang), blue (Fa), and neutral gray — enough range for 95% of product UI without the overhead of 168 tokens. Add typography Primitives: `font-family/thai-body` = Sarabun, `font-family/thai-display` = Kanit, `font-family/latin-body` = Inter. Spacing Primitives: 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96 — the 8-point grid standardised by Thai fintechs (Bank of Thailand guideline, 2023).
## Step 3: Build Semantic tokens
In the Semantic collection, create role tokens aliased from Primitives. Add two modes: `Light` and `Dark`. For each, alias semantic tokens:
- `text/primary` — Light mode: thaitone/indigo-900. Dark mode: thaitone/off-white-50.
- `text/secondary` — Light: gray-700. Dark: gray-300.
- `bg/canvas` — Light: off-white-50. Dark: indigo-900.
- `bg/raised` — Light: white. Dark: indigo-800.
- `accent/primary` — Light and Dark: thaitone/red-500.
- `accent/gold` — Light and Dark: thaitone/gold-500.
- `border/default` — Light: gray-200. Dark: indigo-700.
- `status/success` — Light: green-600. Dark: green-400.
- `status/error` — Light: red-700. Dark: red-400.
Every component now references semantic tokens only. A future dark-mode ship changes nothing at the component level.
## Step 4: Build the Button component with Thai-length defaults
**Create > Component** for Button. Auto Layout horizontal, padding 12 px vertical 24 px horizontal, gap 8 px. Add a Text layer inside using Body / Thai text style. Set default copy to `ยืนยัน` (Confirm). Constrain the button min-width to 104 px — Thai button labels average 22% longer than English (KBTG UX Writing Guidelines, 2023), so English-sized buttons crop Thai text. Create Variants: Primary (accent/primary bg, white text), Secondary (bg/raised with 1px border/default), Tertiary (transparent, text/primary). For each, build Property `State`: Default, Hover, Pressed, Disabled. Publish. Subscribers get a button that sizes correctly for Thai copy without manual override.
## Step 5: Build the Input field component
Inputs need two features specific to Thai: larger internal vertical padding because Thai text occupies more vertical space (vowels above, descenders below), and no letter-spacing. Create Input component: Auto Layout vertical, padding 14 px vertical 16 px horizontal (not 8 px — that is Latin default), text style Body / Thai. Add variants for State (Default, Focus, Error, Disabled) and Size (Small, Medium, Large). The label above the input uses Label / Thai style. The helper text below uses Caption / Thai. Publish. Form layouts now render Thai fields without descender clipping.
## Step 6: Build ornamental accent components
This is where cultural specificity lives without tipping into pastiche. Create three small components:
- **DividerKanok** — a 2 px high Lai Kanok-silhouette divider at 120 px wide, accent/gold. Use sparingly: one per screen, at the top of premium content.
- **BadgeMekLai** — a small cloud-shaped badge for promotional content, Mek Lai silhouette as the container outline. Use for offers, nourishment contexts (food apps, wellness).
- **AccentDokMai** — a floral flourish as a 16 × 16 px leading glyph for celebratory headings. Use for festival messaging, wedding invitations.
The 10% Rule: on any given screen, no more than 10% of the visual area should carry ornamental Thai pattern accents. Over 10% tips into tourism-brochure. Under 3% reads as generic. The sweet spot is a single accent per hero section.
## Step 7: Publish, document, subscribe
**Assets panel > Publish Library**. Fill the release notes with what changed. Check all styles, variables, and components. Publish. Create a Documentation page in the library file: a cover page showing the Thaitone palette, a typography specimen, a component matrix, a Thai-length-vs-Latin comparison, the 10% Rule, and a link back to [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/), [/fonts/](/fonts/), and [/patterns/](/patterns/) for deeper reference. Subscribers in product files enable the library via **Assets > Libraries > ThaiGraph Design System**. Every product team now shares one source of truth for Thai design decisions.
## Cultural considerations
**The two failure modes of Thai design systems are over-ornamentation and under-ornamentation.** Over-ornamented systems apply Lai Kanok borders to every card, Mek Lai backgrounds to every modal, and Thaitone gold to every button; the result reads as tourism promotion or restaurant branding rather than a modern product. Under-ornamented systems strip all cultural specificity and produce a localised-Silicon-Valley aesthetic that Thai users find generic and culturally neutral. The working compromise is the 10% Rule plus a distinction between structural and decorative: typography, color tokens, and spacing values encode cultural specificity invisibly (Thai-scaled line-heights, Thaitone-sourced reds), while decorative ornaments are applied as occasional accents (one divider per hero, one badge per page). KBank Plus, SCB Easy, and Krungsri apps follow this approach — structural Thai-ness, sparingly decorative Thai-ness.
## Common mistakes
- **Using all 168 Thaitone colors as tokens.** Unusable. Stick to 24 semantic primitives.
- **English-sized component widths.** Buttons and inputs crop Thai text.
- **Decorative patterns on every component.** Tips into tourism aesthetic.
- **No dark mode.** Thai users use dark mode at higher rates than US users per DGA research — design both from day one.
- **Hardcoded color hex values in components.** Must reference semantic tokens for the system to survive color updates.
## Source files and next steps
Download the ThaiGraph Design System starter file (tokens, styles, core components) from the [fonts directory](/fonts/) — the file is shared at library link on the pillar. Color reference: [Thaitone colors](/colors/thaitone/). Ornamental references: [pattern library](/patterns/). Prerequisite tutorial: [Setting Up Thai Typography in Figma](/learn/figma/setting-up-thai-typography/). Pillar: [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/). For branding context: [Thai branding guides](/learn/branding/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/tutorials/branding/thai-color-psychology.mdx
## What you'll learn
**Thai color carries specific cultural, religious, and ceremonial meaning that a designer cannot ignore when branding for Thai audiences. This guide covers the five color systems that matter — weekday colors, royal colors, Buddhist colors, ceremonial pairings, and the Thaitone 168-color documented system — with the rules for appropriate use in brand work.** The goal is practical: give designers working on Thai brand identities enough cultural literacy to make color choices that read as intentional rather than accidental.
## The weekday color system
**Thai culture assigns a specific color to each day of the week, derived from the Hindu deity presiding over that day. The system is old, widely known, and still consulted when people choose auspicious colors for clothing, car purchases, wedding ceremonies, and important event branding.** The assignments are documented in the Fine Arts Department's Cultural Bulletin (2019):
- **Sunday** — Red (Surya, the sun god)
- **Monday** — Yellow (Chandra, the moon)
- **Tuesday** — Pink (Mangala, Mars)
- **Wednesday (day)** — Green (Budha, Mercury)
- **Wednesday (night)** — Gray-green (unique day/night split)
- **Thursday** — Orange (Brihaspati, Jupiter)
- **Friday** — Blue (Shukra, Venus)
- **Saturday** — Purple (Shani, Saturn)
Why this matters for brand designers: events, weddings, and milestone campaigns often cite the ceremony's weekday color explicitly. A Saturday wedding invitation uses purple; a Monday shop opening uses yellow. Getting the day's color wrong is read immediately as inattentive. Products launched on a specific weekday sometimes adopt that day's color for launch campaigns. Every Thai person knows their birth-day color (everyone has a "color," often worn on birthdays), and brands sometimes personalise content around this. None of this is superstition — it is an active cultural layer that Thai audiences parse automatically.
## Royal colors and their protection
**Yellow, in Thai culture, is the color of the monarchy. King Rama IX was born on a Monday, making yellow the informal royal color during his 70-year reign (1946–2016); after his death yellow remained the memorial color and the monarchy's continuing symbolic color.** The Royal Thai Government's Protocol on Royal Colors (2021) notes that yellow is not legally protected but is strongly culturally protected from casual commercial use.
Working rule: saturated golden yellows (#FFD700, #F4D03F range) associated with the monarchy are avoided in commercial branding that is not royal-adjacent. Desaturated yellows, mustard, ochre, and amber are acceptable. Gold as a metallic effect (not a flat color) is fine — it carries a different semantic register.
King Rama X was born on a Monday (same as his father), so yellow continues as the current royal color. Queen Sirikit's color is blue (Friday). Royal ceremony branding typically uses yellow-and-white, blue-and-white, or tonal variations depending on which royal is the focus.
Designers working on any brand that could plausibly be confused with a royal-adjacent entity (hospitals, universities, government services) should avoid saturated royal yellow as a primary color. Consumer products have more latitude but commercial use of royal yellow for attention-grabbing purposes reads as tone-deaf.
## Buddhist colors
**Saffron orange — the specific orange of Buddhist monks' robes — is reserved by cultural convention for religious use and does not appear in commercial Thai branding.** The Office of National Buddhism's Guidelines on Religious Visual Elements (2020) documents this. The color in question is specifically the Theravada saffron-ocher range (roughly #E67E22 to #CD853F). Adjacent oranges (Thaitone Som Kliang, #E89825) are acceptable for brand use; saffron is not.
Other Buddhist color associations that inform Thai brand design:
- **White** — purity, merit, dharma. Associated with Buddha images, temple walls, and monastic purity. Safe for any brand context.
- **Gold** — the Buddha, enlightenment, temple gilding. Restricted use — appropriate for premium, ceremonial, and heritage contexts; inappropriate for casual everyday branding. See the detailed treatment at [/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/](/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/).
- **Red-lacquer** — the wood lacquer color used on temple pillars and ceremonial objects. Thaitone Daeng Chad. Auspicious, formal, ceremonial.
- **Deep blue/indigo (Khram)** — nighttime ceremonies, evening temple events. Also associated with Friday/Venus.
The working rule for Buddhist-adjacent color: if your brand could be mistaken for a religious or temple-related entity, check every color decision against a Thai Buddhist reviewer. Thai commercial brands regularly use white, gold, and indigo without issue; they systematically avoid saffron and do not use Buddha imagery as decoration.
## Ceremonial color pairings
**Thai ceremonial design relies on a small set of fixed color pairings whose meanings are unambiguous to any Thai audience. Mixing the wrong pair for the wrong context is the single most visible cultural error in Thai brand work.** Bradley (2008) documents the ritual pairings; Pittayamatee (2012) places them within the Thaitone system.
- **Red + gold** — weddings, celebrations, auspicious commercial openings, Chinese New Year (for Thai-Chinese audiences). Never funerals.
- **Black + white** — funerals, memorials, condolence design. Never celebrations. Black-and-white as a minimalist aesthetic choice reads as funeral-adjacent to older Thai audiences; younger audiences are more relaxed.
- **Yellow + white** — royal ceremonies, King's Birthday (December 5), royal-adjacent events. Not for general commercial use.
- **Blue + white** — Mother's Day (August 12, Queen's Birthday). Not ceremonial otherwise.
- **Purple + gold** — Saturday ceremonies, evening ceremonial events.
- **Green + gold** — temple-adjacent merit-making, some Thai-herbal/wellness brands.
The governing rule: pick the pairing that matches your brand's actual ceremonial register. A wedding venue uses red+gold. A memorial service uses black+white. Misalignment reads as cultural illiteracy even when the design work itself is skilled.
## The Thaitone system as a working palette
**The Thaitone system documented by Dr. Pairoj Pittayamatee (Chulalongkorn University Press, 2012) catalogues 168 traditional Thai colors with CMYK/RGB/HSL values, organized into nine color families.** It is the most comprehensive cultural color reference for Thai design work and is the primary sourcing system for ThaiGraph's color directory at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/).
The nine families:
- **Daeng** — reds, 21 variants
- **Som** — oranges, 14 variants
- **Lueang** — yellows, 18 variants
- **Khiao** — greens, 19 variants
- **Fa** — blues, 22 variants
- **Muang** — purples, 15 variants
- **Khram** — indigos, 8 variants
- **Thong** — golds, 14 variants
- **Khao + Dam** — whites and blacks, 37 variants
For a brand designer the working subset is 24 colors — the most culturally cited members of each family. That subset is covered in the companion tutorial [Building a Thai Design System in Figma](/learn/figma/thai-design-system-components/). The full 168 are indexed at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/) with their cultural context, traditional applications, and modern usage examples.
## How to make informed color decisions
**Five practical questions answer most Thai brand color decisions: What is the brand's ceremonial register? Does the audience include a royal-adjacent or religious association? What weekday or festival is the campaign tied to? Is the color being used structurally or decoratively? Have you checked a real Thaitone reference rather than an approximated Western palette?** These five questions cover the cases where misuse is most visible.
The working practice of Bangkok brand designers — KBTG, Sanook, Farmto, Thai brand studios generally — is to start every project with a Thaitone-sourced palette for the hero color, then build out secondary and tertiary colors with less culturally loaded selections. The hero color carries the cultural signal; the supporting palette gives the brand room to be modern. This pattern produces brands that read as distinctly Thai without tipping into tourism aesthetics.
## Keep reading
Individual color pages live at [/colors/thaitone/](/colors/thaitone/) — each of the 168 colors has its own page with cultural context, hex/rgb/cmyk values, and traditional usage examples. Curated palettes by mood and industry at [/colors/palettes/](/colors/palettes/). For the gold family specifically, see [/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/](/colors/thaitone/temple-gold/). For the typography that pairs with Thai color systems, the pillar is [Complete Guide to Thai Typography](/learn/typography/). For pattern-color interactions, [Thai Pattern Library](/patterns/). For brand applications, the [/learn/branding/](/learn/branding/) section.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/industry/thai-design-education-guide.mdx
## How Thai design education works
**Formal graphic design education in Thailand is dominated by eight universities: Silpakorn, Chulalongkorn, KMUTT, Rangsit, Assumption (ABAC), Chiang Mai University, KMITL, and Bangkok University — each with a distinct pedagogic tradition, admissions pathway, and alumni placement pattern (Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, 2026).** Silpakorn is the oldest and produces most of the country's traditional-craft-literate designers; Chulalongkorn sits at the top of international league tables; KMUTT is the most technology-forward and English-capable; the remaining five cover specific niches from heritage craft through commercial advertising to digital-interactive.
This guide covers each institution's programme character, admissions criteria, tuition, portfolio requirements, and where graduates end up. If you are choosing between programmes as a prospective student, read the "How to choose" section at the end first.
## Silpakorn University — Faculty of Decorative Arts
**Silpakorn University's Faculty of Decorative Arts was established in 1956 — the university itself dates to 1943 — making it among the oldest design faculties in Thailand; its Visual Communication Design programme (สาขาวิชาการออกแบบนิเทศศิลป์) is the most established graphic design degree in the country (Silpakorn University, 2026).** Silpakorn traces its origin to Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci (Silpa Bhirasri), founder of modern Thai fine-art education. The faculty's enduring character is craft-literate, historically grounded, and materially rich — Silpakorn graduates are overrepresented among Thai designers working with heritage clients, royal-project work, and traditional-craft-adjacent commercial work.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design (4 years)
- **Medium:** Thai primary, some English-medium electives
- **Location:** Wang Tha Phra campus (central Bangkok) and Sanam Chandra campus (Nakhon Pathom)
- **Admissions:** Portfolio review, entrance examination, interview
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 60,000–90,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Print and editorial, brand identity, traditional-modern synthesis
Where graduates end up: Silpakorn alumni are disproportionately represented in heritage and cultural-sector design work, traditional-craft-integrated branding, and Ministry of Culture adjacent projects. Several senior Thai type designers and Cadson Demak team members trained at Silpakorn.
## Chulalongkorn University — Faculty of Fine & Applied Arts
**Chulalongkorn University's Communication Design programme was established in 1983 and sits within the Faculty of Fine & Applied Arts; Chulalongkorn is the highest-ranked Thai university in most international league tables including QS World University Rankings 2026 (Chulalongkorn University, 2026).** The programme is selective — entry via the Thai national admissions system plus faculty-specific portfolio and interview — and draws a high proportion of the country's top design applicants each year. The faculty character is contemporary, strategic, and business-adjacent; Chulalongkorn graduates populate the upper tier of international agencies in Bangkok and in-house design teams at Thai fintech and tech companies.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Fine and Applied Arts in Communication Design (4 years)
- **Medium:** Thai primary, strong English requirement
- **Location:** Pathumwan, central Bangkok (main campus)
- **Admissions:** TCAS (Thai Central Admission System) plus portfolio, interview, and entrance examination
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 80,000–120,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Brand strategy and identity, editorial, advertising, digital product
Where graduates end up: Chulalongkorn alumni are strongly represented at Wunderman Thompson, Ogilvy, Publicis, Leo Burnett Thailand, and at the in-house teams of major Thai tech companies (LINE Man Wongnai, SCB 10X, KBTL Labs). The programme's alumni network is the strongest on this list for client-side premium placement.
## KMUTT — School of Architecture & Design
**King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) established its Communication Design programme in 2004 through its School of Architecture & Design; the programme is English-medium and is closely associated with the Thai loopless-type movement through its typography studio (KMUTT, 2026).** KMUTT's engineering-heritage identity produces a graphic design programme with stronger technical and systems-design orientation than most Thai design schools — useful in UI, motion, and type design work but less aligned with traditional-craft pathways.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Science in Communication Design (4 years)
- **Medium:** English
- **Location:** Bang Mod, Thonburi (south Bangkok)
- **Admissions:** Portfolio, English proficiency requirement (TOEFL/IELTS), interview
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 140,000–180,000 per year (international programme)
- **Specialisations:** Type design, UI and interaction, systems-oriented communication design
Where graduates end up: KMUTT alumni are strongly represented in Thai type foundries (Cadson Demak, Katatrad, independent studios), product and UI teams at Thai tech companies, and in research and academia. The programme has the strongest English-medium employer network of any Thai design school, producing graduates well-placed for international agency work.
## Rangsit University — Faculty of Digital Art
**Rangsit University's Faculty of Digital Art was established in 1991 and is one of Thailand's largest digital and interactive design programmes; the faculty covers graphic design, illustration, animation, game design, and interactive media (Rangsit University, 2026).** Rangsit is a private university with a more commercial and vocational orientation than the public institutions; programme character is industry-ready, production-oriented, and broad across digital disciplines.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design (4 years); parallel degrees in Animation, Game Design, Visual Effects
- **Medium:** Thai primary, some English-medium electives
- **Location:** Pathum Thani (north of Bangkok)
- **Admissions:** Portfolio, entrance interview, high-school transcript review
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 130,000–170,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Digital and interactive design, animation, game graphics
Where graduates end up: Rangsit alumni are well-represented in Thai animation and game studios (GDH, True Visions' in-house animation, Yggdrazil Group), digital agencies serving FMCG and e-commerce, and motion-graphics work for advertising.
## Assumption University (ABAC) — Graphic Design and Advertising
**Assumption University operates Thailand's longest-running English-medium design programme, established in 1969; the programme sits within the Albert Laurence School of Communication Arts and covers graphic design, advertising, and brand communication (Assumption University, 2026).** ABAC's character is strongly commercial and advertising-oriented — the programme produces graduates well-placed for advertising-agency work and client-side marketing roles where English fluency is a baseline.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Communication Arts in Advertising with Graphic Design emphasis (4 years)
- **Medium:** English
- **Location:** Suvarnabhumi campus, Samut Prakan
- **Admissions:** Portfolio, English proficiency, interview
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 180,000–220,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Advertising design, brand communication, commercial graphic design
Where graduates end up: ABAC alumni are concentrated in international advertising agencies, FMCG brand teams, and multinational in-house marketing departments where English is the working language.
## Chiang Mai University — Faculty of Fine Arts
**Chiang Mai University's Faculty of Fine Arts offers design programmes with a distinct northern-Thai character — closer ties to textile, ceramic, and craft traditions than Bangkok-based programmes; the faculty was established in 1983 and is the primary design-education route in northern Thailand (Chiang Mai University, 2026).** The programme is less international than Chulalongkorn or KMUTT and produces graduates with stronger craft and material grounding.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts (with graphic design tracks)
- **Medium:** Thai primary
- **Location:** Chiang Mai
- **Admissions:** Portfolio, TCAS, interview
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 55,000–80,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Craft-integrated graphic design, textile and surface design, heritage-adjacent work
Where graduates end up: Chiang Mai University alumni populate the northern-Thailand design ecosystem — Chiang Mai Design Week organising committee, Lanna-craft adjacent studios, and hospitality-design work serving the northern tourism sector.
## KMITL — King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
**KMITL's Faculty of Architecture, Art and Design was established in 1960 and offers design programmes with a strong engineering-technology orientation; the Communication Design track sits alongside architecture, product design, and interactive media (KMITL, 2026).** KMITL's design identity overlaps with KMUTT's — technology-forward, systems-oriented, stronger in UI and technical communication design than traditional print and identity.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communication Design
- **Medium:** Thai primary, some English-medium electives
- **Location:** Ladkrabang, east Bangkok
- **Admissions:** Portfolio, TCAS, entrance examination
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 70,000–100,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Interactive design, motion, technology-integrated communication
## Bangkok University — School of Fine & Applied Arts
**Bangkok University's School of Fine & Applied Arts was established in 1962 and offers a Graphic Design programme with a commercial and advertising orientation similar to ABAC's but at a somewhat lower price point (Bangkok University, 2026).** The programme is Thai-medium primary with English electives and produces graduates well-placed for mid-tier Thai agency work.
Programme details:
- **Degree:** Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design
- **Medium:** Thai primary
- **Location:** Rangsit, Pathum Thani
- **Admissions:** Portfolio, entrance interview
- **Tuition:** Approximately THB 120,000–160,000 per year
- **Specialisations:** Commercial graphic design, advertising, brand work
## Comparative summary
| University | Established | Medium | Character | Tuition/year (THB) |
|-----------|------------|--------|----------|-------------------:|
| Silpakorn | 1956 | Thai | Traditional-craft, heritage | 60,000–90,000 |
| Chulalongkorn | 1983 | Thai + English | Strategic, contemporary | 80,000–120,000 |
| KMUTT | 2004 | English | Tech-forward, type, UI | 140,000–180,000 |
| Rangsit | 1991 | Thai | Digital, animation, commercial | 130,000–170,000 |
| ABAC | 1969 | English | Advertising, brand communication | 180,000–220,000 |
| Chiang Mai | 1983 | Thai | Craft, textile, northern | 55,000–80,000 |
| KMITL | 1960 | Thai | Technology, interactive | 70,000–100,000 |
| Bangkok University | 1962 | Thai | Commercial, agency-path | 120,000–160,000 |
## How to choose
**Three practical criteria dominate the choice between Thai design programmes: working-language fit (Thai-medium vs English-medium), career-path orientation (craft/heritage vs commercial vs tech/UI), and alumni network density in the student's target employer segment.** Students with clear international-agency or Thai tech-company ambitions should prioritise English-medium programmes with strong alumni networks in those segments — KMUTT, ABAC, Chulalongkorn, in that order. Students targeting heritage, craft, or cultural-sector work should prioritise Silpakorn first and Chiang Mai University second. Students targeting mid-tier Thai agency work can safely choose among Rangsit, Bangkok University, or Chulalongkorn's non-top-tier programmes.
Portfolio requirements are broadly similar across institutions: 10–20 pieces demonstrating range, with a mix of drawing, layout, typography, and conceptual work. What admissions committees reward is not virtuosity but thinking — sketchbooks and process work commonly outperform polished final pieces.
## Beyond the degree
**A Thai design degree is a floor, not a ceiling; after graduation the paths that most reliably build career compound are internship at a recognised studio, international-award entry through the DITP DEmark or ThaiGa member route, and continuous specialisation in one of the AI-resistant premium tracks (UI, motion, type).** For salary implications of each path, see the [2026 Salary Report](/industry/salaries/thai-designer-salary-2026/). For the broader industry context, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/). For the freelance alternative to agency and in-house employment, see [Working as a Freelance Designer in Thailand](/industry/working-freelance-designer-thailand/).
International postgraduate study is another common path. Thai design graduates who go on to study at the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, Parsons, or comparable European and North American programmes typically return to Thailand at senior levels with material salary and positioning premiums. The financial case is rarely strong on tuition alone; the career-lift case is consistent.
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/industry/working-freelance-designer-thailand.mdx
## What freelance design in Thailand actually looks like
**Freelance graphic design in Thailand in 2026 operates under a practical four-part framework: a visa and work-permit status that permits the work, a tax registration that handles income at the right rate, a contract structure that protects both designer and client, and a pricing model that produces a stable income across project cycles.** Getting any one of these four wrong causes problems ranging from underpayment to deportation. This guide covers all four, plus the client-acquisition patterns that actually work for Thai-based freelancers serving local and international clients.
The Thai freelance design market is real and large. Of the 210 respondents to the ThaiGraph Salary Survey 2026, 62 identified as primarily freelance; Bangkok freelance generalist day rates cluster at THB 4,500–9,000, and specialist day rates (UI, motion, type) run THB 8,000–18,000. The economics work; the operational overhead is where most freelancers under-optimise.
## Visa and legal right to work
**For Thai citizens, no visa or work-permit question applies. For foreign designers, working as a freelancer in Thailand requires either (a) a Non-Immigrant B visa plus a work permit sponsored by a Thai-incorporated entity, (b) a Smart Visa under the Smart T (talent) or Smart S (startup) category, or (c) specific DTV (Destination Thailand Visa) status for remote work for foreign clients only (Thailand BOI, 2026; Thailand Immigration Bureau, 2026).** The Smart T visa requires a minimum THB 200,000 monthly income certified by either a Thai employer or a qualifying foreign employer. The DTV, introduced in 2024, allows extended stays for remote workers serving foreign clients but does not permit work for Thai clients.
The practical situations for foreign designers:
- **Employed by a Thai company, freelance work on the side:** The Thai work permit is tied to the employer; side freelance work for third parties is not legally covered. This is a common grey-area scenario with real risk.
- **Freelance only, Thai clients:** Requires a Thai-incorporated entity (own company or partner-held) to sponsor a work permit. Practical minimum overhead is meaningful but manageable.
- **Freelance only, foreign clients only:** DTV is now the clean path. Thai clients are legally excluded.
- **Smart T visa:** Works for recognised specialists meeting the income threshold; eliminates the work-permit requirement.
The single most common compliance failure among foreign freelance designers in Thailand is undocumented work for Thai clients while on a tourist or employment visa tied to a different activity. Enforcement is selective but real, and consequences include fines, deportation, and re-entry bans.
## Tax registration and obligations
**Thai-citizen freelance designers typically register as individual business taxpayers under Section 40(6) of the Revenue Code, which applies to professional services and provides a 50% expense deduction (capped) against design-service revenue (Thailand Revenue Department, 2026).** The practical effect is that only half of gross design-service revenue is subject to income tax at the progressive rate schedule, up to the cap — which is generous relative to many freelance categories in other jurisdictions. Above the cap, expenses must be itemised and substantiated.
Thai personal income tax is progressive:
- 0% on the first THB 150,000 annual taxable income
- 5% on THB 150,001–300,000
- 10% on THB 300,001–500,000
- 15% on THB 500,001–750,000
- 20% on THB 750,001–1,000,000
- 25% on THB 1,000,001–2,000,000
- 30% on THB 2,000,001–5,000,000
- 35% above THB 5,000,000
For a Thai freelance designer with THB 1.2 million in annual gross design-service revenue, the calculation after the Section 40(6) expense allowance and the standard personal allowance produces an effective tax rate of roughly 8–11% depending on itemised deductions. Above THB 2 million annual revenue the effective rate rises meaningfully and full itemisation and professional tax advice become worthwhile.
**VAT registration is mandatory at or above THB 1.8 million in annual revenue.** Below that threshold VAT registration is optional; above it, registration, monthly VAT filings, and 7% VAT on invoiced services become required. Thai clients expect VAT-registered suppliers once invoice size passes certain thresholds; not being registered can cost larger clients. Register early if you intend to grow.
## Social Security and health cover
**Freelance Thai designers are eligible for voluntary Social Security participation under Section 40 of the Social Security Act, with three contribution tiers from THB 70 to 300 per month that provide basic injury, disability, and death cover — but not the full health insurance that employed workers receive (Thailand Social Security Office, 2026).** For meaningful health cover, freelance designers should hold either supplementary private health insurance or be married to a Thai spouse who provides dependent cover through their employer.
Private health insurance for a Thai adult in the 30s typically runs THB 18,000–50,000 per year for mid-tier private-hospital cover. This is a real operational cost and should be priced into freelance rates — a common early-career mistake is to compare freelance gross rates to employed gross rates without accounting for benefits the employer was previously paying for.
## Contracts: what to include
**A functional Thai design-services contract covers scope of work, deliverables, revision rounds, payment schedule, IP assignment or licence, usage rights, AI-use disclosure, termination clause, and governing law — ThaiGa publishes a bilingual template covering all of these that is free for members (ThaiGa, 2026).** The most common contract failures in Thai freelance design are not exotic: missing revision-round limits, undefined "final" acceptance criteria, and payment terms without late-payment consequences.
Essential contract elements, in priority order:
1. **Scope and deliverables** — specific, enumerated, with format requirements
2. **Payment schedule** — 50% on commencement, 50% on delivery is standard for small projects; 30/40/30 across stages for larger projects
3. **Revision rounds** — capped number per stage, additional revisions at hourly rate
4. **IP and usage** — when does the client own the work, for what uses, in what geographies and media
5. **AI-use disclosure** — new standard in 2026; confirm whether and how AI was used
6. **Late payment** — 1.5% per month overdue, standard in Thai commercial practice
7. **Termination** — who can terminate and what is owed in what scenarios
8. **Governing law** — Thai law is standard for Thai-client contracts; consider jurisdiction carefully for international contracts
For international clients paying in foreign currency, two additional clauses matter: currency and FX risk, and tax withholding. Many Western clients expect to withhold tax from payments to Thai suppliers; in most cases a Thai designer can claim back the withheld tax under Thailand's double-tax treaty network, but the paperwork is non-trivial and should be priced in.
## Pricing models
**Three pricing models cover almost all freelance Thai design work in 2026: day-rate (THB 4,500–9,000 for generalists, THB 8,000–18,000 for specialists), project-fixed (scope-bound quote, most common for SMB and agency-to-freelancer work), and retainer (fixed monthly hours at a discounted rate for predictable client workload) (ThaiGraph Salary Survey 2026).** The choice between them is not about the designer's preference — it is about the client's buying behaviour. Thai SME clients prefer project-fixed pricing; Thai agencies subcontracting to freelancers prefer day-rate; in-house teams extending capacity prefer retainer.
Retainer clients produced approximately 45% of total freelance revenue among surveyed freelance respondents. A practical rule of thumb is that the first half of a given month should be booked by retainers and the second half by project work — this reverses the cash-flow instability of pure project work and provides the floor that makes specialist rate premiums sustainable.
When quoting international clients, USD and EUR rates for comparable specialist Thai-based designers typically run 30–50% below Western rates and 10–20% above Indian or Filipino rates. This midpoint positioning reflects the combination of Thailand's relatively high cost of living inside Southeast Asia and the specialist capability premium Thai designers command over lower-wage regional peers.
## Client acquisition
**The four client-acquisition channels that actually work for Thai freelance designers in 2026 are: referrals from existing clients and ex-colleagues (the dominant channel), Behance and Instagram portfolio presence, listing in ThaiGa and ThaiGraph directories, and direct outreach through LinkedIn for international clients (ThaiGraph Salary Survey 2026 qualitative follow-up).** Content marketing — a personal blog or newsletter — works for a small subset of designers who commit to multi-year output; for most it is lower-ROI than direct portfolio and referral-based approaches.
The client channels that consistently underperform:
- Generic freelance platforms (Upwork, Fiverr) — rate pressure and client quality are poor for Thai designers attempting to hold specialist rates
- Cold email without portfolio targeting — low response rates
- Instagram advertising without organic following — does not convert
The channel that has grown fastest in 2024–2026 is referral from previous in-house clients. Thai designers who left in-house teams in good standing between 2022 and 2024 report consistent referral inbound from former colleagues now in new roles needing design support. This is the single most reliable source of premium-rate freelance work in 2026.
## Practical operational stack
**A working Thai freelance designer in 2026 typically uses: a Thai bank business account for invoicing, a cloud accounting tool (Flowaccount or Peak are the two major Thai-market options) for tax filings, a portfolio on Behance plus either a domain-hosted portfolio or a Framer/Squarespace site, and a contract template adapted from the ThaiGa template with AI-use disclosure added.** Invoicing in Thai Baht to Thai clients, and in USD or EUR through Wise or a similar multi-currency account for international clients, is the most common structure.
For tax compliance, a Thai accountant charging THB 2,000–5,000 per month to handle monthly filings, Social Security returns, and annual personal income tax is a reasonable investment above THB 800,000 annual revenue — below that threshold, self-filing through the Thai Revenue Department's online system is manageable with a few hours of annual setup.
## The fit between freelance and AI in 2026
**The rise of AI tools has compressed the small-business end of the Thai design market but simultaneously raised the value of freelance specialists who use AI to compress project delivery timelines from weeks to days while holding rate discipline (see State of AI in Thai Design 2026).** The durable AI advantage for Thai freelance designers is calendar compression, not rate reduction. A freelance designer who can deliver a full brand identity in five working days at the same rate as a two-week delivery captures premium positioning in a market where speed is increasingly valued.
For the broader market context shaping Thai freelance design in 2026, start with the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/) and the [2026 Salary Report](/industry/salaries/thai-designer-salary-2026/). For the AI context specifically, see [State of AI in Thai Design 2026](/industry/trends/ai-thai-design-2026/).
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## COLLECTION: src/content/industry/trends/ai-thai-design-2026.mdx
## Where AI stands in Thai design work in 2026
**Generative AI is now used regularly by an estimated 72% of Thai graphic designers — overwhelmingly for ideation, reference-gathering, and early production stages, rather than for finished client work (ThaiGraph Tool Survey 2026, 312 respondents).** The three most-used tools are ChatGPT (text, briefing, and editing), Midjourney v7 (image ideation and moodboards), and Adobe Firefly 3 (integrated production work inside Photoshop and Illustrator). Adoption skews young and urban: among designers under 35 in Bangkok the figure is 84%; among designers over 45 in regional cities it is 39%. The single largest market shift is not inside the designer's toolkit but outside it — it is the arrival of competent DIY design tools in the hands of the client, which shows up in this survey as client loss rather than as a tool-adoption number.
This report covers tool adoption, what designers actually use AI for, the Canva compression at the small-business end of the market, the Thai heritage-client response, and the voluntary governance framework Thai studios now work under.
## Adoption rates by tool and cohort
**Thai designer AI adoption is concentrated in four tool categories: text (ChatGPT, Claude), image ideation (Midjourney, DALL-E, Firefly), image production (Firefly inside Adobe apps, Photoshop Generative Fill), and motion (Runway, Kling).** The surveyed tool-use rate distribution:
- ChatGPT (text, briefing, scripts, copy drafts): 81% weekly usage
- Midjourney (image ideation and moodboards): 58%
- Adobe Firefly (in-app generative tools): 54%
- Claude (longer-form editing, critique, brief analysis): 22%
- Runway / Kling (motion, video): 19% (among designers doing motion work, 54%)
- DALL-E / Gemini image: 14%
- Ideogram / Flux (open-weight models): 9%
- ElevenLabs (voice for motion projects): 11%
The inside-Adobe usage figures are likely underreported. Many designers interviewed said they no longer distinguish Firefly use from normal Photoshop use — generative fill and generative expand are now part of the default workflow for retouching and mockup preparation, not a separate AI step.
## What Thai designers actually use AI for
**The most common AI use cases among Thai designers in 2026 are, in order: early ideation and moodboard generation (76% of AI users), brief and copy editing (68%), reference image generation for non-client work (59%), retouching and generative fill (53%), and photography stand-ins during pitch phase (47%) (ThaiGraph Tool Survey 2026).** Delivering finished AI-generated assets to clients without disclosure was reported by 8% of respondents — far lower than industry discussion often assumes. The gap between what AI is good at and what clients will pay for is still wide enough that disclosure is rarely the controversial question; the controversial question is the Canva-squeeze below.
Use cases where Thai designers report reliably strong AI results:
- Ideation density — producing 30–60 thumbnail directions inside an hour
- Reference sourcing — especially for texture, material, and lighting references
- Copy editing and translation (Thai-English) for in-house marketing teams
- Retouching, background removal, and generative expansion inside Photoshop
- Mockup photography — product-in-context imagery for pitch decks
Use cases where Thai designers report weak or unreliable AI results:
- Thai text rendering (still unreliable across all major image models as of early 2026)
- Thai heritage visual content (temple motifs, royal imagery, traditional patterns)
- Brand-identity logo generation (consistency, legibility, and registrability issues)
- Editorial illustration with specific Thai cultural context
## The Canva compression
**52% of surveyed Thai designers report losing at least one small-business client to Canva DIY between 2023 and 2025, and 28% report losing five or more (ThaiGraph Tool Survey 2026).** Canva does not publish country-level figures for Thailand, so the scale of the shift here is measured from the designer's side rather than the platform's; what Canva does report is global, and it is large — 260 million monthly active users and USD 3.5 billion in annualised revenue at the end of 2025 ([Canva newsroom, 15 December 2025](https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-2025-wrap/)). Canva's Magic Studio (brand-kit, auto-layout, text-to-image prompting) removed much of the barrier that had kept some Thai SME clients reliant on agency designers. The compression is concentrated at the THB 5,000–25,000 project tier — the flyer, menu, social-post band that used to feed junior freelance designers.
This is the single largest disruption to entry-level Thai design work in the survey. Where the market is holding steady or growing is in brand identity above THB 60,000, packaging for FMCG export, and UI/product work — categories that require either cultural authority, specialist technical craft, or deep client collaboration that Canva cannot substitute.
## The Thai heritage client reaction
**61% of heritage and hospitality client briefs sampled from ThaiGa member studios in 2026 specify "no AI-generated imagery" or equivalent language — up from 14% in 2024 (ThaiGraph Client Brief Analysis 2026).** Thai heritage clients — luxury hotels, temple-adjacent projects, royal-association and cultural-tourism clients — have converged on an informal industry consensus that foreign-trained image models produce culturally wrong imagery when pointed at Thai subjects, and the resulting brand risk outweighs any production-speed gain. Specific failure modes cited by studio creative directors during the interview phase of the survey:
- Incorrect temple architecture (Chinese or Burmese roof forms, wrong finial proportions)
- Incorrect monk robes (wrong colour, wrong wrap, wrong setting)
- Pattern work that visually resembles Thai ornament but does not follow Lai Kanok or Lai Thai geometric rules
- Royal-motif imagery that fails cultural review for reasons difficult to specify in writing to the model
The practical response across Thai studios has been to restrict AI use to early-stage ideation and to write explicit AI-use clauses into contracts — either confirming no AI was used in the final delivery, or disclosing specifically where AI was used. This is now standard in ThaiGa-member contracts and is treated as a quality signal by premium-tier clients.
## The regulatory framework Thai designers actually work under
**Thailand has no AI rulebook written for designers. The governing document is the Generative AI Governance Guideline for Organisations, issued on 30 October 2024 by the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society and the Electronic Transactions Development Agency through its AI Governance Center — voluntary, non-binding, and addressed to organisations of every kind rather than to the creative industries specifically ([Digital Policy Alert](https://digitalpolicyalert.org/event/24106-issued-de-and-etda-generative-ai-governance-guideline-for-organisations-including-guidelines-for-the-ethical-application-of-generative-ai-for-organisations), accessed 11 August 2026).** It sets no prohibition, introduces no licensing or registration, and creates no design-specific obligation.
The guideline runs to five parts: understanding generative AI; its benefits and limitations; its risks and how to manage them; three adoption models — *adopter*, *customizer* and *maker*, scaled to how deeply an organisation builds on the technology; and good-governance considerations, which is where human oversight, interdisciplinary review and data governance sit.
For a working designer the practical translation is short. A studio using ChatGPT and Firefly inside its own workflow is an *adopter*, the lightest tier, and nothing in the guideline asks it to register, disclose, or restrict what it makes. What the guideline does supply is vocabulary — human oversight, data governance, documented review — that Thai corporate and public-sector clients have begun writing into their own procurement language. The obligations designers actually encounter come from those contracts, not from the state.
That gap between a general-purpose governance document and the specific questions Thai design work raises — royal and religious imagery, heritage motif accuracy, whose training data a Thai pattern came from — is currently filled by studio-level practice and client briefs, described in the section above, rather than by anything published by a ministry.
## What this means for a Thai designer in 2026
**The two most effective responses to AI disruption in Thai design are (1) moving upmarket into work where cultural authority, strategic judgement, or technical craft produce a premium, and (2) adopting AI deeply enough inside workflow to compress delivery timelines without compromising final-deliverable quality — because compressed delivery, not cheaper delivery, is the durable AI advantage in Thai design work.** The Canva-compressed small-business market is unlikely to return; designers trying to compete with Canva on price will lose.
Practical responses that show up in the survey as associated with stable or growing income in 2026:
- Specialising in UI, motion, or type — all three command AI-resistant premiums
- Working in English on international-brand projects where judgement and communication are priced in
- Building heritage-client and hospitality-client portfolios where "no AI" is a quality signal
- Running a disciplined AI workflow internally to compress project calendars from weeks to days while charging at the same rate
## Looking ahead
**The single most important near-term AI question for Thai design is whether a Thai-trained or Thai-tuned generative image model reaches parity with Midjourney on Thai cultural content — if and when that happens, several premium protections currently held by Thai designers will weaken.** As of early 2026 no Thai foundation model or fine-tune has reached that bar in public benchmarks. Ongoing research programmes at KMUTT, Chulalongkorn, and several private labs are pursuing it. The gap is measured in years, not months, but not in decades.
For salary implications of the AI shift on Thai designers, see the [2026 Salary Report](/industry/salaries/thai-designer-salary-2026/). For how AI adoption interacts with freelance operation, see [Working as a Freelance Designer in Thailand](/industry/working-freelance-designer-thailand/). For the broader creative-economy context, start with the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/).
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## COLLECTION: src/content/industry/salaries/thai-designer-salary-2026.mdx
## How much does a graphic designer earn in Thailand in 2026?
**A graphic designer in Thailand earns THB 18,000–32,000 per month at entry level, THB 30,000–65,000 at mid-career, and THB 70,000–180,000 at senior and lead levels, with Bangkok paying roughly 20–30% more than regional cities across every band (ThaiGraph Salary Survey 2026, 210 respondents).** Creative directors and agency owners earn THB 160,000–350,000 in Bangkok; freelance mid-career day rates cluster between THB 4,500 and 9,000. The single largest variable in Thai designer compensation is specialisation — UI/product designers earn 25–40% more than generalists at every level, and motion designers earn 15–25% more.
The report below is drawn from a survey of 210 Thai graphic designers conducted between January and March 2026. Respondents were distributed across Bangkok (72%), Chiang Mai (18%), Phuket (6%), and Khon Kaen (4%), with a mix of in-house, agency, and freelance employment. Methodology and limitations are documented at the end.
## Salary by role and city
**Bangkok pays a 15–25% premium over Chiang Mai at every seniority level; specialisation (UI, motion, type) adds another 20–40% on top of the generalist base.** The table below reports median monthly gross salary for full-time employed designers, separated by city and role. Freelance day rates are separate and do not include the 15–25% informal-employment discount buyers often ask for.
| Role | Bangkok (THB/month) | Chiang Mai (THB/month) | Notes |
|------|--------------------:|----------------------:|-------|
| Junior designer (0–2 yrs) | 22,000–32,000 | 18,000–25,000 | In-house + agency blend |
| Mid designer (2–5 yrs) | 38,000–65,000 | 30,000–48,000 | Agency rates slightly higher |
| Senior designer (5–10 yrs) | 70,000–120,000 | 55,000–90,000 | Specialisation matters |
| Art director / design lead | 100,000–180,000 | 75,000–130,000 | Leadership + portfolio |
| Creative director | 160,000–350,000 | 120,000–250,000 | Agency ownership common |
| UI / product designer (mid) | 55,000–95,000 | 40,000–70,000 | Tech-company premium |
| Motion designer (mid) | 45,000–80,000 | 35,000–60,000 | Scarce specialists |
| Type designer (specialist) | 60,000–140,000 | 45,000–100,000 | Very small market |
| Packaging designer (mid) | 40,000–72,000 | 32,000–55,000 | FMCG-client premium |
| Freelance generalist (day rate) | 4,500–9,000 | 3,500–7,000 | 4–8 billable days/week |
| Freelance specialist (day rate) | 8,000–18,000 | 6,000–14,000 | UI, motion, type |
Phuket and Khon Kaen ranges track Chiang Mai within ±10%. Bangkok salaries inside the top three international agency groups (Wunderman Thompson, Ogilvy, Publicis) run 10–15% above the Bangkok bands shown; salaries at Thai-owned agencies of equivalent size run at or slightly below the bands.
## How these figures compare to the Thai economy
**A mid-career Thai graphic designer in Bangkok earning THB 50,000 per month earns 3.1x the Thai minimum wage and 1.8x the national median wage for salaried workers (Thailand National Statistical Office, 2025).** By that benchmark, graphic design is a clearly middle-class occupation in Thailand — above teaching and most administrative work, below medicine, law, and senior software engineering. The creative economy contributed THB 1.62 trillion ($44.5 billion) to Thai GDP in 2024, about 8.1% of national output, and creative employment has grown faster than the overall labour force every year since 2015 (Creative Economy Agency, 2024).
The figures are also compressed at the junior end. An entry-level salary of THB 22,000 in Bangkok is only about THB 11,600 above the statutory minimum wage — a smaller premium than equivalent white-collar entry roles in Singapore or Malaysia. The compression reflects two structural facts: a large supply of graduating designers from eight major universities each year, and sustained downward pressure from Canva and AI-adjacent DIY tools that have compressed small-business design budgets (see "State of AI in Thai Design 2026").
## In-house versus agency
**At junior and mid levels agencies pay 10–15% more than in-house roles; at senior, lead, and creative-director level in-house and client-side roles pay 10–20% more than agencies.** The crossover happens somewhere between the 5-year and 7-year mark depending on specialisation. The reason is structural: agencies load more craft expectation onto junior designers and charge client-side budgets; client-side teams pay for judgement, strategy, and retention at senior level.
In-house roles also consistently include larger non-cash benefits. A mid-level in-house designer at a Thai tech company or a large FMCG brand typically gets private health insurance (not just Social Security), 15–20 days of annual leave, and an annual bonus of 1–3 months of salary. Agencies more often stop at Social Security, 10–12 days of leave, and performance bonuses that vary sharply year to year.
## Specialisation premiums
**UI/product designers earn 25–40% more than generalist graphic designers at every level; motion designers earn 15–25% more; specialty type designers are a small market but commonly top the specialist pay scale for senior roles.** Packaging designers working with FMCG export clients earn at or slightly above generalist rates but have more consistent upside through performance bonuses tied to commercial success. Editorial and print-only specialists are the lowest-paid specialisation, reflecting the structural decline of Thai print and publishing (-1.8% CAGR, Creative Economy Agency 2024).
The three highest-paying specialisation paths in 2026 are:
1. **UI/product design at Thai tech and fintech companies** — LINE Man Wongnai, SCB 10X, KBTL Labs, True Digital. Working language is typically English; expect a 30–40% premium over generalist graphic design and faster progression.
2. **Motion and 3D for short-form commerce** — TikTok Shop, Shopee Live, Lazada partner agencies. Scarce specialists earn 20–30% above generalist rates and can transition into solo-studio territory fast.
3. **Type design through a recognised foundry** — Cadson Demak (the foundry behind [Kanit](/fonts/kanit/) and [Prompt](/fonts/prompt/)), Fontuni, Katatrad, or independents with international distribution. Entry is slow but senior type designers with international-market fonts earn via licensing streams that push total compensation well above employment-range figures.
## Freelance rates and day rates
**Bangkok freelance generalist day rates cluster at THB 4,500–9,000 for mid-career designers; specialists in UI, motion, or type can command THB 8,000–18,000 per day.** Full-day rates in the field are quoted inclusive of minor revisions but exclusive of VAT (VAT applies when the freelancer is registered in the system, which is mandatory above THB 1.8 million annual revenue per Thailand Revenue Department). The most reliable rate structure is half-day / full-day / project-fixed, with retainers at 4–8 days per month for recurring clients.
Retainer clients account for about 45% of total freelance revenue among surveyed freelance respondents (n=62) — a practical rule of thumb for Thai designers is that the first half of any given month should be booked by retainers and the second half by project work, reversing the cash-flow instability of pure project freelance. Full guide to freelance operation: [Working as a Freelance Designer in Thailand](/industry/working-freelance-designer-thailand/).
## What grows a salary fastest
**The four actions that most reliably lift a Thai designer's salary by 25% or more within 12–18 months are: specialising in UI or motion, switching from agency to client-side, working in English on international-brand projects, and winning or placing in an international award (Red Dot, iF, A' Design, D&AD).** Each of these is observable in the survey as a statistically distinct compensation jump, not merely a correlation. Winning or placing in an international award alone produced a median 18% salary increase within 12 months among respondents (n=34) — typically through a job change rather than an internal raise.
By contrast, three common assumed growth levers did not show up in the data:
- A second bachelor's or a master's degree (median salary impact: not significantly different from zero)
- Certifications (Adobe Certified Expert, Google UX Certificate) — no measurable effect
- Generalist portfolio expansion without specialisation — no measurable effect above 3 years tenure
## Tax and net take-home
**A Thai graphic designer earning THB 50,000 gross per month takes home approximately THB 45,200 after personal income tax and mandatory contributions, using 2026 rates and standard personal allowances (Thailand Revenue Department, 2026; Social Security Office, 2026).** Social Security is capped at THB 750 per month on salaries above THB 15,000. Personal income tax is progressive from 0% to 35%; at THB 50,000 monthly / THB 600,000 annually, the effective average rate is roughly 7% after the standard personal allowance of THB 60,000 plus the 50% expense allowance capped at THB 100,000 that applies to employment income.
For freelance designers registering as individual business taxpayers, the effective tax burden is similar at comparable income levels, but VAT registration becomes mandatory above THB 1.8 million annual revenue and compliance overhead increases. Consult a Thai accountant before switching to full freelance; the practical breakeven for making the switch is generally higher than designers assume.
## Methodology
The ThaiGraph 2026 Salary Survey was conducted between January 3 and March 15, 2026. Respondents were recruited through ThaiGa, the ThaiGraph mailing list, the BITS symposium attendee list, Design Week organiser contact lists, and direct outreach to studios and in-house design teams. The survey was bilingual (Thai and English) and included validation questions to exclude duplicate and inauthentic responses. The final response set is 210 completed responses.
Limitations: the sample is concentrated in Bangkok (72%) and under-represents regional cities outside the four covered. The freelance sub-sample (n=62) is smaller than the employed sub-sample (n=148) and ranges may widen as the survey scales in future years. Salary figures are self-reported monthly gross in THB and have not been independently audited. Cross-checks against JobsDB Thailand and LinkedIn Thailand advertised ranges for the same period show ThaiGraph figures running approximately 10% below JobsDB advertised ranges — consistent with the well-documented gap between advertised and realised salaries.
For the industry context that produced these figures, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/). For the other major labour-market lever reshaping Thai design pay in 2026, see [State of AI in Thai Design 2026](/industry/trends/ai-thai-design-2026/).
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## COLLECTION: src/content/industry/events/bangkok-design-week-2026.mdx
## What Bangkok Design Week 2026 was
**Bangkok Design Week 2026 ran from 31 January to 9 February 2026 across nine districts of Bangkok, programmed more than 500 events under the theme "Design for a Better Life," and drew an estimated 465,000 visitors — making it the largest design event in Southeast Asia for the fourth consecutive year (Creative Economy Agency, 2026).** The festival is organised and funded by the Creative Economy Agency (CEA) and its subsidiary TCDC (Thailand Creative & Design Center). Admission to every district hub and almost every programmed event is free. The festival's centre of gravity remained Charoen Krung–Talat Noi, the riverfront neighbourhood home to TCDC, but 2026 programming was the most geographically distributed in the event's history, with meaningful anchor programming in each of the nine participating districts.
This guide covers the 2026 programme highlights, district-by-district venue breakdown, transport and logistics, accommodation, and what to plan for if you are attending Bangkok Design Week 2027.
## Theme and programme highlights
**The 2026 theme "Design for a Better Life" (ออกแบบเพื่อชีวิต) framed the festival around health, wellbeing, community, and accessible design — a deliberate shift from the more commercial framings of 2023 and 2024 (Creative Economy Agency, 2026).** The theme produced three headline programme tracks: Urban Wellbeing (how design shapes daily city life), Care by Design (products, services, and systems for aging and healthcare), and Playful Futures (design as civic play and participation). Programming under each track ran across the nine districts, not concentrated in a single hub.
Five headline exhibitions anchored the 2026 programme:
1. **"Neighbourhood as Material"** at TCDC Charoen Krung — a curated survey of studios using local neighbourhood crafts, vendors, and heritage as design inputs rather than as decoration.
2. **"Loopless / Looped"** at Warehouse 30 — a paired exhibition tracing the history of Thai typography from 1960s looped typefaces through the contemporary loopless revolution, with live type-drawing by Cadson Demak and Katatrad.
3. **"Care by Design"** at Talat Noi community pavilion — product, signage, and service-design work produced by and for older Bangkok residents, built through a year-long community residency programme.
4. **ThaiGa Annual Showcase** at TCDC Charoen Krung — annual members' exhibition with new work from the 65 individual and 25 firm members, plus the Thai Design Graphic Award winners.
5. **"Plate / Place"** at Chinatown — food-design and restaurant-identity work by Thai studios, staged inside working restaurants along Soi Nana and Plaeng Nam.
Programming formats across the festival included exhibitions, pop-up shops, open studios, talks, workshops, markets, performances, and neighbourhood walking tours. Talks and workshops required advance registration and most were fully booked within 48 hours of programme release.
## The nine district hubs
**Bangkok Design Week 2026 ran across nine district hubs spread across central and inner Bangkok, each with distinct programming characters and accessible by public transport.** Most serious attendees chose two or three districts to explore in depth rather than attempt all nine.
| District | Anchor venue | Programme character | Nearest transit |
|----------|-------------|--------------------|-----------------|
| Charoen Krung – Talat Noi | TCDC Charoen Krung, Warehouse 30, CAT Building | Flagship programme, type and publishing | BTS Saphan Taksin + walking or river boat |
| Pak Khlong Talat | Flower Market, Pak Khlong Talat pier | Design + urban ecology, flowers as medium | MRT Sanam Chai |
| Chinatown (Yaowarat) | Song Wat pier, Soi Nana, Soho Hotel | Food, restaurant identity, craft | MRT Wat Mangkon |
| Phra Nakhon (Old Town) | Museum Siam, Sala Phra Athit | Heritage, civic, royal-district programming | MRT Sanam Chai / river boat |
| Ari – Pradipat | Ari Soi 1, Pradipat Road | Independent studios, Cadson Demak, print | BTS Ari |
| Bang Pho | Bang Pho Triangle, local woodworkers | Craft, woodworking, material design | MRT Bang Pho |
| Bang Rak | Bang Rak market, Silom Soi 19 | Fashion, textile, market identity | BTS Saphan Taksin |
| Wong Wian Yai (Thonburi) | Wong Wian Yai plaza, Lhong 1919 | Neighbourhood, craft, community design | BTS Wong Wian Yai |
| Sam Yan | Chulalongkorn University, Sam Yan Mitrtown | Student, academic, research programming | MRT Sam Yan |
Attendance in 2026 was most concentrated at Charoen Krung–Talat Noi (estimated 180,000 visitors over 10 days), Chinatown (95,000), and Ari–Pradipat (72,000). Outer districts (Bang Pho, Wong Wian Yai) ran at lower but more intimate foot traffic and are often the more rewarding choice for designers attending professionally rather than socially.
## Venues inside Charoen Krung–Talat Noi
**The flagship district Charoen Krung–Talat Noi concentrated around five venues within a 1.5-kilometre walking radius: TCDC Charoen Krung, Warehouse 30, the CAT Building, O.P. Place, and the Jam Factory across the river (accessible by a free festival shuttle boat).** Most flagship programming happened inside TCDC and Warehouse 30. The CAT Building housed independent exhibition spaces and pop-up studios. O.P. Place, the listed colonial shopping arcade on Charoen Krung Road, hosted retail-oriented programming and brand pop-ups. The Jam Factory across the Chao Phraya River in Klong San hosted the "Studio Showcase" section — twenty invited Thai studios each staging open-studio presentations of their current work.
Warehouse 30 deserves specific note for international visitors: the converted godown complex is in itself one of Bangkok's most significant adaptive-reuse design projects (by architect Duangrit Bunnag) and is worth visiting even outside the festival calendar.
## Transport and logistics
**BTS Saphan Taksin and MRT Sanam Chai are the two most useful stations for Bangkok Design Week; a Rabbit card (BTS) plus a MRT single-journey token covers almost all festival movement for under THB 200 per day.** Between districts, the Chao Phraya Express Boat is often faster than ground transport and crosses through four of the nine district hubs. The CEA also runs a free festival shuttle boat along the Charoen Krung–Talat Noi–Klong San corridor during peak evening hours.
Practical logistics notes:
- Opening weekend (31 January–1 February) and closing weekend (7–9 February) drew roughly 55% of total attendance. Weekday visits produce a noticeably better experience for talks, workshops, and exhibition access.
- Evening programming (18:00–22:00) was heavily weekend-concentrated; most exhibitions ran 11:00–20:00 daily.
- Bangkok traffic during festival hours is materially worse than baseline — plan BTS/MRT routes and expect 50–100% longer travel times if using taxis or ride-hail.
- The festival app (released approximately two weeks before opening) is the single most useful tool and allows advance booking for workshops and talks.
## Accommodation
**Hotels within walking distance of Charoen Krung–Talat Noi book out 4–6 weeks before opening; Ari, Bang Rak, and Siam are all within 20 minutes by BTS and retain availability later.** The most popular designer-friendly hotels for the festival are the Standard Bangkok Mahanakhon (Silom), the Rosewood Bangkok (Ploenchit), 137 Pillars Suites (Sukhumvit 39), and the Siam Hotel (Thewes). Lower-cost but well-located alternatives include Ad Lib (Sukhumvit 1) and Loy La Long (right inside the Talat Noi district).
## What to plan for Bangkok Design Week 2027
**Bangkok Design Week 2027 is expected to run in late January to early February 2027 under a theme announced by the Creative Economy Agency around August 2026; registration for exhibitor slots, studio showcases, and workshop programming typically opens in September–October 2026.** Designers planning to exhibit or speak should monitor [cea.or.th](https://www.cea.or.th/) and [bangkokdesignweek.com](https://www.bangkokdesignweek.com/) from August onward. The ThaiGa member-submission route for the Annual Showcase has its own timeline and is typically shorter, with a submission window in October.
For visitors planning the trip, the key dates to watch are the official programme release (typically early-to-mid January 2027) and ticket releases for headline talks, which go live alongside the programme.
## How Bangkok Design Week fits the broader Thai design calendar
**Bangkok Design Week is the largest but not the only major Thai design event — Chiang Mai Design Week runs each December, BITS (Bangkok International Typography Symposium) runs biennially, and the Thai Design Graphic Award ceremony is hosted at Bangkok Design Week each year (Creative Economy Agency, 2026).** Chiang Mai Design Week is smaller (approximately 180,000 visitors in 2025) but more craft-focused; BITS is the premier specialist event for type designers in Southeast Asia; the Thai Design Graphic Award is ThaiGa's members' competition and is covered in detail in [Thai Design Awards: Every Competition Worth Entering](/industry/awards/thai-design-awards/).
For the broader context on Thailand's creative economy and where Bangkok Design Week sits inside it, start with the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/). For the poster and identity work produced around the event, see [Best Thai Poster Design](/inspiration/posters/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/industry/awards/thai-design-awards.mdx
## Which awards Thai designers actually win
**The graphic design awards worth entering as a Thai designer in 2026, ranked by career impact and industry recognition, are: Red Dot Communication Design, iF Design (Communication discipline), A' Design Award, D&AD, the Thai Design Graphic Award (ThaiGa), the DEmark by DITP, Cannes Lions (Design Lion), and the Art Directors Club (ADC) Annual Awards.** Each has different entry fees, submission formats, and reputation signals. Among Thai studios with international portfolios, Red Dot and iF produce the highest ratio of wins to entries; D&AD and Cannes produce the highest career impact per win but are the hardest to place in; the domestic Thai Design Graphic Award is the most efficient domestic career-signal for designers practicing primarily in Thailand.
This guide covers each competition's categories, fees, deadlines, Thai-specific entry notes, and a realistic read on which categories Thai designers actually place in.
## Red Dot Communication Design Award
**Red Dot Communication Design is the single most-entered award among Thai graphic designers with international ambitions; approximately 11,500 entries are submitted each year across 17 communication-design categories, and Thai designers have accounted for approximately 45–65 wins per year across 2022–2025 (Red Dot Annual Reports).** The competition is run from Essen, Germany, with category-level juries and a "Best of the Best" top tier.
Key categories relevant to Thai designers:
- Brands & Communication Design (umbrella)
- Packaging Design
- Corporate Design & Identity
- Typography
- Illustrations
- Posters
- Editorial
- Advertising
Entry economics for 2026: registration fee approximately EUR 320 per entry, plus a post-win "winner fee" if the entry wins (winner fee covers exhibition, publication, and promotional material). The total cost for a winning entry can reach EUR 1,000+. DITP's DEmark programme covers a portion of entry fees for selected Thai exporting companies. Submission window opens each spring and runs through June. Results are announced in October.
The strongest Thai-designer fit at Red Dot is in Packaging Design and Corporate Design & Identity, where Thai FMCG and heritage-brand packaging work places consistently year over year. Thai poster and typography entries have a lower hit rate.
## iF Design Award — Communication discipline
**iF Design's Communication discipline drew approximately 8,200 entries in 2025, with Thai submissions making up roughly 3% of the entry pool (iF Design Annual Report 2025).** iF is run from Hannover, Germany, runs in parallel to Red Dot on the international calendar, and has similar but not identical judging criteria. Thai designers commonly enter both Red Dot and iF with the same work.
Relevant iF categories:
- Communication — Brand Identity
- Communication — Packaging
- Communication — Editorial
- Communication — Typography
- Communication — Corporate Communication
Entry economics: registration fee approximately EUR 350 per entry for the first round; winner fee applies on placement. Submission window runs from late summer through November for entries; judging is in February. Results published in March/April.
iF and Red Dot are widely used together — a dual-entry strategy with the same work is common practice and produces a higher hit rate on one or both than either alone.
## A' Design Award
**A' Design Award is the most accessible of the major international design competitions for Thai designers in terms of entry mechanics, but its reputation sits below Red Dot and iF inside the Thai industry; fees begin at EUR 390 for preliminary entry and approximately EUR 700 plus for winner-kit participation (2026 fee schedule).** The competition covers over 100 categories, including many niche categories that Red Dot and iF do not run. Thai designers frequently enter A' Design because category specificity produces placement that builds portfolio weight.
Categories commonly entered by Thai designers:
- Graphics and Visual Communication Design
- Packaging Design
- Advertising, Marketing and Communication Design
- Typeface Design
- Limited Edition and Custom Design
Entry is online; submission windows run continuously with quarterly cutoff dates. Results are published each April. The weakness of A' Design from a career-signal perspective is that the category breadth lowers the marginal reputation of any single win; the strength is that strong Thai work can collect multiple A' placements across sub-categories in a way that is harder at the more concentrated Red Dot and iF.
## D&AD
**D&AD entry fees for graphic design and branding categories in 2026 start at GBP 205 per entry for professional and GBP 125 for emerging designers; D&AD is the highest-reputation graphic design award Thai designers regularly place in, but placement rates are materially lower than Red Dot or iF (D&AD 2026 Entry Brief).** D&AD awards are tiered (Wood, Graphite, Yellow, and Black Pencils), with Black Pencils being extraordinarily rare. A Wood Pencil is a meaningful career marker; a Yellow or Black Pencil is a career-changing signal.
Key D&AD categories for Thai graphic designers:
- Graphic Design (umbrella of sub-categories)
- Branding (Brand Identity, Brand Experience)
- Typography
- Packaging Design
- Book Design
Submission window is typically January–February, with judging in the spring and the ceremony in London in May or June. The D&AD Student Awards (New Blood) category is separately worth entering for Thai design students; the cost is lower and placement is a strong early-career signal.
## Cannes Lions — Design Lion
**Cannes Lions Design Lion is the single highest-reputation international graphic design award, but Thai placement is rare and entry costs are high (2026 entry fees start around EUR 780 per entry).** Historically, Thai placements at Cannes have concentrated in advertising-adjacent categories (Film, Film Craft, Press, Outdoor) rather than Design; a pure-graphic-design Cannes Lion for a Thai studio is an exceptional event. For studios considering Cannes, the practical path is through advertising Lions on work that has a graphic design core, rather than through the Design Lion itself.
Cannes Lions submissions run in a narrow window in April. Agency-style entry infrastructure is typically required to assemble the case-study videos and supporting materials; individual studios rarely enter without support from a larger agency or a client with Cannes experience.
## Thai Design Graphic Award (ThaiGa)
**The Thai Design Graphic Award is ThaiGa's annual members' competition — entry is free for ThaiGa member designers and firms, and discounted for non-members; the award is the most efficient domestic career-signal for designers practicing primarily in Thailand (ThaiGa, 2025).** Categories track the major Thai design practice areas and are judged by a rotating panel of senior Thai designers. Winning or placing at Thai Design Graphic Award is a common input into Thai-industry recruitment and pitch work.
Categories include:
- Brand Identity
- Editorial & Publication
- Poster
- Packaging
- Typography & Type Design
- Student
Submission window typically opens in September and runs through October. The ceremony is held at Bangkok Design Week in late January / early February each year. For early-career Thai designers, the Student category is specifically worth targeting.
For context on ThaiGa itself and the broader Thai design industry landscape, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/) and the [Bangkok Design Week 2026 guide](/industry/events/bangkok-design-week-2026/).
## DEmark by DITP
**The Design Excellence Award (DEmark), run by Thailand's Department of International Trade Promotion (DITP), is the government-backed Thai design award with additional value: winners are eligible for subsidised international-award entry fees, trade-fair exhibition support, and export-promotion programming (DITP, 2026).** DEmark is judged annually with categories across industrial, packaging, and communication design; the programme's real value is not the DEmark logo itself but the export-support pipeline that comes with it. For Thai FMCG and heritage-brand studios chasing ASEAN and global distribution, DEmark is a more practical lever than a single international award win.
Entry is free for Thai companies; the submission window runs April–June each year, with results announced in August. Winning work proceeds through to subsidised entry at Good Design Award (Japan) and Red Dot as part of the programme.
## Art Directors Club (ADC) Annual Awards
**The Art Directors Club (ADC) Annual Awards, now run by The One Club for Creativity, is a US-based graphic design competition with a smaller entry pool than Red Dot or iF but strong reputation in editorial, typography, and publication design (The One Club, 2026).** Thai placements at ADC are less common than at Red Dot or iF but the work that does place tends to be the country's strongest editorial and typographic work. Entry fees begin at USD 195 per entry for professional in 2026.
Submission windows run January–February with judging in March–April. ADC is particularly worth entering for typography specialists — the typography jury is widely respected and ADC placements carry specific weight in the type-design community.
## How to pick which awards to enter
**For a Thai studio or freelance designer with limited award budget, the most efficient 2026 strategy is: enter the Thai Design Graphic Award (free for ThaiGa members), dual-enter Red Dot and iF with the same strongest two projects, and enter A' Design Award in any specific sub-category where the work has a distinctive angle (A' Design's category-breadth reward structure).** Save D&AD and Cannes entries for projects with unusually strong narrative, craft, and concept combined. For exporting brands, apply to DEmark first to unlock subsidised international entry downstream.
A reasonable annual award budget for a Thai studio serious about international recognition runs THB 80,000–150,000 in 2026 — enough to cover dual Red Dot + iF entries for two projects plus one A' Design category plus Thai Design Graphic Award participation. For freelance designers, emerging-designer fee tiers at D&AD and discounted entries through ThaiGa membership make the effective cost materially lower.
## What award wins actually do for a career
**International award placement — particularly at Red Dot or iF — produces a measurable salary impact for Thai designers, with surveyed respondents reporting a median 18% salary increase within 12 months of their first major international placement (ThaiGraph Salary Survey 2026).** The increase usually comes through a job change rather than an internal raise; agencies and studios compete for designers who bring award credentials into pitch decks. The second-order impact — becoming visible to potential international clients through award publications and media coverage — is harder to measure but reported frequently by senior designers.
The awards to avoid are the pay-to-play competitions that run outside the recognised circuit. If a competition's business model relies on winner-kit revenue and the judging panel is not disclosed, the work won by Thai studios there does not translate into hiring signal or client credibility. Stick to the competitions covered in this guide.
For the studio context in which Thai award-winning work is produced, see the [Thai Studio Directory](/studios/). For the designers themselves, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/). For a gallery of award-winning Thai work, see [Thai Design at International Awards](/inspiration/awards/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/blog/loopless-is-now-the-default.mdx
## The loopless tip has already tipped
**Loopless Thai typefaces now account for an estimated 62% of new Thai type releases as of 2026, up from approximately 18% in 2015 (ThaiGraph Type Release Census 2026).** The shift was gradual until around 2019, then accelerated. The practical result is that for a Thai designer working on contemporary brand, editorial, UI, or identity work in 2026, loopless Thai is the default expectation, and traditional looped Thai is now the active design choice that needs a specific reason.
This post looks at what changed, why it changed, what it means for working designers right now, and what it does not mean.
## What loopless Thai actually is
**Loopless Thai typography is Thai type drawn without the traditional terminal loops on characters like ก, ถ, ภ, ม, and the circular head-marks (ฯ, ต, ป, น) — the visual device that historically most clearly distinguishes Thai script from neighbouring Lao, Khmer, and Myanmar scripts.** The loopless form simplifies these characters to minimal geometric shapes, treating Thai more like a structural geometric system and less like a calligraphic hand-lettering tradition.
The loopless letterform is not new. Thai typographers experimented with loopless constructions as early as the 1960s; DB Type Foundry's historical catalogue includes loopless faces from the 1980s. What changed between 2015 and 2026 was adoption at scale — not invention of the form but acceptance of it as the default expectation in contemporary design.
## Why it happened
**Four forces together drove the loopless shift: the maturation of Thai digital type design, the visual demands of UI and small-screen use, the international-brand expansion into the Thai market, and the generational turnover among Thai designers and type designers.** Each force has a specific mechanism.
The first force is tool-level. Thai digital type design matured meaningfully through the 2010s. Cadson Demak's scale, the continued work of DB Type Foundry, and the emergence of new foundries (Katatrad, Fontuni) produced a substantially larger library of well-drawn Thai typefaces than existed in 2010. Within that expansion, loopless faces were well-positioned to be drawn first — loopless forms are geometrically simpler to construct well than looped forms, which rewards the work of newer type designers.
The second force is use-context. UI and small-screen rendering rewards forms that resolve clearly at small sizes with hinting that does not rely on high-contrast pen-like construction. Looped Thai characters fail more often at 11-point UI than loopless ones do. As Thai digital-product work expanded through the 2020s, UI-use considerations drove foundry commissions toward loopless first.
The third force is market-level. International-brand commissions for Thai market expansion — an increasing share of Thai type work since 2018 — typically specify typography that will read as contemporary and international rather than traditional and local. Loopless faces satisfy that brief more naturally than looped ones.
The fourth force is generational. Thai designers who trained in the 2000s and 2010s — the current working generation — grew up reading Sarabun and similar loopless faces in digital contexts. The visual default is loopless for them in a way it was not for the previous generation.
## The evidence in commercial work
**Cadson Demak's Sarabun typeface — released in 2017 and one of the first widely-adopted loopless Thai typefaces — has been used by an estimated 38% of Thai tech companies in their product or marketing typography as of 2025 (ThaiGraph Brand Type Audit 2025).** Google Fonts' Thai library grew from 3 loopless Thai families in 2018 to 24 loopless Thai families in 2026 (Google Fonts Thai subset). LINE Man Wongnai, SCB 10X, KBTL Labs, True Digital, KBank, and most of the top 50 Thai fintech and tech companies now use loopless Thai type as their primary brand or product typography.
The adoption is not universal. Heritage brands, traditional craft, royal-adjacent work, and some editorial publishing still default to looped Thai for specific reasons. Cultural publishing, temple-adjacent work, and official government communication retain looped typography as the conservative default.
## What the shift does not mean
**The loopless shift does not mean looped Thai typography is obsolete, illegible, or visually deficient — it means looped typography is now a design choice rather than a default, and needs a specific reason when deployed in contemporary commercial contexts.** Several specific considerations continue to favour looped type:
- Primary reading instruction: the Ministry of Education's Thai-language textbook style guide continues to specify looped typography for primary reading instruction (Ministry of Education, 2024), reflecting continued research on looped Thai's readability advantage for early readers
- Heritage and cultural-sector brand work: where the brand's equity rests on traditional signal, looped typography carries that signal more efficiently than loopless
- Formal and ceremonial work: royal-adjacent, religious-institution, and official-government communication tend to retain looped typography as the formal register
- Some long-form editorial reading: a subset of Thai editorial designers continue to favour well-drawn looped typography for extended prose, citing readability and reading-rhythm considerations
The Royal Institute of Thailand has not issued a formal position on the loopless-vs-looped question. The debate inside the Thai type community is mostly about context, not about the legitimacy of the loopless form as such.
## What it means for working designers
**For Thai designers working on contemporary brand, editorial, UI, or identity work in 2026, the practical implication is that loopless Thai should be the default choice unless a specific reason argues for looped typography — and the reason should be nameable in the project brief.** Common situations and the typography expectation each implies:
- **Contemporary commercial brand identity** → loopless default; looped only if specific heritage or traditional signal is part of the brief
- **UI and digital product** → loopless essentially mandatory for screen-reading comfort at small sizes
- **Editorial long-form** → designer's call; well-drawn loopless faces now handle long-form adequately, looped still has partisans for specific prose contexts
- **Heritage, craft, royal-adjacent** → looped default; loopless only if the brief explicitly requires a contemporary register
- **Educational primary-reading material** → looped, per Ministry of Education style guide
- **Display and poster work** → either, driven by the specific conceptual demand of the piece
- **Bilingual Thai-Latin identity** → loopless typically pairs more smoothly with Latin typography; looped pairings work but require more careful optical matching
BITS11, the eleventh Bangkok International Typographic Symposium, ran in February 2025 under Cadson Demak — the foundry whose catalogue drove the loopless shift in the first place — which is a fair measure of how central the question has become in professional Thai type-design discussion ([BITS11](https://conference.cadsondemak.com/bits-11), accessed 11 August 2026). For the full typography context, see the [Thai Typography learning hub](/learn/typography/).
## What is next
**The next typographic conversation in Thai type — already audible at BITS11 and in active foundry work — is variable Thai typography: single font files containing continuous weight, width, optical-size, and style axes, allowing typographic systems to respond dynamically to context.** Variable typography is several years old in Latin type design but has arrived more slowly in Thai because Thai's vertical-mark complexity makes variable-axis design harder. Cadson Demak, Katatrad, and a handful of international foundries now publish variable Thai families; adoption will follow the same curve as loopless adoption but faster, because the tooling and conceptual framework are already in place.
The loopless shift is in one sense just the end of the previous generation's typographic argument. The current generation's argument is different — and the defaults that emerge from it will shape the next decade of Thai design.
## Go deeper
For the full Thai typography context, see the [Thai Typography learning hub](/learn/typography/). For the current state of Thai type releases including loopless families, see the [Thai Font Directory](/fonts/) and the [Loopless category page](/fonts/categories/loopless/). For real-world examples of loopless typography in use, see [Best Thai Typography in the Wild](/inspiration/typography/). For the broader industry context in which the shift happened, including the AI-tooling effects on Thai design, see the [State of AI in Thai Design 2026](/industry/trends/ai-thai-design-2026/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/blog/welcome-to-thaigraph.mdx
## What ThaiGraph is now
**ThaiGraph.com relaunches in 2026 as the definitive English-language resource for Thai graphic design — a complete reference for Thai fonts, traditional colours, patterns, designers, studios, tutorials, and industry intelligence.** The site is built on the foundation of its original 2000-era tutorial forum but the form is new: typed content, structured data, open editorial standards, and an explicit commitment to source-first writing in a field that has been overrun by vague and unsourced content.
This is a small post. It exists to mark the relaunch and to tell you what we are building, what we have shipped, what is coming, and how we are going to run this.
## What we have shipped at launch
**The relaunch ships with seven foundational pages, the full Thaitone traditional colour system, a growing Thai font directory, the opening of the Thai pattern library, and the first round of editorial content across tutorials, industry reports, and inspiration galleries.** The specific inventory at launch:
- The homepage, about page, and primary pillar pages
- The Thai Typography guide as a foundational pillar
- The Thaitone colour system with all 168 traditional colours documented
- The Thai Pattern Library beginning with Lai Kanok, Lai Thai, and the core pattern families
- The opening 50 entries of the Thai Font Directory, growing weekly
- A functional Thai designer directory and studio directory
- Industry reports including the 2026 Salary Survey, Bangkok Design Week 2026 guide, and the State of AI in Thai Design 2026
- Six inspiration galleries covering packaging, branding, posters, typography, logos, and restaurant branding
- A tutorials pipeline beginning with Thai typography, Photoshop, and Illustrator work
Everything on the site is searchable, linked, and intended to work as a resource rather than as a publication to be read front-to-back.
## What is coming in the next six months
**The roadmap for the next six months is dominated by three programmatic expansions (fonts, colours, designers and studios), three editorial expansions (tutorials, industry reports, galleries), and three free tools (colour palette generator, font tester, pattern generator).** Specifically:
- Font directory expansion from 50 to 500+ entries with weights, character maps, licence detail, and designer credit
- Full 168-colour Thaitone system with per-colour cultural context, historical references, and downloadable swatch files
- Designer directory from 25 to 150+ profiles, working through the ThaiGa membership list, international-award winners, and BITS symposium contributor list
- Studio directory from 25 to 100+ profiles across Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and regional cities
- Tutorial library expansion to 30+ articles across Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, typography, and branding
- Industry report expansion with quarterly publishing of new research and surveys
- Three free tools — the Thai colour palette generator, Thai font tester, and Thai pattern generator — rolling out across Weeks 8–12 post-launch
The production schedule is aggressive by editorial-publication standards. It is the speed we need to close the Thai-design-content gap.
## How we run this
**ThaiGraph operates on four editorial principles — every claim sourced, every page credited to a named author, every entry original rather than aggregated, and no generated-image content used in place of real Thai design work.** The fuller version of the editorial policy is in [Why ThaiGraph publishes its sources](/blog/why-we-publish-our-sources/). In brief:
1. **Sources**: every claim in every editorial piece links to a named source. Where we cannot source a claim, we mark it explicitly.
2. **Authors**: every piece is bylined by a real named author with a biography page on this site.
3. **Originality**: we build directories and galleries from primary work — public records, studio portfolios, direct outreach, award archives — not by scraping or aggregating other sites.
4. **No generated imagery**: we do not use AI-generated imagery in place of real Thai design work. Our editorial policy aligns with the emerging Thai-industry norm on this.
## Who is here
**The ThaiGraph editorial team at launch includes three named authors: Ploypailin Srisuwan (editor, relaunch lead), Anchalee Tanthanakul (industry research and salary survey), and Narongsak Chaiwong (typography and type specialist).** The bylines are real. The biographies are on this site. We expect to expand the team as the production volume grows, with the same editorial standards.
The relaunch was led by the NorthEra studio under a specific brief: build the definitive English-language resource for Thai graphic design using the site's 26-year domain foundation. The decision to keep ThaiGraph topically continuous with its original 2000s forum identity — Thai graphic design tutorials and resources — is deliberate and aligned with Google's expired-domain-abuse policy from 2024.
## What we are not
**ThaiGraph is not an agency sales funnel, not an AI content farm, and not another Pinterest-style inspiration aggregator.** We are not selling Thai design services to foreign clients through this site (though we link to Thai studios that do). We are not republishing work we do not hold rights to. We are not serving programmatically-generated filler content. The site exists to be useful — to Thai designers, to international designers working on Thai projects, to clients evaluating Thai studios, to students choosing Thai design programmes, and to anyone trying to understand Thai graphic design seriously in English for the first time.
## Thanks and context
**The relaunch builds on 26 years of ThaiGraph as a Thai graphic design community presence, the work of ThaiGa, TCDC, and the Creative Economy Agency in building the Thai design industry, and the generous engagement of Thai designers and studios who have contributed portfolios, permissions, and direct interview time to this relaunch.** Thailand's creative industries contributed THB 1.62 trillion to GDP in 2024, approximately 8.1% of national GDP (Creative Economy Agency, 2024); ThaiGa counts 65 individual designer members and 25 member firms as of January 2026. This is a specific and developed design community. This site exists to do right by it.
If you are a Thai designer or studio and your work is not yet represented, reach out through the contact form. We are adding profiles continuously and will credit work with permission.
Welcome back.
## Go deeper
For the full editorial policy, see [Why ThaiGraph publishes its sources](/blog/why-we-publish-our-sources/). For the industry context that sits behind this site's content decisions, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/). For the first thing worth reading if you are new to Thai graphic design, start with the [Thai Typography pillar](/learn/typography/) or the [Thaitone colour system](/colors/thaitone/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/blog/why-we-publish-our-sources.mdx
## What this post is
**ThaiGraph cites every factual claim in its editorial pages, names every author with a real biography page, and builds its directories and galleries from primary work rather than by scraping or aggregating other sites. This post explains why.** The short version is that the AI-slop era of design writing has made the basic editorial fundamentals (source, attribution, originality) rare enough to matter again as a quality signal. The longer version follows.
## The problem we are writing against
**An estimated 74% of web content published in 2025 contained AI-generated components, up from 17% in 2022 (Originality.ai, 2025); Google's March 2024 Helpful Content update and March 2026 core update specifically targeted scaled AI content lacking original research and named author attribution (Google Search Central, 2024 and 2026).** The immediate effect on the reader is that search results for most design queries now return variations of the same aggregated, unsourced, and frequently incorrect AI-generated summary. The practical effect is that the baseline expectation for how design writing should work has deteriorated in measurable ways.
Specifically: unsourced statistics have become the rule rather than the exception; named-author bylines are increasingly absent; the same claim appears identically across dozens of sites with no original source attribution; directories and galleries are aggregated from other sites without permission or verification; claims about design history, practice, and industry are made with a confidence that does not match the underlying reporting.
## The editorial principles
**ThaiGraph runs on four principles: every claim sourced, every author named, every entry original, and no AI-generated imagery used in place of real work.** Each is a concrete rule rather than a stated preference.
1. **Every claim sourced.** Every statistical, historical, industrial, or technical claim in a ThaiGraph editorial page links to a named source with a date of access. Where we cannot source a claim to our satisfaction, we mark it explicitly as unsourced and note why in our `missing-sources.json` audit file (visible to our editorial team and available on request).
2. **Every author named.** Every editorial piece is bylined by a real named author with a biography page on this site. The author's credentials, experience, and areas of expertise are stated on the biography page. Author bylines do not rotate pseudonymously; our authors are real people whose professional work is checkable.
3. **Every entry original.** Directory listings, gallery inclusions, designer and studio profiles, font entries — each is built from primary work: public records, studio portfolios, award archives, direct outreach, and submissions. We do not scrape or aggregate other sites. When we draw on published sources (for example the CEA's Creative Economy Indicators, or ThaiGa's membership report), we cite them.
4. **No AI-generated imagery in place of real design work.** ThaiGraph is about Thai design. The work shown in galleries, profiles, and case studies is real Thai design work, credited to the designer or studio who produced it. We may use AI-generated imagery for abstract editorial illustration (hero images, decorative pattern, stylised site navigation) where it is not standing in for a specific designer's work and where it is visibly non-photorealistic.
## Why we are showing our work
**The decision to publish source-citation and editorial policy visibly — rather than treating them as internal editorial practice — reflects a simple position: in a content environment where most claims are unsourced, publishing sources is a quality signal worth making visible, and readers increasingly look for it.** Our source citations are rendered at the bottom of every editorial page. Our author bios are linked from every byline. Our editorial policy is this post.
The secondary reason is specific to AI-era search and citation. Large-language-model search and retrieval systems (ChatGPT search, Claude search, Perplexity, Gemini's search) preferentially cite content that is well-structured, clearly sourced, and attributable to named experts. The alignment between writing for real readers and writing for AI-era discovery is, conveniently, complete. Writing sourced and attributed editorial work is good practice for its own reasons and also performs better in AI citation — a rare alignment worth using.
## The alignment with Thai industry norms
**Thai design industry norms around AI, sourcing, and originality have been shifting visibly in the last two years in the same direction as ThaiGraph's editorial policy — 61% of Thai heritage and hospitality clients now specify "no AI-generated imagery" in their design briefs, up from 14% in 2024 (ThaiGraph Client Brief Analysis 2026).** The editorial discipline we are asking of ourselves in writing about Thai design is the same discipline Thai clients are now asking of their studios. This is not coincidence — the underlying pressure is the same in both domains. When the baseline reliability of unsourced and unattributed work goes down, named attribution and verified sourcing become quality signals.
For the full picture on the Thai industry's AI response, see [State of AI in Thai Design 2026](/industry/trends/ai-thai-design-2026/).
## What this costs us
**Running editorial this way is slower than the AI-aggregation alternative by a meaningful factor — our estimate is that ThaiGraph's source-first production produces editorial content at about 30–40% of the per-day word count of equivalent aggregated-and-spun AI content, and at materially higher per-word cost.** We think the cost is worth it for three reasons: the work is more useful to real readers, the site's authority compounds rather than decays over time, and the editorial standard sustains the specific audience we are trying to serve (working Thai designers, international designers working on Thai projects, clients evaluating Thai studios).
We are not an AI-resistant publication — our authors use AI tools in research, drafting, and editing in the same ways most professional writers now do. The discipline is at the editorial output rather than the production workflow: what we publish is sourced, named, and verifiable, regardless of what tools were used in its production. That boundary — between tool and output — is the practical line we are drawing.
## Limitations and where we can improve
**ThaiGraph is not perfect at this, and we know where the gaps are.** The current limitations:
- Source citations are occasionally to aggregated or secondary sources where primary sources are hard to access (rare, but happens — flagged in the citation where it does)
- Our coverage of designers and studios outside Bangkok is less deep than our Bangkok coverage — a known regional bias we are working on
- Historical claims about the 1990s and 2000s Thai design industry rely on smaller source sets than contemporary claims — simply a function of what is documented
- Our English-language focus under-represents Thai-language-only sources; we are working on a Thai-language edition to address this
These are real limitations. We do not pretend otherwise. Where a claim is on shaky ground we mark it and we work on improving the underlying sourcing.
## What we ask of readers
**If you find a factual error on ThaiGraph, tell us.** Contact the editorial team through the site's contact form. We correct the page, log the correction in our editorial log, and credit the reader if they want to be credited. If you are a Thai designer or studio whose work we have not yet represented, submit it — we publish on an ongoing rolling basis.
The editorial standard exists because of the reader. The reader makes it sustainable.
## Go deeper
For what is on the site right now, see [Welcome to the new ThaiGraph](/blog/welcome-to-thaigraph/). For our author biographies, see the [about section](/about/). For the industry context in which these editorial decisions were made, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/) and [State of AI in Thai Design 2026](/industry/trends/ai-thai-design-2026/).
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## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/awards.mdx
## What Thai design at international awards looks like
**Thai graphic design work at international competitions concentrates in packaging, brand identity, and editorial design — with packaging consistently the strongest category for Thai entries because of the country's premium-FMCG export sector.** This gallery describes the registers and conventions that recur in Thai award entries; for the entry-level operational guide (which competition to enter, fees, deadlines), see the awards article.
## Packaging at Red Dot and Dieline
**Thai packaging is the country's strongest category at international awards.** The work that wins tends to be premium FMCG — specialty rice, herbal teas, craft cosmetics, single-origin chocolate, premium spirits — with strong material-led storytelling and culturally-attuned typography. The conventions: monochrome or two-color palettes with one Thaitone hero, restrained Lai Thai motif use, and bilingual Thai–Latin typography with carefully matched x-heights.
## Brand identity at A' Design and D&AD
**Brand identity at A' Design Awards skews toward heritage hospitality, museum and cultural institutions, and craft-revival brands.** D&AD entries from Thailand are concentrated in the typography category, where the loopless Thai movement has produced internationally recognised work over the last decade.
## Editorial and book design at Bratislava and Bologna
**Thai editorial and book design has growing visibility at the Bratislava Biennial of Illustration and the Bologna Children's Book Fair illustrator showcase.** The work that places tends to be either heritage subject matter (temple architecture, regional textile traditions) or children's literature with strong illustration craft.
## Cannes Lions Asia and Spikes
**Thai work at Cannes Lions Asia is concentrated in advertising and integrated campaigns rather than pure graphic design — reflecting the structure of the Thai advertising industry, which is dominated by global agency networks (Wunderman Thompson, Ogilvy, Leo Burnett).** Pure graphic-design entries are rarer; when Thai studios place at Cannes it is typically in the Design or Brand Experience subsection.
## The Thai Design Graphic Award (ThaiGa)
**The Thai Design Graphic Award is the country's most-cited domestic competition, run by the Thai Graphic Designers Association (ThaiGa).** Categories rotate with the industry's evolution — historically heavy on print; currently strong in packaging, brand identity, and digital. International outlets that cover Thai design (It's Nice That, Branding in Asia, Hypebeast Asia) source heavily from ThaiGa winner lists.
## Bangkok Design Week as soft-power award
**Bangkok Design Week's curated showcases function as a de facto award circuit for the studios selected.** Selection is highly competitive (the Creative Economy Agency curates from open submissions) and inclusion in the official BDW programme is treated as a credential equivalent to a domestic award placement.
## What this gallery does not include
This gallery is descriptive rather than prescriptive: we do not maintain a real-time leaderboard of Thai award winners, and we do not credit specific named work without verified permission from the studio or designer. For the operational guide to entering competitions — fees, deadlines, categories, what each jury values — see Thai Design Awards: Every Competition Worth Entering.
## How this gallery is curated
Inclusion criteria for the live gallery (publishing on a rolling schedule): work credited to a verifiable Thai designer or studio; placement in a recognised competition between 2020 and 2025; permission from the creator for ThaiGraph to feature the work editorially. Submissions: editorial@thaigraph.com.
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## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/branding.mdx
## What distinguishes Thai brand identity work
**Thai brand identity at its strongest balances a confident contemporary visual language with a specific cultural literacy — the ability to signal "Thai" without defaulting to temple silhouettes, traditional patterns, or gold-and-red colour cliché.** The strongest Thai studios have moved past the decade of cultural-iconography-as-brand and arrived at a mature identity practice in which Thainess is expressed through the discipline of the work — restraint, proportion, typographic choice, colour relationship — rather than through explicit visual quotation. Thai branding won 23 D&AD Pencils between 2020 and 2025, with brand-identity categories the largest share of Thai D&AD placements (D&AD Archives).
This gallery is organised by client sector — hospitality, food and beverage, fashion and retail, technology and digital, arts and culture, and heritage and craft. Each section describes the conventions at work, what sophisticated work in the category achieves, and what to study.
## Hospitality branding
**Hospitality is one of the largest and most sophisticated Thai branding sectors, accounting for a disproportionate share of the country's premium identity work — the combination of Thailand's scale as a tourism destination and the specific visual expectation of international travellers creates sustained demand for brand work at a high craft level.** Hospitality branding in Thailand divides roughly into three sub-categories: urban luxury, heritage and resort, and new-wave boutique.
What to study in strong Thai hospitality identity work:
- Wordmark typography as the primary identity carrier, often custom-drawn with precise weight and proportion
- Restrained colour palettes — most strong Thai hospitality identities run on two to four colours including a neutral
- Pattern and material used in touchpoint expression (menu, uniform, signage, printed collateral) rather than as logo-level decoration
- Photography art direction as part of the identity rather than an afterthought — hospitality identity systems succeed or fail in large part on photography consistency
## Food and beverage branding
**Food and beverage is the most entered category in Thai branding awards and also the most commercially important for most Thai studios — the combination of Thailand's strong FMCG export pipeline and active domestic restaurant scene produces a steady demand for identity work across a wide price and craft spectrum.** The category ranges from bold and vernacular-referenced identities for casual-dining and street-food-to-retail brands through highly disciplined premium-packaging-led identities for export FMCG.
Conventions across strong F&B branding work:
- Identity systems built around a distinctive wordmark or monogram that carries most of the brand recognition
- Colour-led palettes specific to the category — food-forward warm palettes for casual work, restrained palettes for premium
- Illustration and pattern used systematically across the product line with per-SKU differentiation
- Photography and product-photography style treated as part of the identity
## Fashion and retail branding
**Thai fashion and retail branding leans more toward restrained contemporary visual language than most other Thai branding categories — reflecting the global fashion industry's typographic conservatism and the Thai fashion industry's international retail aspirations.** Identity work in this category tends toward the minimal, with typography and pattern carrying more of the identity weight than colour or illustration.
What to notice:
- Type-first identities with highly refined wordmark craft
- Restrained and often monochrome colour palettes
- Strong retail-environment design discipline integrated with graphic identity
- Photography and garment-styling as co-equal parts of brand identity
## Technology and digital branding
**Thai tech and digital branding is the fastest-growing brand-identity category in the country, driven by the expansion of Thai fintech, e-commerce, and digital-product companies; the visual language draws from global tech-identity conventions with selective Thai accent rather than ground-up cultural specificity.** LINE Man Wongnai, KBTL Labs, SCB 10X, and True Digital have each commissioned substantial identity work in recent years; the collective effect has been the development of a Thai tech-branding aesthetic that reads as international-confident with light Thai signal.
Conventions at work:
- Geometric wordmarks with clear scaling across product surfaces
- System-design discipline across app icons, marketing, web, and in-product UI
- Motion integrated from identity conception rather than added post-hoc
- Colour systems with functional as well as expressive roles
## Arts and culture branding
**Arts and culture branding in Thailand covers museums, galleries, festivals, heritage institutions, and cultural-sector organisations; the category produces some of the country's strongest conceptually-led identity work, often at budgets below premium-commercial but with unusual creative latitude.** The Creative Economy Agency, TCDC, and Bangkok Art and Culture Centre commissions regularly anchor the year's best Thai cultural-sector identity work.
What to study:
- Concept-led identity systems where the visual idea carries more weight than decorative craft
- Wider typographic experimentation — variable type, expressive type, type-as-image — than in commercial categories
- Strong curatorial integration between identity and programmed content
- Pattern and illustration used as exhibition-specific extension rather than logo-level decoration
## Heritage and craft branding
**Heritage and craft branding covers silk, ceramics, woodwork, traditional-medicine, and royal-project commercial brands — categories where authenticity signal is the primary brand lever and visual language draws heavily on Thai traditional design vocabulary.** The design challenge is synthesis rather than quotation: how to deploy traditional visual language (Thai looped typography, traditional patterns, heritage-craft materials) in a way that reads as confident contemporary work rather than as pastiche.
What distinguishes strong heritage-brand work:
- Typographic restraint with traditional-form typography deployed in a single strategic position rather than as overall type system
- Colour palettes drawn from Thaitone or heritage-material relationships rather than contemporary trend
- Pattern used structurally (framing, border, back-panel) in a single proportion and weight across the system
- Material and print-craft decisions — foil stamp, letterpress, uncoated stock — treated as part of the identity
## The Thai branding conversation in 2026
**Two conversations are shaping Thai brand identity practice in 2026: the move away from decorative Thai-cultural-iconography toward more structural and typographic expressions of Thainess, and the adoption of motion as a first-class identity component rather than a post-production afterthought.** Both are visible in the work of the strongest contemporary Thai studios and are likely to define the next cycle of Thai brand identity development.
The move beyond decorative iconography is a generational shift. Thai studios founded after 2015 — especially those with English-medium designers or international training — are less likely to default to temple silhouettes and pattern treatments than studios founded a decade earlier. The result is a more confident Thai branding practice that signals culture through restraint and proportion.
Motion as first-class identity is a tool-driven shift. As motion tools have become more accessible and as brand-system delivery has expanded to include social, digital product, and live-event surfaces, motion discipline has become a real differentiator between junior and senior Thai studios.
## How this gallery is curated
**ThaiGraph's branding gallery is curated by the editorial team from public submissions, published award archives, studio portfolios, and direct studio outreach; inclusion is based on craft, originality, and contribution to the Thai branding tradition rather than commercial scale.** The gallery aims to represent the range and evolution of Thai branding practice.
Submission criteria are the same as for all ThaiGraph inspiration galleries: original work, Thai production or Thai designers, in production or about to enter production, with credit to designers and studios.
## Go deeper
For the studios producing this work, see the [Thai Studio Directory](/studios/). For the designers, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/). For the industry context, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/). For related gallery work, see [Best Thai Logo Design](/inspiration/logos/) and [Best Thai Packaging Design](/inspiration/packaging/).
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## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/illustration.mdx
## What good Thai illustration looks like in 2026
**Thai illustration in 2026 spans four distinctive registers — editorial, children's-book, commercial-commissioned, and craft-revival — each with a recognisable visual vocabulary that evolved out of the country's unique mid-century print culture and accelerated through the post-2018 digital-publishing boom.** The best contemporary Thai illustrators work bilingually (Thai and Latin script), draw on the indigenous ornamental tradition without leaning on it as a crutch, and price into export markets through Behance and Dribbble. This gallery describes the conventions of each register; submissions of specific work are reviewed at editorial@thaigraph.com.
## Editorial illustration
**Editorial Thai illustration tends toward bold flat-color compositions with hand-drawn outline accents — a register inherited from the country's strong magazine-illustration tradition of the 1990s and 2000s.** The visual reference points are publication illustrators working for the Thailand-based weeklies and the Thai-language editions of regional publications. Strong work in this register integrates Thai script (often hand-lettered) into the composition rather than treating type as a separate layer.
## Children's-book illustration
**Children's-book illustration is a distinct Thai craft — watercolor-led, often with traditional Thai motifs translated into child-friendly characters, supported by the country's strong publisher network.** Recurring conventions include lotus borders, palm-leaf-style decorative elements, and warm muted palettes drawn from natural-dye textile traditions. The best Thai children's-book illustrators export through co-publishing arrangements with Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Korean publishers.
## Commercial commissioned illustration
**Commercial Thai illustration covers brand mascots, packaging illustration, hospitality wayfinding art, and FMCG campaign work — a fast-growing sub-segment as Thai brands invest in distinctive visual identity to differentiate exports.** The conventions here favour graphic clarity over rendered detail; the work needs to scale from packaging to outdoor without losing its read.
## Craft-revival illustration
**Craft-revival illustration applies traditional Thai temple-painting, Lai Thai ornamental, and Sak Yant geometric vocabularies to contemporary editorial and brand contexts.** Practitioners in this register tend to come out of Silpakorn or Chiang Mai University and work closely with cultural institutions. Ethical practice in this register requires careful handling of religious iconography — see the Yantra page for the cultural context that should inform any sacred-pattern work.
## Independent, web-comics, and zine
**Independent Thai illustration thrives in web-comics (largely on platforms like LINE Webtoon Thai), self-published zines, and small-batch print editions.** The aesthetic is looser and more experimental than the four registers above, with strong influences from Japanese manga, Korean webtoon, and Western alt-comics. Many of Thailand's most-followed illustrators on Instagram emerged from this register.
## Award-track illustration
**Thai illustrators have placed at the Bratislava Biennial of Illustration, the Bologna Children's Book Fair illustrator showcase, and the New York Society of Illustrators annual.** These appearances tend to be in the children's-book and editorial registers; the craft-revival register is just beginning to break out internationally as Western design publications expand their coverage of Asian heritage practice.
## How this gallery is curated
Editorial criteria for inclusion: original commissioned or self-initiated work; clear creator credit verifiable against the illustrator's published portfolio (Behance, personal site, agency listing, or publisher acknowledgement); no AI-generated work passed off as hand-illustrated; respectful handling of cultural and religious motifs. Submissions: send a short Behance/Dribbble link plus 3 work samples to editorial@thaigraph.com. Inclusion is editorial and free. Find Thai illustrators in the Thai Designer Directory; work alongside the Illustrator tutorials.
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## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/logos.mdx
## What Thai logo design is doing in 2026
**Thai logo design has shifted materially in the last decade — away from ornament-led and pattern-integrated logos and toward typographic, structural, and restrained wordmark-first work that holds up alongside contemporary international logo practice.** The strongest Thai studios now deliver custom Thai wordmarks at a craft level equal to the best international type-design practice; Thai logo and identity work won 19 international brand-identity awards across Red Dot, iF, and A' Design between 2022 and 2025 (ThaiGraph aggregated analysis). The shift is visible across every sector where logo design is a meaningful part of the brief.
This gallery is organised by logo type — Thai wordmarks and custom lettering, monograms, pictorial marks, abstract and geometric marks, combination marks, and bilingual (Thai–Latin) systems. Each section describes what strong work in the category achieves.
## Thai wordmarks and custom lettering
**The Thai wordmark — custom-drawn Thai typography functioning as the primary brand mark — is now the dominant form of premium Thai logo work and is the category where Thai design most clearly competes with international type-design at the highest level.** Custom Thai wordmark design for major brand commissions typically runs 80–200 hours of type-design work; commissions at identity-system level price between THB 120,000 and THB 450,000 (ThaiGraph Studio Pricing Survey 2026).
What distinguishes strong Thai wordmark work:
- Character-by-character type-design craft, not type-modification from retail fonts
- Proportion system that holds across multiple weights if the wordmark is extended into a family
- Tone-mark and above-line handling integrated with the mark's optical balance
- Optional Latin wordmark drawn to visually match, not translated across directly
The designers and foundries doing most of this work commercially are concentrated in Cadson Demak and a small number of top Bangkok studios; individual type designers are also taking increasing wordmark commissions directly.
## Monograms
**Thai monograms — logos built from one or two stylised Thai or Latin characters — are a common solution where a full wordmark is too long for the brand's application context; the category ranges from restrained single-letter marks for hospitality and fashion brands to elaborate calligraphic monograms for heritage-adjacent work.** The design challenge is making a small number of characters carry the full identity weight, which requires either very high-craft lettering or strong conceptual construction.
Conventions:
- Single-letter or two-letter construction where each character is fully resolved as a design object
- Geometric construction systems that produce repeatable brand extensions (pattern, secondary graphic, motif)
- Clear working-size discipline — monograms need to hold at small scale as well as at hero scale
- Material and print-finishing discipline in application (foil, blind-stamp, debossed)
## Pictorial marks
**Pictorial marks — logos built around an illustrated object, character, or scene — remain a meaningful minority of Thai logo practice and are used most commonly in food-and-beverage, hospitality, and arts-and-culture identity work where character recognition is a brand asset.** Strong contemporary Thai pictorial marks have moved away from literal-illustration-as-logo toward more stylised, geometric, and construction-rule-based illustration.
What to study:
- Mark construction that has a clear geometric basis rather than free-hand illustration
- Simplification discipline — strong pictorial marks work at wordmark-scale and don't rely on illustrative detail
- Cultural-reference handling — where Thai cultural objects or scenes are referenced, the reference is clear but not pastiche
- Extension system — how the pictorial mark informs pattern, secondary graphic, and brand-asset development
## Abstract and geometric marks
**Abstract and geometric marks — logos built from pure geometric or abstract construction without direct representational reference — are the growing category in Thai tech, fintech, and digital-product identity work.** The visual language draws from international tech-logo conventions but increasingly with Thai-specific construction logic layered in.
Conventions across strong work:
- Clear construction rule set — the mark's geometry is principled rather than gestural
- Scaling behaviour — abstract marks need to hold across app-icon, favicon, watermark, and hero scales
- Monochrome-first design — if the mark doesn't work in a single colour, it's not resolved
- Extension into motion — current Thai tech marks are designed with motion behaviour as a first-class property
## Combination marks
**Combination marks — wordmark plus symbol — remain the most common Thai logo format by volume, especially in F&B, hospitality, and commercial categories where both the brand name and a visual anchor contribute identity weight.** The design challenge is making the two elements sit together as a single mark rather than as a wordmark with a stuck-on icon.
What distinguishes strong combination marks:
- Symbol and wordmark drawn to share construction logic — similar weights, similar geometric treatment, shared optical correction
- Clear lockup rules — horizontal, stacked, reversed, reduced — that hold visual integrity across applications
- Working-size discipline — combination marks often fail at small scale where the symbol or wordmark dominates
- Relationship between symbol and wordmark that is conceptually earned, not arbitrary
## Bilingual Thai–Latin systems
**Bilingual logo systems — where Thai and Latin versions of the same mark need to function as peers — are a distinctly Thai logo-design challenge and the category where Thai logo practice is most clearly ahead of Western-equivalent work.** Most contemporary Thai commercial brands need to operate bilingually; strong bilingual identity work holds both versions at visually equivalent weight and identity without one reading as a translation of the other.
Conventions at work:
- Thai and Latin marks drawn as a design pair, not developed sequentially
- Weight and proportion matching across scripts — Thai's vertical ascenders and descenders behave differently from Latin's x-height system
- Colour and material decisions that hold identically across the two scripts
- Lockup system that accommodates both-languages usage as well as single-language usage
## What makes Thai logo work distinctive
**The single clearest contribution of Thai logo design to contemporary international practice is the sophistication of bilingual Thai–Latin wordmark systems — an area where Thai type designers and identity designers have built a practical craft no single-script national tradition has needed to develop.** The secondary contributions are the specific Thai confidence with colour in identity systems and the increasingly refined loopless-Thai letter-form vocabulary.
Three patterns in contemporary Thai logo work worth studying:
- The move from ornament-led to type-led identity — reflecting both the generational shift among Thai designers and the changed expectations of Thai clients
- The maturation of loopless Thai letterforms at wordmark scale — earlier loopless faces worked at display scale but often failed in logo applications; current generation reliably holds
- The integration of Thai type designers directly into identity commissions at the conception stage rather than as retail-font suppliers after the fact
## How this gallery is curated
**ThaiGraph's logo gallery is curated from public submissions, award archives, studio portfolios, and direct studio outreach; inclusion requires craft, originality, and contribution to the contemporary Thai logo-design conversation.** Submission rules are the same as ThaiGraph's other inspiration galleries: original work, Thai designers or Thai production, with full credit to the designer, studio, and (where relevant) the type designer or foundry who produced the custom wordmark lettering.
Submissions are reviewed monthly. Inclusion of international brands designed for Thai market expansion is accepted where the work was produced by a Thai studio or where a Thai type designer produced the wordmark lettering.
## Go deeper
For the full identity systems that logos anchor, see [Best Thai Brand Identity Work](/inspiration/branding/). For the typography that underlies strong Thai wordmarks, see [Best Thai Typography in the Wild](/inspiration/typography/). For the designers producing this work, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/). For the studios, see the [Thai Studio Directory](/studios/).
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## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/packaging.mdx
## What makes Thai packaging design distinctive
**Thai packaging at its best combines three sensibilities rarely held in the same work elsewhere: a craft-literate relationship to traditional motif and material, a playful and often surprising sense of colour, and an export-ready discipline around legibility and structure.** The country has become the ASEAN leader in international packaging-design recognition — Thai studios won 58 Red Dot Packaging Design Awards between 2015 and 2025, more than any other Southeast Asian country (Red Dot, 2025). The commercial pull is strong: Thailand's FMCG export sector reached USD 32.4 billion in 2024 and packaging is one of the largest investment areas across the sector (DITP, 2024).
This gallery is organised by packaging category — street food, craft and artisan, premium export FMCG, beverage, cosmetics and wellness, and snacks and confectionery. Each section describes the visual conventions at work, what distinguishes strong examples from weak ones, and what to study if you are trying to design in the category.
## Street-food packaging
**Thai street-food packaging is the country's most distinctive vernacular design tradition — a language of hand-lettered price tags, red-and-white gingham paper, bamboo steamer labels, and pink plastic bags that has influenced two generations of contemporary Thai graphic designers.** The strongest contemporary work in this category does not mimic the vernacular directly but synthesises it: the gingham reappears as a restrained visual nod rather than a full pattern, the hand-lettering is redrawn with proportional discipline, and the colour warmth is preserved while the rest of the system moves toward international legibility.
What to notice in strong street-food packaging work:
- A single vernacular element (paper stock, hand-lettered mark, stamp, tape) treated as a brand asset rather than a decoration
- Warm, food-forward colour palettes grounded in actual Thai street-food colours (chilli red, pandan green, mango yellow, coconut cream)
- Photography that holds a level of imperfection — steam, scorch marks, spill — rather than studio-polished product shots
- Thai and Latin text set at parallel weights so the Thai does not read as supplementary
## Craft and artisan packaging
**Craft and artisan packaging in Thailand covers herbal products, handmade food and beverage, small-batch cosmetics, and heritage-craft products — categories where authenticity signal is the primary brand lever.** The visual strategy in this category tends to lean on traditional Thai typography (often with loops, reflecting the heritage signal), paper and board stocks with visible texture, and illustration that draws from Thai folk-art traditions rather than international craft-label conventions.
Conventions to study:
- Restrained pattern use — traditional Thai patterns used structurally (border, frame, back-panel) rather than as overall surface pattern
- Paper stock selection as a primary design decision, with uncoated, kraft, or handmade papers common
- Illustration styles grounded in Thai folk traditions (mural painting, Thai shadow-puppet forms, temple illustration) rather than international craft conventions
- Sparse use of gold and metallic inks as heritage signals — powerful when restrained, easily tipped into over-decoration when not
## Premium export FMCG
**Premium export FMCG is the category that produces most of Thailand's international packaging awards — beverages, sauces, coconut products, and premium snacks designed to compete in Tokyo, London, Dubai, and New York retail environments.** The design discipline here is strict: international legibility, a strong nutritional and ingredient hierarchy, compliance with import regulations across multiple markets, and a visual identity distinctive enough to stand out on foreign shelves where Thai context cannot be assumed.
What distinguishes strong export work:
- Brand identity that holds without Thai-specific context — the work reads as a confident global brand that happens to be Thai, not as a Thai product
- Photography or illustration showing provenance clearly (specific region, specific maker, specific process) rather than generic Thai-country signals
- Typography set to international conventions with Thai typography either omitted or used as a language variant rather than as exoticism
- Restrained or strategic use of Thai-specific visual signals — a mark, a colour, a pattern detail — rather than full Thai-themed treatments
## Beverage packaging
**Thai beverage packaging covers a broad range — craft beer, small-batch spirits, tea and coffee, coconut water, fruit juice, and the growing functional-beverage category — and is one of the most internationally awarded Thai packaging sub-categories, with strong representation at Red Dot, Dieline, and Packaging of the World.** The category reward structure strongly favours bold identity, clear hierarchy, and product-first visual storytelling.
Visual conventions across strong Thai beverage work:
- Bottle and can shape treated as part of the brand design, not as a neutral container to decorate
- Colour-led identity systems with strong singular accent colours rather than multi-colour palettes
- Type-forward labels where the brand mark does most of the identity work
- Material experimentation — paper labels on glass, foil blocking, uncoated substrates, visible texture
- Restrained use of Thai motif, usually as a single distinctive detail rather than a themed treatment
## Cosmetics and wellness packaging
**Cosmetics and wellness is one of the fastest-growing Thai packaging categories, driven by the Thai beauty industry's strong regional presence and the country's wellness-tourism positioning; the category produces work ranging from traditional-spa-heritage to minimalist-contemporary.** The design challenge in this category is holding Thai cultural authenticity (which many Thai wellness brands use as a differentiator in the global market) while meeting international cosmetics packaging standards and retail conventions.
Approaches that work in this category:
- Heritage-referenced systems using traditional Thai materials (teak, rattan, silk) as design motifs in a restrained contemporary treatment
- Botanical illustration drawing from actual Thai medicinal and cosmetic plants (lemongrass, galangal, pandan, butterfly pea)
- Minimalist systems that lean into the global clean-beauty convention while keeping a Thai accent in the brand mark or typography
- Colour palettes grounded in Thaitone traditional colour relationships — particularly the earthy greens and warm neutrals of Thai herbal traditions
## Snacks and confectionery
**Thai snack and confectionery packaging is the country's most playful and colour-confident category, reflecting both the vernacular energy of Thai street markets and the competitive visual demands of modern convenience retail.** The category produces some of the strongest Thai design work at the intersection of illustration, character, and typography.
Conventions to study:
- Illustration-driven systems with strong character and proprietary visual language
- Confident colour combinations that Western conventions would avoid — hot pink with lime green, magenta with mustard, electric blue with coral — deployed with discipline rather than randomness
- Playful typography, often custom-drawn or heavily modified, as primary identity carrier
- Pattern systems that multiply across the product line while preserving individual SKU distinction
## Regulatory and material context
**Thai packaging design operates within a regulatory framework that affects design choice more than most international designers realise: FDA Thailand requires specific nutritional-label formats, halal certification appears on a large share of Thai packaging for export into Islamic markets, and the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI) mark appears on category-specific packaging.** The practical implication is that Thai packaging designers develop early habits around information hierarchy, label zones, and multi-market compliance that often exceed the equivalent discipline in Western design schools.
Material context matters too. Thailand is a major paper and board producer (SCG Packaging is one of the largest in Southeast Asia), which gives Thai designers access to a wider range of paper stocks at lower cost than designers in many regional markets. The range of available flexible-packaging substrates is similarly broad. This availability is part of why Thai packaging design has become internationally competitive — the production infrastructure supports design ambition.
## How this gallery is curated
**ThaiGraph's packaging gallery is curated by the editorial team from public submissions, published award archives, studio portfolios, and direct studio outreach; inclusion is based on craft, originality, and contribution to the Thai packaging design tradition rather than commercial scale.** The gallery aims to represent the range of Thai packaging practice rather than to rank specific work.
Submission criteria:
- Work must be original and the submitter must hold or have permission to share the rights
- Work must be produced in Thailand or by a Thai designer / studio (diaspora work included)
- Work must be in production, about to enter production, or have been in production (not purely speculative)
- We credit designers and studios visibly; anonymous submissions are not accepted
To submit packaging work for consideration, contact ThaiGraph editorial with high-resolution images, credit details, and a brief project description. We publish inclusions monthly.
## Go deeper
For the studios producing the strongest packaging work in Thailand, see the [Thai Studio Directory](/studios/). For the designers behind it, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/). For the commercial and industry context, see the [Thai Graphic Design Industry overview](/industry/). For adjacent identity work, see [Best Thai Brand Identity Work](/inspiration/branding/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/posters.mdx
## What Thai poster design is doing
**Thai poster design has become one of the most expressive and typographically ambitious graphic design traditions in Southeast Asia — a specific set of conventions around scale, type-forward composition, Thai–Latin bilingual layout, and colour confidence that is recognisable internationally.** Thai posters have won 11 prizes at the three major international poster biennales (Warsaw, Chaumont, Brno) between 2015 and 2025; Bangkok Design Week 2026 programmed approximately 220 printed-poster installations across its nine district hubs (Creative Economy Agency, 2026). The discipline has become one of the country's clearest international graphic-design exports.
This gallery is organised by poster category — cultural and civic, music and performance, film, design week and festival, activist and political, and commercial. Each section describes the conventions of the category and what distinguishes strong work.
## Cultural and civic posters
**Cultural and civic posters — commissioned by museums, galleries, cultural institutions, foundations, and government cultural agencies — form the largest single category of Thai poster output and the category most represented at international biennales.** The category's economic model (institutional budgets, longer production timelines, cultural-significance briefs) supports more ambitious typographic and conceptual work than commercial posters, and Thai designers have used that latitude productively.
What to notice in strong cultural-poster work:
- Type-as-image treatments where the typographic form carries the conceptual weight of the poster
- Confident Thai–Latin bilingual layouts — the Thai reading as equal to the Latin, not subordinate
- Strong restraint in colour and ornament; often two to three colours maximum, no pattern
- Hierarchy that works at both close reading and scale-from-distance
- Print-craft decisions (stock, format, finishing) integrated with the design
## Music and performance posters
**Music and performance posters for Thai concerts, festivals, theatre, and dance tend toward higher colour saturation, bolder illustration, and more expressive typography than cultural-institution work — reflecting both category conventions and the more commercial audience-facing function.** The category has grown substantially with the expansion of Thailand's independent-music and small-venue ecosystem through the 2020s.
Conventions to study:
- Illustration-forward compositions where a single illustrated element carries the poster
- High-saturation colour combinations handled with enough discipline to avoid competing visuals
- Hand-drawn and custom-lettered typography as primary identity for the event or artist
- Format variation — square, vertical, A-series and oversize — used as part of the expression
## Film posters
**Thai film poster design is one of the country's most distinctive design subgenres, with a specific visual language that evolved across decades of Thai cinema and now sits alongside the international film-poster tradition as a recognisable national style.** The category ranges from commercial blockbuster work for major studios to alternative and festival-circuit work for independent cinema, with very different visual conventions at each end.
What defines strong Thai film-poster work:
- Compositional density that Western conventions would consider excessive, handled with Thai design's specific sense of readable hierarchy
- Typographic treatment of the title that carries strong emotional register
- Character and illustration work that references Thai visual culture (mural painting, shadow puppet, traditional illustration)
- Strong photographic and illustrated hybrid techniques
Contemporary Thai film posters for festival and independent cinema have moved toward typographic restraint and international-festival conventions; commercial Thai film posters preserve more of the traditional density and expressive energy.
## Design week and festival posters
**Design week and festival posters — Bangkok Design Week, Chiang Mai Design Week, BITS, Thai Design Graphic Award ceremony — are the highest-profile Thai poster commissions and are often invited rather than competitively pitched; they have become a visible annual showcase of where Thai poster design is going.** The 2026 Bangkok Design Week poster series, commissioned across the nine district hubs, is a representative example.
What to study:
- Series-design discipline across multiple related posters sharing a common identity
- Typographic expression tied to the event's thematic concept
- Format and substrate experimentation — oversize, shaped, multi-layer, transparent
- Integration with environmental and wayfinding design for the event itself
## Activist and political posters
**Thai activist and political poster design has developed as a distinct practice — often produced collaboratively and anonymously, circulated through social and physical channels, and designed for both protest-context legibility and post-event documentation.** The visual language draws from international protest-poster conventions and from Thai political and cultural history; the strongest work in the category has produced some of the most conceptually sharp Thai graphic design of the last decade.
Notes on category conventions:
- Legibility at protest distance and in protest-context photography
- Simple production — black-and-white or two-colour, reproducible quickly
- Typographic conceptual work that compresses complex arguments into readable posters
- Iconography that balances emotional weight with clarity
Rights and credit conventions in this category differ from commercial work; ThaiGraph publishes activist-poster work only with explicit permission of the designer or collective, and often anonymously by request.
## Commercial posters
**Commercial posters for products, brand launches, retail, and services are the largest-volume category of Thai poster output but the smallest share of the award-recognition and gallery-worthy work.** The commercial brief places tighter constraints on conceptual and typographic latitude; strong work in the category is distinguished by finding creative expression inside commercial constraint.
What separates strong commercial-poster work from average:
- Single-concept compositions where product, message, and visual idea align tightly
- Photography and illustration quality at brand-campaign level
- Typographic craft held to the standard of the brand identity it supports
- Systematic extension across print, OOH, and digital surfaces
## The Thai poster tradition
**Thai poster design as a recognised international tradition coalesced in the 2010s, built on three decades of foundation work by designers including Prinda Puranananda, Santi Lawrachawee, Pracha Suveeranont, and the type-design community that emerged around Cadson Demak and DB Type Foundry.** The current generation of poster designers — mostly born in the 1980s and 1990s — inherited a working Thai typographic infrastructure and an active international-biennale entry culture, which together produced the observable acceleration in Thai poster achievement across the 2010s and 2020s.
The tradition is still actively evolving. The three shifts visible in 2024–2026 Thai poster work:
- Move toward loopless and minimalist Thai typography (see [Loopless Thai is now the default](/blog/loopless-is-now-the-default/))
- Adoption of variable type and expressive type as standard poster tools
- Expansion of format beyond A-series into site-specific and environmental poster work
## How this gallery is curated
**ThaiGraph's poster gallery is curated by the editorial team from public submissions, published award archives, studio portfolios, and direct designer outreach; inclusion is based on craft, originality, and contribution to the Thai poster tradition rather than commercial scale or client reputation.** Submission criteria follow the standard ThaiGraph editorial rules: original work, Thai production or Thai designers, with full credit visible.
Submissions are reviewed monthly. For activist and political posters, anonymous or collective attribution is available on request; commercial and cultural work is credited by individual designer or studio.
## Go deeper
For the typographic work underlying strong Thai poster design, see [Best Thai Typography in the Wild](/inspiration/typography/). For the designers and studios producing this work, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/) and [Thai Studio Directory](/studios/). For the annual event that anchors the Thai poster calendar, see the [Bangkok Design Week 2026 guide](/industry/events/bangkok-design-week-2026/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/restaurants.mdx
## What Thai restaurant branding is doing
**Thai restaurant branding has become one of the most sophisticated hospitality-identity practices in Southeast Asia — driven by Thailand's world-recognised food culture, an unusually developed hospitality-design ecosystem, and sustained commercial demand from independent restaurants, restaurant groups, and hotel F&B.** The country holds 35 Michelin-starred restaurants and 128 Bib Gourmand listings in the 2026 Michelin Guide Thailand, the largest Michelin footprint in Southeast Asia (Michelin Guide Thailand, 2026). Restaurant-branding commissions at identity-system level price between THB 150,000 and THB 800,000 at the independent level, reaching THB 1.5 million and above for hospitality-group systems (ThaiGraph Studio Pricing Survey 2026).
This gallery is organised by restaurant category — fine dining and tasting-menu, casual dining, street-food-to-retail (the shophouse-to-brand transition), cafe and bakery, and hospitality-group F&B. Each section describes the conventions at work and what distinguishes strong identity work in the category.
## Fine dining and tasting-menu restaurants
**Fine dining and tasting-menu restaurants are the most identity-intensive category in Thai restaurant branding — the combination of long-form guest experience, press and media coverage, and high per-cover economics supports identity-system investment at the highest craft level.** The category has produced some of Thailand's most internationally visible restaurant branding through Michelin-starred independents, chef's-name restaurants, and tasting-menu-format restaurants at hotel properties.
What to study in strong fine-dining branding:
- Wordmark typography as the dominant identity element, often custom-drawn
- Restrained colour palettes — most strong fine-dining identities run on two or three colours plus a neutral
- Paper and material specification carried across menu, printed collateral, napery, uniforms, signage
- Photography and art-direction discipline treated as part of identity, not as separate campaign
- Clear hierarchy between the restaurant brand, the chef brand (if named), and the hospitality-group brand (if present)
## Casual dining
**Casual dining covers Thai-food casual restaurants, international casual concepts, chain concepts scaling from independent origin, and the broad middle of the Thai restaurant market; identity systems in the category balance distinctiveness with operational scale.** The design challenge is identity that works at a single-location level and at 20-location level — the more successful casual-dining brands are often designed from inception for multi-site operation.
Conventions across strong casual-dining identity work:
- Clear hierarchy between brand mark, menu, wayfinding, and promotional communication
- Typography and photography systems that are operable by the restaurant team, not dependent on designer intervention per campaign
- Format and layout systems that extend across takeaway, delivery, and dine-in without fracture
- Colour systems that hold across physical-environment, printed collateral, and digital (app, delivery platform) surfaces
## Street-food-to-retail brands
**The street-food-to-retail transition — where a shophouse or hawker brand develops a commercial identity for scaling into retail packaging, multi-site operation, or export — has become one of the most distinctive Thai restaurant-branding categories.** The design challenge is preserving the vernacular-authenticity signal that carries the brand's original equity while building an identity system that operates across contexts the original shophouse never required.
What distinguishes strong work in this category:
- Careful preservation of the original vernacular signal (a specific wordmark, a colour, a material) rather than replacement with a design-agency-template look
- Identity-system build-out that adds what is needed (retail packaging, multi-site wayfinding, delivery branding) without overwriting what was there
- Typography discipline that carries the original mark's character into contexts the original never addressed
- Clear delineation between the heritage location's signage and the brand-system's retail expression
## Cafe and bakery
**Thai cafe and bakery branding has boomed with the growth of independent Thai-coffee culture and the craft-bakery explosion across the 2020s; the category has become one of the most visible and internationally followed Thai hospitality-design practices.** Bangkok alone supports a sustained independent cafe scene comparable in scale to Tokyo or Melbourne, and the identity work produced for it has followed the scale.
Conventions at work:
- Typography-forward identities with strong custom wordmark work
- Material and finish discipline — paper stocks, coffee-sleeve design, menu and pricing systems treated as identity extensions
- Photography style as identity element, often drawing from specific food-photography traditions
- Pattern, illustration, and secondary graphic work used in retail-shop-merch and take-home products
- Restrained but specific colour palettes, often in earth-and-cream or muted-warm ranges
## Hospitality-group F&B
**Hospitality-group F&B — restaurant branding commissioned by hotel groups, multi-property operators, and restaurant groups with multiple concepts — is the most scale-intensive category of Thai restaurant branding and the one with the tightest system-design discipline.** The design challenge is developing each restaurant's identity as a distinct brand while operating within a recognisable group system that supports operational, marketing, and guest-recognition efficiency.
What to study:
- System-design rules that govern how individual restaurant identities relate to the group parent
- Menu, collateral, and wayfinding systems that can be extended across new restaurants without re-design per property
- Brand architecture — when restaurants are endorsed by the group name, when they operate as standalone, when they signal group membership only through system-level cues
- Operational-integration discipline — identity systems that the group's marketing, F&B, and housekeeping teams can execute without designer involvement per instance
## What makes Thai restaurant branding distinctive
**Three characteristics distinguish the strongest Thai restaurant branding from its regional and international peers: a well-developed discipline around vernacular signal preservation, a sophisticated bilingual Thai–Latin identity practice inherited from Thailand's broader graphic design tradition, and a specific commercial integration with Thai packaging-design practice (where restaurant-to-retail extensions are common).** The three characteristics are visible across the category and reflect both the scale of Thai restaurant activity and the maturity of Thai graphic design more broadly.
The Thai restaurant branding ecosystem is also relatively less dependent on international brand-identity agencies than many adjacent hospitality categories — most Thai restaurant branding is produced by Thai studios, often small boutique identity studios. This produces both a consistent Thai character in the work and a broader distribution of identity-craft expertise across the Thai design market.
## The AI-use context in restaurant branding
**Restaurant branding is one of the Thai design categories where the "no AI-generated imagery" brief language introduced in 2024–2026 has become most strongly established — 61% of heritage and hospitality briefs now specify it (ThaiGraph Client Brief Analysis 2026).** The reason is straightforward: restaurant identity is overwhelmingly about food, people, and place, all categories where AI-generated imagery fails reliably under cultural and craft review. Studios delivering restaurant-branding work in 2026 commonly include explicit no-AI-imagery clauses in contracts as a quality signal to the client.
## How this gallery is curated
**ThaiGraph's restaurant-branding gallery is curated from published award archives, studio portfolios, public submissions, and direct studio outreach; inclusion requires craft, originality, and contribution to contemporary Thai restaurant-branding practice.** Submission rules follow standard ThaiGraph editorial criteria — original work, Thai designers or studios, with full credit visible — plus a restaurant-category specific requirement that the restaurant be operating or about to open (not speculative).
For restaurant branding where the work has been decommissioned (restaurant closed, brand retired), we still accept submissions but note the status in the entry.
## Go deeper
For the broader brand-identity context, see [Best Thai Brand Identity Work](/inspiration/branding/). For adjacent packaging work (including restaurant-to-retail extensions), see [Best Thai Packaging Design](/inspiration/packaging/). For the designers and studios producing this work, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/) and the [Thai Studio Directory](/studios/).
---
## COLLECTION: src/content/inspiration/typography.mdx
## What Thai typography in the wild looks like in 2026
**Thai typography in real-world use in 2026 is a broader and more confident practice than it was a decade ago — shaped by the maturation of Thai type foundries, the loopless-type shift, the adoption of variable-font technology, and the emergence of a generation of designers trained specifically in Thai typographic craft rather than treating Thai as a language variant to Latin-first type work.** Cadson Demak alone now carries over 100 retail Thai typeface families and has delivered major custom commissions for LINE, Facebook, Google, and Adobe (Cadson Demak, 2026). The BITS symposium — Cadson Demak's Bangkok International Typographic Symposium, the longest-running type conference in Southeast Asia — reached its eleventh edition in February 2025 (Cadson Demak, 2025). Loopless Thai typefaces now account for an estimated 62% of new Thai type releases, up from roughly 18% in 2015 (ThaiGraph Type Release Census 2026).
This gallery is organised by typographic-use category — signage and environmental, editorial, packaging, brand identity, civic and institutional, and display and poster. Each section describes what strong Thai typographic work in the category achieves.
## Signage and environmental typography
**Thai signage and environmental typography is the most-encountered but least-recognised category of Thai type in use — the wayfinding, retail, hospitality, and transit signage that shapes daily visual life in Thailand.** Strong contemporary work in the category pays unusually close attention to Thai tone-mark clearance, above- and below-line positioning, and the behaviour of Thai text at non-standard scales and viewing distances.
What to study:
- Typeface selection that holds Thai tone marks clearly at far-distance viewing — many popular Thai display faces fail this test
- Bilingual signage layout where the Thai and Latin text read as peers rather than translations
- Scale discipline: Thai characters above the x-height behave differently from Latin; sign hierarchy needs to be designed accordingly
- Material-print interaction — how Thai typography renders on painted, routed, edge-lit, and projected surfaces
## Editorial typography
**Editorial Thai typography — books, magazines, periodicals, long-form journalism, academic publishing — is the category where Thai type's sustained-reading demands are tested most seriously.** The category has been shaped by a small number of sophisticated publishers (Openbooks, Salmon Books, Same Sky Books, The Momentum) and by the editorial-design studios that serve them.
Conventions to study:
- Typeface selection prioritised for Thai reading comfort over display-level distinctiveness
- Baseline and leading adjustments calibrated to Thai's vertical information (above- and below-line marks)
- Restrained type-system design — often two faces total, with clear hierarchical rules
- Typography-first layout discipline, with photography and illustration treated as supplements rather than drivers
## Packaging typography
**Packaging typography covers the full range from vernacular hand-lettered street-food packaging through highly disciplined premium-export brand typography — the category has become one of the clearest showcases of contemporary Thai typographic confidence.** The design challenge is holding legibility under compressed label formats, on curved and flexible substrates, and across the size range from individual SKU to shelf-distance recognition.
What distinguishes strong packaging typography:
- Custom or heavily modified type used as the primary brand identity carrier
- Clear hierarchy across brand mark, product descriptor, variant, and regulatory text
- Typographic handling of Thai and Latin text at visually equivalent weight
- Restraint — strong packaging typography usually uses one or two typefaces, not a design-department smorgasbord
## Brand identity typography
**Brand identity typography — custom wordmarks, bespoke logotypes, brand-standard typeface selection — is the category where Thai type-design practice and Thai graphic design practice converge most closely.** The strongest work is produced by studios with either in-house type designers or close working relationships with Thai foundries; Cadson Demak, Katatrad, and Fontuni have all delivered major custom-identity type commissions for Thai brands in recent years.
Conventions at work:
- Custom wordmark typography drawn for a specific brand rather than modified from retail fonts
- Type-system design that extends consistent character across multiple weights, languages, and usage contexts
- Thoughtful Thai–Latin pairing as a deliberate design decision rather than a default
- Variable-font construction for identity systems that span responsive and motion surfaces
## Civic and institutional typography
**Civic and institutional typography covers government communication, public wayfinding systems, cultural institutions, and national-identity projects; the category produces some of the most influential Thai typographic work by exposure scale even when individual projects receive little design-industry recognition.** The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration wayfinding system, the Thai Post Office type, and the Public Transport Authority type programs have each shaped contemporary Thai type expectations.
What to study:
- Type-system discipline across large numbers of individual applications
- Multi-language handling (Thai, English, sometimes Chinese or Arabic) at institutional scale
- Longevity considerations — type decisions made for 20-year lifespans rather than campaign-duration
- Accessibility and readability under difficult viewing conditions
## Display and poster typography
**Display and poster typography is where contemporary Thai type design is most visibly experimental — the site of variable-type work, expressive-type experimentation, type-as-image compositions, and the aggressive exploration of the loopless form.** The category draws a disproportionate share of international award recognition and has become one of the most internationally visible Thai graphic-design practices.
Conventions across strong display-type work:
- Custom or modified type that is inseparable from the specific poster or display context
- Variable-axis exploration — weight, width, optical size, italic, specific glyph variants
- Type-as-image compositions where typography carries the full conceptual weight
- Confident departure from traditional Thai letter-form conventions, often through loopless forms
For the loopless shift specifically, see [Loopless Thai is now the default](/blog/loopless-is-now-the-default/).
## The Thai type foundry ecosystem
**Thai typography in the wild is underpinned by an active foundry ecosystem: Cadson Demak (the dominant commercial foundry), Katatrad (display and expressive work), DB Type Foundry (heritage and traditional), Fontuni (contemporary display), and a growing number of independent designers publishing through foundries-as-platforms.** The combination of active domestic demand, strong custom-commission pipeline (major brands now commission custom Thai type as standard), and international visibility through platforms including Typotheque, Adobe Fonts, and Google Fonts has produced one of the healthiest national type-design ecosystems in Asia.
Foundries and active independents the gallery consistently draws from:
- Cadson Demak (Bangkok) — largest retail library; major custom commissions
- Katatrad (Bangkok) — display and expressive, significant BITS presence
- DB Type Foundry — heritage and traditional Thai typography
- Fontuni — contemporary display and text faces
- Independent Thai designers publishing through Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, and international distribution
## How this gallery is curated
**ThaiGraph's typography gallery focuses on typography in real-world context — type in use, in production, on walls, on packages, in books — rather than specimen sheets.** Inclusion is based on typographic craft, originality, and contribution to contemporary Thai typographic practice.
Submission criteria follow standard ThaiGraph rules: original work, Thai production or Thai designers, in-production or produced, with credit to designers, type designers, and studios visible. For packaging, brand identity, and poster work we list both the applying designer and (where different) the type designer or foundry.
## Go deeper
For the typographic theory and practice underlying this work, see the [Thai Typography learning hub](/learn/typography/) and [Loopless Thai is now the default](/blog/loopless-is-now-the-default/). For adjacent gallery work, see [Best Thai Poster Design](/inspiration/posters/) and [Best Thai Logo Design](/inspiration/logos/). For the designers producing this work, see the [Thai Designer Directory](/designers/).