In the Bangkok Post’s The Magazine, November 2014, Philip Cornwel-Smith discusses the complexities of typography in Thailand. The story includes interviews with Anuthin Wongsunkakon, Pracha Suveeranont, Roj Siam Ruay and some nice quotes from this blog. Download the full article Thaipography [ pdf] here.
Cornwel-Smith is a writer and journalist, whose bestselling book Very Thai celebrates the wonderful idiosyncrasies of Thai visual culture.
This post is written in response to some of the questions people asked me about Thai typestyles last week at ATypI in Barcelona. Here I’m exploring looped and loopless styles by analysing current typographic practices in the Thai press. Continue reading
This blog post has grown in the writing, as various emails, conversations and Twitter threads seemed to be pointing in a similar direction. For reasons we will explore, Thai script is often seen as an example of a writing system prone to Latinisation. Its looped and loopless styles are easy to interpret as traditional and Latinised, but does that interpretation stand up to critical scrutiny? Continue reading
A rather nasty ‘ten commandments of typography’ infographic prompted me to think about what might be more useful for designers needing to work with type. This quick runthrough aims to highlight the relevant issues and shed light on the considerations that can help you find answers. Continue reading
This is a really common question I’m asked, so I thought I’d write a few notes about why it’s not necessarily a central part of type design to speak a language. Continue reading
Recently, we were visited by Will Hill, ex-Reading student and now Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Anglia Ruskin University. His lecture touched upon something that’s been bothering me for some time… Continue reading
Week 8 was our second intensive practical week with Gerard, and with only two more weeks of term, it’s felt like time to really settle into a definite direction and concentrate fully on our typefaces. Continue reading
Gerard said something along the lines of the above back in July when I was studying the TDI course here. Back then, I understood it to mean that aesthetic fashions and art movements through the ages have governed the stylistic proclivities of type designers — as a general overarching principle rather than a traceable set of technological, political and national variables evidenced in every work of typography and type design. Modern Typography: An essay in critical history (Robin Kinross) certainly added a new depth to my understanding. Continue reading