The first of our Myanmar fonts with extended language support, the brief for this project was to create a family of modulated fonts that would harmonise with the Noto Serif Latin design while working as a companion to the existing Noto Sans Myanmar family.

Noto Serif Myanmar was conceived as a typeface for display text such as newspaper titles and document headings. It draws on some of the traditional modulated styles of Burmese script, where the weight falls on the horizontals and strokes thicken towards the baseline and x-height. This style was chosen as it is commonly used for display work such as titling and signage in Burma, where we found expressions of this idiom in old metal type (Stephen Austin’s Burmese Bold from 1958, for example), in Burmese newspapers from the mid-20th century, and in contemporary shop signs and road signs in Burma.

Those traditional expressions of the script can be rather ornate and decorative and though Noto Serif Myanmar draws on those, it is a fresh interpretation of this genre, not old-fashioned or over-mannered. Instead, it prioritises clarity that performs at sizes large and small.

Legendary linguist John Okell reviewed the work in progress and offered feedback, to catch any problems in the design and suggest improvements.

Noto Serif Myanmar is available for free download from Google Fonts.