Huai

Huai and Huai Thai marks the first professional typeface release by Potch Auacherdkul and represents the culmination of research into the duality of influences between handwritten, vernacular Thai lettering and Latin typefaces. The result is a warm, expressive typeface that doesn’t abandon the human hands and the language that produced them.

With Thai script, there are two different terminal styles—the Loop terminal style, associated with the original forms of Thai glyphs; and the Loopless, which has evolved to best coordinate with Latin sans serif typefaces. In recent years, this Thai Loopless style has continued to influence and even change to become ‘more Latin.’ One would go so far as to define these heavily Latin-influenced typefaces as Thai Latinized. This curiosity with shifting influences, turns the idea around and explores what would happen if the vernacular Thai scripts actually influenced their Latin counterparts instead.

An Inversion of Thai Latinized is the result. The street signs of Bangkok, local vernacular writing, quick, fluid strokes… these influences form the DNA behind the Huai Thai typeface. Refining and systematizing those natural, handwritten strokes into a Thai typeface and then using those solutions to serve as the pioneer proportions behind the development of its Latin script companion was the product. Huai adopted the essence of these Thai glyphs into the Latin and uniquely embraced the contemporary writing system (and soul) of the Thai people in its letterforms.