OA-Satapud — Thai/Latin Typeface

Where the letters come from

Thai architectural drawing has its own lettering tradition — a disciplined, slightly compressed hand taught in drafting rooms and passed between generations of students who never think of it as type. It is one of the few Thai letterforms with a genuinely technical origin.

OA-Satapud takes that hand as its source and asks what it becomes when it is made systematic: consistent stroke weight, resolved joints, a stable rhythm across a full character set, and a Latin companion drawn to the same logic rather than borrowed from elsewhere.

Thai and Latin as one drawing problem

The hard part of a bilingual typeface is not covering both scripts; it is making them agree. Thai carries loops, ascending and descending marks, and a much denser vertical stack than Latin does. Matching them by height alone produces a Latin that looks starved next to its Thai.

The translation here was made at the level of stroke logic rather than metrics: both scripts are drawn from the same instrument at the same speed, and the proportions follow from that shared constraint.

Recognition

The typeface won the Creative Design Award (CDA) 2022 in New Media Design and was exhibited at Chiang Mai Design Week 2022 and the SILPA Creative Works Exhibition — an exhibited and awarded creative work, and the seed of the type design track that continues in OA-Reloyd.