“HOW DO YOU TRANSLATE A COMPANY’S IDENTITY INTO A VISUAL REFERENCE?” MEET THAILAND’S LEADING MADE-TO-MEASURE TYPEFACE DESIGNER

Here’s a trivia stumper for your next happy hour pub quiz: What’s the most popular font being used these days on billboard advertisements along the BTS Skytrain route? The answer:

“DB Ozone.” The question will be a guaranteed head- scratcher, but before you ask it, you might want to look over your shoulder and make sure the guy on the opposite page isn’t in the room. Because he’ll know the answer for sure. He’s Anuthin Wongsunkakon, the founder and creative director of Cadson Demak, a local type foundry, and he can see the world through typefaces.

“When you go up and down the BTS line, you see the same typeface over and over,” he says. “I see 10 different products using the same typeface. I’m not knocking the font for being popular, but to me, it’s funny. I mean, how can one typeface serve every voice? How can your company be unique if you use the same typeface as your competitor?”

It was precisely this question, asked in Thailand for the first time in the late 1990s, that led to one of the country’s biggest-ever shifts in the way that companies advertise and market their services. Just 15 years ago, phone carriers like AIS, Dtac and TrueMove, for instance, all used identical typefaces, differentiating their brands only by their colour schemes and logos.

“In Thailand in those days, the word type foundry was unheard of,” Anuthin recalls. “Everybody knew what a font was, but ‘font’ always meant ‘free.’”

Around that time, Anuthin returned to Thailand after completing his master’s degree at the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York City. As a freelance type designer in America, he had developed several retail and custom fonts, the most successful of which he sold to Choice Hotels, the holding corporation for popular hotel brands like Comfort Inn and Sleep Inn.

AIS, through a local advertising agency, had heard about Anuthin’s work abroad, and the company approached him, saying, “We need our own voice.” Anuthin proceeded to create one of Thailand’s first custom digital typefaces. “Once AIS got their own voice,” he says, “other companies saw the benefits and they all had to follow suit.”

Today, business at Cadson Demak, which was officially born in 2002, is booming. Persistent hammering and the whir of electric saws punctuated our interview. This year, the company will more than double its existing office space. They regularly host on-site design workshops, while Anuthin also teaches introductory typography courses at Chulalongkorn University.

The name Cadson Demak – and, curiously, the modern font on the company’s business cards – evokes a sleek Scandinavian minimalism, à la IKEA, when in fact, when read as a Thai transliteration, the name roughly means “best selection.” Anuthin says he enjoys being asked about the origins of the company’s name. Among the local companies he counts as custom font clients are Thai Beverage (Chang Beer), CAT Telecom and CPAC (the cement company). Anuthin also has created custom typefaces for local versions of international magazines and media, including Wallpaper, MTV and Men’s Health, among others.

For companies with an established global identity, like Nokia for instance, the job of local type foundries is relatively straightforward. When Nokia wanted its own Thai font, Cadson Demak simply translated the look and feel of the existing typeface into a local voice. “You can’t have different worlds where there’s a separate Nokia Thailand and Nokia Finland,” he explains.

The process becomes more complicated when brands must start from scratch. For these clients, Cadson Demak works with branding companies, ad agencies and corporate strategists to envision what a brand should look like. “It’s a hard question,” Anuthin says. “How do you translate a company’s identity into a visual reference?”

Cadson Demak also works with Thai brands seeking to connect with global audiences. These companies require fonts in languages as diverse as Croatian and Vietnamese.

“If it’s Hangkul (Korean) or Japanese, then it’s a different world from Latin-based typefaces,” Anuthin says. “For these, or Chinese, you pretty much have to know the language. Just to design it isn’t a problem, but you need to know if it would be readable to the native eye.”

Besides Anuthin, Cadson Demak also employs three full-time type designers, one type director and one technician, whose role is basically to “stress test” the new fonts to make sure they stay consistent regardless of size, zoom-view or operating platform.

“With print media, it didn’t matter if a font appeared crooked at a certain size, as long as it looked okay when you printed it,” Anuthin says. “Those days are gone. The new frontier is all about iPads and those kinds of devices. Fonts must look perfect on every type of screen.”

Anuthin adds that although he focuses mostly on typography, he doesn’t want to “lock my reality to typography. Everybody thinks you only deal with type, but that’s not true. It’s part of graphic design, and people should perceive it as part of graphic design.”

So what sets his company apart from its competitors?

“We don’t really have – I don’t want to say no competitors – but no direct competitors,” Anuthin says. “Some other companies offer retail fonts, so you can buy the stuff they’ve already made. What makes Cadson Demak different is that we actually create something specifically to fit your business. Think of it this way: You go to the Gap, and you can buy what the Gap offers. We’re like a custom-tailor.”