How to design arrows<br>– Pangram Pangram Foundry

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Pangram Pangram FoundryPangram Pangram

How to design arrows

An in-depth conversation with PP best and brightest type designers on how to nail the design of typography’s more identifiable (but easily ill-designed) glyph.

Type Design

June 17, 2026

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We’ve spoken super in-depth to Andrea Biggio, Caio Kondo, Francesca Bolognini and Valerio Monopoli about designing a single set of glyphs ⇢ one that’s as important ⇡ and (literally) iconic ⇡ as it is easy to mess up ↯ when designing it cohesively with your font. Arrows!

You know and love them, we certainly do. Arrows! Typographic arrow glyphs, to be precise. What’s really remarkable about arrows, like very very few symbols, they are truly universally recognised. You could go anywhere on Earth and set up a sign with an arrow on it and people will know that you mean to point them in a specific direction. “ Arrows have been guiding human behaviour, desires and decisions for millennia, long before typography existed,” Pangram Pangram’s Andrea Biggio tells us.

In fact, to prove as much, the oldest ever arrow to have been found was used to point the way to a brothel. Arrows also occupy a significant place in visual culture, both in terms of wayfinding (obviously) but also within identities too, just look at Glasgow Airport’s original logo, which went on to inspire Off White (I use inspire generously, you could argue it was simply stolen). There are also a lot more arrows than you may think, just look at the Unicode chart if you don’t believe us.

The iconic logo (maybe the best ever???) from Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir

Yeah, it’s gotta be one of the best?

Use of arrows in Britain’s National Rail identity

Unicode Supplemental Arrows

Arrow certainly appear simple – a line with a pointed end – however, when it comes to their inclusion within an entire typographic systemic, perhaps it’s not an uncomplicated as it seems. “Arrows are interesting because they act as a kind of mirror for the typeface,” Andrea says, “if you can design them coherently, it means the design has developed enough of an identity to extend beyond the alphabet.” As such, different designers tend to design arrows at different stages of the process in designing a font.

For Andrea, he draws them somewhere in the middle, as he says, “early enough to shape the design’s direction, but not before the fundamental traits of the alphabet are clearly defined.” For others in Pangram Pangram’s design team, like Francesca Bolognini or Caio Kondo, it comes much later in the game when the tone of the typefaces is mostly established. “That gives me a clearer framework to respond to,” Caio explains, “so the arrows feel consistent with the rest of the design rather than arbitrary.”

Francesca details arrows often are tackled at later stages because their design is derived from the logic flows of the existing glyphs – basing their form on decisions that are already made, such as optical feel, terminal style or stroke weight. “The exception is when arrows are conceptually central from the start,” Francesca adds, “as in wayfinding typefaces or brand-driven families where they're a core identity element.” At this stage, arrows are coordinated alongside letterforms rather than being subordinate to them.

PP Räder’s design was directly informed by the visual aesthetics of way-finding and arrows.

It stands as a beautiful example of how the typefaces concept directly feeds into the design of its arrows.

The typeface that the arrows are designed for directly informs how complex they are to design, as Valerio Monopoli says, “sometimes their shape can be derived intuitively from the other characters in the font, and sometimes they require special attention and unique graphic solutions,” ultimately being neither particularly easy nor overly complex to design.

“The most challenging part is maintaining consistent stroke weight across different directions,” Caio details, “while still respecting typographic conventions,” such as the horizontal and diagonal elements which can often require optical adjustments to feel balanced amongst vertical strokes. “The more expressive or sophisticated the typeface, the more that detail and character carries through into the arrows too,” Andrea adds, “in that sense they’re not really a special case, they just reflect the overall level of refinement of the font.”

That means that the typographic genre makes a big impact on its complexity, whereby a straightforward, geometric grotesque could be rather simple, and a complex display serif may occupy the more labyrinthine end of the spectrum. “The arrow needs to absorb a much richer visual language while still functioning clearly as a symbol,” Francesca, importantly, notes, speaking to the more complex side of designing arrows.

In speaking to PP’s incredibly talented team, they all stress that, when...