The design of pure rolling cylindrical gears with circular arc tooth profile in the normal section is proposed based on the active design of meshing line equation. The transverse active tooth profiles of the gear set are established based on the circular arc tooth profiles in the normal section. The Hermite curve is used as the transition curve to smoothly connect the active tooth profile and the dedendum circle to enhance the bending strength. The whole tooth surfaces of the gears are formed by sweeping the entire transverse tooth profiles along pure rolling contact curves. The basic design parameters, equations of the tooth surfaces and mathematical model of gear drives are established for tooth contact analysis. The contact patterns are obtained without micro-geometry applied on the pinion tooth surface. The results of TCA verify the design idea of pure rolling meshing. The meshing performance and stress analysis compared with the pure rolling meshing gears with circular arc tooth profile in the transverse section will be researched in the future work.