What goes into the making of an award-winning font

It takes all kinds to make the world, they say. And just as damsels and great danes exude a certain kind of a personality, so do typefaces. Think Arial, Comic sans, Helvetica, Palatino, Trebuchet and ZapfChancery. It's easy to imagine Comic sans as a whimsical child and Arial as a stern boss, but ever spared a thought for an Indian font? What is the Times New Roman equivalent for the Devnagari script? Or which font does one fall back on to type the prime minister's name in Bengali? And can there be a font which instantly brings to mind Lalbaugcha Raja?

While we are spoilt for choice given the dozens of type designs to choose from for Latin scripts, there aren't half as many options for Indian languages. India has 22 constitutionally-recognised languages across 11 scripts. But the pool of designers dedicated to creating fonts for Indian languages, pioneered by such stalwarts as Prof RK Joshi and Prof Mahendra Patel, remains limited. It is to set this right that, in 2013, type designers Sarang Kulkarni, Girish Dalvi and Noopur Datye co-founded Ek Type, an open, collaborative platform to develop Indic fonts. “The word for one in all Indian languages, except for the four south Indian languages, is similar to ek,” says Kulkarni. “We like that notion. It's one, or ek, platform where we make fonts for all Indian languages.”

Kulkarni, who graduated from Sir JJ Institute of Applied Arts in 2002 and worked for two years under Joshi, believes that designing types is akin to providing raw materials to designers, printers and publishers. “If the raw material is not of a good quality, the end product or service will not reflect good design,” he says. “This is why we decided that come what may and however long it takes, we'll ensure that our fonts are not lacking. Our intention is to make good quality fonts and make them accessible, which is why they are all free. Free as in free to use (mufta) and free to co-create (mukta).”

Designing an Indic typeface is more than writing all of the language's vowels and consonants, but also accommodating its matras and accents. It's also about paying attention to the language's nuances. Citing an example, Kulkarni says that south Indian scripts have a lot of joineries that go below the baseline (on screen, in print and elsewhere), which would make them bottom heavy when compared to corresponding letters in Latin, resulting in a difference in line spacing. “Our languages are complex. But we stick to the script's visual grammar,” he says. “We don't design a font to match it with Latin, we design the font to match the script. Even if it makes our task that much more challenging or time-consuming unlike others who may skip entire characters or matras.”

Type design then becomes a near inter-disciplinary effort involving technological know-how, knowledge of script and design aesthetic. Since 2013, Ek Type's designers and collaborators have designed four scripts — Devanagari, Latin, Tamil and Gujarati — which allow fonts to be created in multiple languages. “For instance, Devanagari script is used to type in Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, Nepalese and Sanskrit,” explains Kulkarni. 

When the collective decided to open source the scripts to enable designers, students and anyone else interested in type design to take the source files and collaborate or develop new fonts, they changed the name to Mukta.

“We want our designers to be free. Rather than coding, which can slow them down, we want them to focus solely on design.”