"Strange Conjuncts" type resurfaces!

Holy smokes. I could barely believe my eyes! I opened one of the few South Asian language books at the Minneapolis Public Library, A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language - and lo and behold, our favorite "strange conjuncts" mystery type shows up! So now my dears, feast your eyes on the beautiful forms! If anyone wants larger scans, or scans of all of the conjuncts, shoot me an email. AMAZING!!!

Interesting, ribbon-like Urdu poetry

Calligraphy by Zoya Zaidi. These make me want to animate some 3-dimensional ribbons floating to create these words! Wowee!

More cool Tibetan calligraphy - Tashi Mannox

View the Tashi Mannox gallery here!

very old Tamil type

"One of the oldest printed samples of a Tamil foundry type in Europe."

* Image by Fernando de Mello Vargas, U of Reading graduate and designer of the award-winning Tamil typeface, Frida

See more here. I love piggybacking off of the University of Reading type design students! Huzzah!

Sirensongs' images from Nepal

Above are images from Sirensongs' flickr collection, which includes loads of colorful images from her travels throughout South Asia. At the moment, she is located in Nepal, where elections have just been held in which the Maoist party won a majority of votes, ensuring the end of the Nepalese monarchy. She has also witnessed firsthand the clash between the local authorities and pro-Tibetan protesters. Her blog, Feringhee: The India Diaries is a really great resource and one of my favorite blogs. Check it out!

P.S. Star Trek fans - yes, the Ferengi got their name from the Arabic/Persian/Urdu term meaning European traders/foreigners/Westerners.

FontStruct updates...

Hi. If anyone out there has started working on any Indic scripts in FontStruct - lemme know! I'd love to find out what "scale" you're using, in order to leave room for vowel maatras etc. I had just spent a bunch of time starting this alphabet, but I think I made it too large on the grid. Sigh. Maybe I'll just make designs in illustrator!

Building the collection...

more book covers!

Amazing Tibetan calligraphy by Nathanael Archer

Wow. You must check out the calligraphy work of Nathanael Archer. The finished pieces , doodles, and sketches are equally inspiring!

Bengali handwriting of Rabindranath Tagore

Here is a peek at the handwriting of the famous Bengali poet, artist, composer, novelist, and Nobel prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore. Read more of the above poem, Fireflies, here. Some additional samples of his writing can be found here. And more of his handwriting/doodles here. I especially like this one.

Indic fonts for Indica

Another cop-out posting on my part... but I've found a few more type samples at Summit India, a company that produced Indica, "The first implementation of Indian languages on MS Windows™ and Apple Macintosh in India, Indica is used by all major newspapers, magazines and other publishers across the country and is considered the leading Indian languages software in the world."

More scripture images

Sorry again folks, I'm going through a rough time right now and haven't been able to put any time into this endeavor. Hopefully things will change soon, though. In the meantime, here are some more images from that scripture site. This time, Panjabi, Oriya, Telugu, and Urdu.

Free online font editor - that allows Indic Scripts!

Sorry to anyone who regularly stops here for the latest and greatest tidbits of Indic script goodness - I haven't posted in a while and have left you starving for type! (A week is a long time in internet-time.)

Luckily, I have a real cool piece of news! Floating around the design "blogosphere" this morning was a new free, online font editor from FontShop called "FontStruct". Users can rate, share, and download their font creations! (And they're YOURS, under Creative Commons licensing.) But the best part, and most relevant to this blog, is that they offer non-latin character sets!!!

Arabic, Devenagari [sic], Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, and Sinhala are all options! I don't know much else about it yet, as I will spend my evening tinkering with it, but I'm sure it'll be my new favorite toy! Woohoo!