Tiny Telugu and Tamil Type

Hi, all! I've recently uploaded some quick snapshots from bibles found at the Minneapolis Public Library. Both included some of the smallest Indic type I've seen so far, as well as some interesting biblical maps with hand-lettering! Here is the Telugu set, and here the Tamil set. Not sure if this is of any interest to anyone, but I thought I'd share! You also get to see my fingernails! What fun!

I've also posted some Bengali script diagrams in a similar style as the Gurmukhi one posted earlier!

Nice film title treatment: Abhijan (The Expedition)

Love this! I haven't seen the film, but hooray again for Satyajit Ray!

The multi-talented Satyajit Ray

A long while back, I added Panther Panchali to my netflix queue, as I had heard of it being the most critically acclaimed film to come out of India. Though I'm still waiting to see it.. I ended up catching The Darjeeling Limited in the meantime, which included music by Satyajit Ray. I was intruged and decided to do a little more digging. Little did I know...

"Satyajit Ray was a man of multiple talents. Not only did he write the screenplays for all his films and score the music for all but his first five films, he was also a prolific, best selling author and a consummate artist." This wonderful website, SatyajitRayWorld.com that takes a detailed look at his life and works.

All of you Bengali type fans should check out his poster work, book jacket designs, and type design (scroll to the middle of the page - some great ones there!) AMAZING!!!

Back from Japan!

Holy cow, I've returned! Sorry, blog readers! I've been in the middle of a big life transition that has taken all of my concentration and energy aaand also away on a 2-week trip to Japan to visit a dear friend who is studying Japanese!

WOW, Japan was very visually overwhelming! Especially for someone who wants to look at every bit of signage and printed matter in the country. I took about a year of Japanese way back when, so I was already familiar with Hiragana and Katakana, but had no knowledge of Kanji. I think it was the first time I really thought about what an enormously difficult task Chinese type designers must have. I thought that nothing could be tougher than trying to fit in all of the dips and curves of Sinhala - but I must say, imagine dealing with this. And then try to use this popular Chinese search engine, Shohu. (here's an image, for those without Chinese language support) Wow. Welcome to the web for the rest of the world! It also reminded me of this post at the Ministry of Type on the difficulties of creating electronics interfaces due to the complexity of such characters.

Phew! Anyway, I could go on and on. But what I have been meaning to get to was that I found a few bits of Indic type while I was over there! So here they are! Some beautiful Bengali at an Indian restaurant, some Siddham script (Bonji in Japan) at a Buddhist temple, and what I believe to be Urdu, found at a park! So there you are! It's fun for me to see two different Asian scripts on one sign. It makes me giddy!

So once again, sorry for my extremely long absence. I hope to keep adding to this blog though, so don't give up on coming back! :)

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.

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!

Bengali protesters and political posters

So this is slightly random - I just celebrated my birthday, which also happens to be "International Women's Day", according to my calendar. This year, I was finally curious enough to try to learn what that meant. Off to Wikipedia I went! It turns out that it was originally a day associated with the Socialist party, in which women workers in the newly industrialized world, were protesting for better working conditions. - Which might seem distant to we readers of design blogs, but of course is an issue of enormous importance in the developing world.

The image on the left, above, shows women of a trade union from Dhaka, Bangladesh protesting on International Women's Day, holding amazingly beautiful, powerful signs. Equally powerful are the red and black Communist Party signs on the right, found in Kolkata. See many more amazing images posted by Wikimedia contributor, Soman.

P.S. Thanks again to Prof. Erik Brandt at Geotypografika for spreadin' the Hindi Rinny word! Shukriya!

Evolution of Bengali script

"The modern script was formalized in 1778 when it was first typeset by Charles Wilkins. ...

Clusters of consonants are represented by different and sometimes quite irregular characters; thus, learning to read the script is complicated by the sheer size of the full set of characters and character combinations, numbering about 500. While efforts at standardizing the script for the Bengali language continue in such notable centers as the Bangla Academies (unaffiliated) at Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Kolkata (West Bengal, India), it is still not quite uniform as yet, as many people continue to use various archaic forms of letters, resulting in concurrent forms for the same sounds. Among the various regional variations within this script, only the Assamese and Bengali variations exist today in the formalized system.

It seems likely that the standardization of the script will be greatly influenced by the need to typeset it on computers. The large alphabet can be represented, with a great deal of ingenuity, within the ASCII character set, omitting certain irregular conjuncts. Work has been underway since around 2001 to develop Unicode fonts, and it seems likely that it will split into two variants, traditional and modern." - Wikipedia article on Bengali Script

The image above and some more info are located here.

world scripts goldmine

phew!! This scripture site has loads of hundred-year-old bible pages in native languages from all over the world. It's so great to see actual old printed specimens of these languages! I think I saved about 60 pictures from that site. Check it out, for real. (above are Nepali, Bengali, and Tamil)

languages!

Marathi | Gujarati
Kannada | Tamil
Telugu | Malayam
Urdu | Bengali

from peta-india posters

Bengali signs

jackpot!!!!!

YESSSSS
check it out!!!!!
TONS of the fonts I've seen on the book covers.
FINALLY I've found a significant collection of fonties!!!!
http://www.cdac.in/html/gist/down/typeface.asp

das rupaye

the many languages printed on Indian currency

Writing systems map

From UPenn