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!

Building the collection...

more book covers!

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.

2,700 Indian fonts - wow!

Wowzers, another great Indian type catalog, from Modular Infotech - that claims to be the largest one available - and can be downloaded via .pdf specimens. A great resource to begin comparing and contrasting letterforms and to see what's available in the world of fonts. Some Hindi display fonts are seen above.

Also, check out this previous post for more type.

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!

Gurmukhi typography

Clicking through the script categories on the right, I realized that I have been neglecting Gurmukhi! It seems like it's one of the harder scripts to find online, though. So, here it is! My small Gurmukhi collection! There are some interesting hand-drawn display-type script samples from this Sikh heritage site, attributed to the late Dr. Channan Singh Chan. Two other examples are from here.

Hindi palm leaf manuscript

Wonderful samples of Devanagari script on palm leaf manuscripts! 1 2 3 4 Interesting non-connecting characters and some strange vowel maatras.
Hosted by Columbia University, where these resources were also linked: Resources for S and SE Asian Languages and Cultures, SARAI, and SAJA.

Sample of Hindi film poster type

A bunch of great chunky/decorative type from Bollywood posters of the past. Collected from the hotspot poster collection.

Hindi word shape play

I've returned to my huge folder of book covers from Pustak.org and found all of these covers with interesting word clusters! There's even a turtle!

Hail Mary Handwriting

Love 'em or hate 'em, Christian missionaries and scholars have left us with a wealth of language documentation. This archive contains hundreds of language samples - and to my delight - most are handwritten!! I'd love to get my hands on as much everyday, handwritten bits as possible - if anyone could point me towards more, I'd be eternally grateful.

looooopy

Found this on Flickr - Books photographed by a student who went to the University of Reading for type design! (Probably the same class as my type teacher Nicole Dotin!) I totally want to go there someday! If I win the lottery.

das rupaye

the many languages printed on Indian currency

flowing script

wispy type

swooshy type?

60s-ish script examples

Topless!

Okay, I guess it wasn't as hard as I thought to find more "topless" type. Here are some extreeeemely varied examples.

Devanagari "monoline script"

from Pustak.org

*I realize that all of my samples so far have been gritty low-res images. But the type is too cool not to post, darn it!