Perso-Arabic workshop at MCAD

Above, image from a Perso-Arabic workshop hosted by Erik Brandt and Leland Hill at my alma mater. Students photographed, drew, and manipulated characters to create some really interesting compositions! Check out the Geotypografika flickr set for more! I'm so very jealous.

Also please check out new friend Omid Hamooni's calligraphic work.

And, as always, sorry readers, for my slowness.

Kannada and Malayalam images

Nothing too amazing to report today, but I'm going to try to get in the habit of more frequent posts, even if they are simple like this! Sound good, readers?

I've just added some dark, hastily taken photos of Kannada and Malayalam type and lettering from the few books I've been able to find on the subject during recent library visits. If you click on "all sizes", there are much larger - and hopefully slightly helpful - images. So there you go! :)

Dan and Paul's Devanagari MATD type creations!

Remember that time a crazy girl from Minnesota started a South Asian type blog and then only posted 4 times in 3 months? Yeah, I do too. And it was so frustrating!!! Hopefully I can be forgiven though, before I'm declared dead...

Feast your eyes on some beautiful new typefaces created by the dedicated, talented U of Reading MATD students Dan Reynolds and Paul Hunt!!! They were kind enough to send me samples of their typefaces, which I am still fine-toothed-combing-over, trying to learn from their genius! Hee hee.

Dan's Martel typeface, features both Devanagari and Latin characters (with a plethora of diacritical marks for use with other European languages!) and was designed to live up to the great expectations of small-print newspaper design, including multiple weights and condensed characters. He paid close attention to stroke thickness and character height in each script in order to harmonize the over-all text color, making a seamless language integration! Ahhh!

I would describe Paul's Latin Grandia and Devanagari Gandhara typefaces as beautifully funky-chunky. He describes them as "Simple character construction with calligraphic flair." I'm not too great at writing. But bravo to him! His generous, squarish counters and bold serifs make for clear and distinct forms and beautiful negative space! He also created an generous library of beautiful conjuct characters! Ahhh again!

Anyway, please visit the sites of these two kind fellows - I'm sure they would love to talk type with anyone who is willing, and would love feedback and insight from regular Devanagari font users!!

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Also, if any of you dear readers have a relevant personal site and wish for it to be included in my new list of "Type Friends" links on the right-hand side of the page, I'll gladly link to you! Please send me an email with your site!! I promise to be a better blog friend from now on.

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! :)

Collection of Pakistani calligraphy

Just stumbled upon Calligraphy Islamic, which has lots of hidden gems! Above is an image from this interesting page, Muraqqa-e-Alif Laam Mim , which looks to be scans of a lettering guide by a calligrapher named Jacobus Michaeil. Also click on the Pakistani Calligraphers page for other interesting samples.

"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!!!

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.

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!

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.

Strange Devanagari conjuncts

I don't have enough knowledge of Hindi or Sanskrit to be able to explain all of these strange conjunct forms, but they sure are interesting to look at!! "CallingTo", a flickr user, has uploaded a bunch of scans of strange letterforms. Check them out! I should probably hunt this fellow down to learn more!

And if anyone can make it, in a few hours, you should check out Typography Day 2008. I'm on the wrong continent. ... er... sub-continent? Also, if anyone wants to take over my job, but split my salary so that I can do this full-time, let me know. Thanks!

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.

An Approach to Type Design and P.K. Ghosh

An Approach to Type Design and Text Composition in Indian Scripts, by P.K. Ghosh - an amazing document, available in .pdf format. Answers a lot of questions about the history of Devanagari printing, the formation of the letterforms, and the future of font development. Also, you can see on the right, additional examples of how northern scripts were derived from flat-tipped pens, and the southern scripts derived from pointed/round-tipped pens.

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.

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.

Sinhalese palm-leaf manuscripts

In order to better understand the origins of the letterforms of South Asian scripts, I've been searching for the earliest writings and printing samples I can find. In contrast to the calligraphic forms of handwritten Sanskrit, the Dravidian scripts of South South Asia are distinctively curved and don't seem to have been originally created by same writing implement. So I was delighted to find a GREAT article about the creation of palm-leaf manuscripts - and how Sinhalese was written onto the leaves!

" The scribe, usually a monk or a scholar, uses a stylus for writing. The scribe places the leaf strip on the palm of hand, as it is easier to gauge the pressure needed for writing. The letters are written from left to right and the scribe uses the parallel lines of the veins of the leaf to guide him to write straight."

"The letters etched with the stylus are colourless and therefore difficult to read. So it has to be ‘inked’ in a special manner. ... Leaf surface is rubbed with a wad of soft cotton cloth dipped in the resinous oil and ... with charcoal. ... The letters on the palm leaf then appears dark black and the words are distinct and easy to read."

I assume that using more curved forms was the best way to prevent the leaf from cracking along the veins. I'll dig into this further!

Long before papermaking made its journey to India, religious and scientific texts were written on these amazing portable manuscripts. I'm sure you'll see many more here as I begin to track down the origins of other scripts!

Images and other links here!

Type designs from MA students at the University of Reading

I love how the type design community is small enough that almost everyone is connected in some way! So, I was looking through flickr images the other day and I found photos from a group of students who were students at the University of Reading MA in type design. - I clicked through some links, and ultimately found specimens of the typefaces they designed. And lo and behold, my teacher Nicole Dotin was in their class! And, to make things even dandier, three of the students had designed typefaces that had accompanying South Asian faces!!!

Above is Surat, a Gujarati design by David Brezina.
Vesper, a Devanagari typeface by Rob Keller.
and Frida, a Tamil typeface by Fernando de Mello Vargas.

Absolutely beauuutiful designs! Download the pdfs to get a closer look!
Also check out the previous class - someone made an Arabic face, another chose Tibetan!