Text typefaces are essential for serious typography. Yet there is an absence of such typefaces in most Indic scripts. And when it comes to typefaces that work well in multi-script environments, the scarcity is even more pronounced.
Skolar’s new complement aims to fill this gap for Devanagari – one of the major scripts of India. The foremost consideration was to create a design suited to Devanagari and its particularities, and not to uncritically borrow formal principles from one writing system to another. The objective was to create a versatile type family that would work smoothly for complex typographic purposes and yet remain distinctive and energetic in larger sizes.
Skolar by David Březina is an award-winning text serif, originally designed with scholarly and multilingual publications in mind. Primarily intended as a robust, energetic text typeface, Skolar addresses the needs of serious typography. At the same time it furnishes the designer with the hallmark versatility of the family in display sizes, fitting the demands of corporate design.The family supports over 165 languages using Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and, most recently, Devanagari scripts. Coming next, Skolar Gujarati is in the final stages of development.
Skolar Devanagari, is the first from a series of Indian typefaces Rosetta Type Foundry plans to release in the next 12 months. The fonts support Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, along with a wide range of regional languages that use the Devanagari script.
The typeface was designed and engineered by two professional type designers, Vaibhav Singh and David Březina, both of whom have experience with designing for Indian writing systems. Importantly, they undertook substantial research in the historical developments and current situation of the Devanagari and Gujarati letterforms. Both have previously written dissertations on these subjects during their postgraduate studies.
The original brief for Skolar was adhered to, and the Devanagari complement also provides extensive support for scholarly and multi-lingual publications, covering a wide range of possibilities – complex Sanskrit can be set with it as readily as regional languages; contemporary mixed-language messages as harmoniously as academic treatises.
Skolar Devanagari also attempts to provide alternative solutions to the legacy of metal-type and its shortcomings. Limitations arising from the physical nature of metal-type made many compromised typographic practices prevalent. These are still carried on in digital fonts today although they are not relevant given the advanced OpenType capabilities. Skolar Devanagari presents a reevaluated attempt at a more well-considered solution with contextual substitutions and appropriate mark positioning.
Figure above: Mark positioning in various metal typesetting environments (top to bottom: handsetting, Monotype, Linotype).
Figure above: The logic of Anusvara placement in Skolar Devanagari: if the letter has ‘width’, i.e. has two strokes touching the headline, then the Anusvara is optically centred over the width of the letter.
The typeface provides an extensive range of conjuncts and adopts a rational approach to letter-combinations. It covers almost all meaningful bi-consonantal conjuncts and frequent tri-consonantal and quadri-consonantal conjuncts with a view to provide for the unexpected or novel combinations often encountered in scholarly texts as well as in day-to-day transliterated words.
All in all, the typeface has been optimized for more than 1500 basic syllables, which are either precomposed or built from half forms. These basic syllables can be further modified by means of matras (aka vowel marks) and other marks (reph, rakar, anusvara, nukta, candrabindu, …). All of the meaningful combinations are designed and engineered to avoid ungainly collisions.
Production
The complex engineering work is an integral part of the design for most of the Indic scripts. Skolar Devanagari fonts were developed in the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO) instead of the more commonly used MS VOLT workflow. Skolar Devanagari is apparently the first Devanagari font built this way. Thanks to custom macros for syllabic analysis in FontLab and Glyphs the sheer amount of syllables and mark combinations could be tackled precisely. Using the new tools streamlined the whole process and allowed for rapid prototyping, systematic issue-tracking and prompt updates.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their gratitude to Fiona Ross who taught both of them and commented on the design in the early stages, to Adobe Type team (namely Paul Hunt and Miguel Sousa) who provided impeccable support during the production in AFDKO, to Georg Seifert for help with some of the custom macros, and to Rosetta’s intern Ami Shah for careful testing of the beta fonts.
Skolar Devanagari won the first prize in the Indic text typeface category at Granshan 2012 competition.
About
David Březina is a Czech type designer and typographer, writer, lecturer, the impresario of TypeTalks, and co-founder of the Rosetta type foundry. He got Masters degrees in Informatics (Masaryk University, Brno) and Typeface Design (University of Reading, UK). From 2004 to 2007 he also ran his own design studio, with projects in graphic, web, and interface design. He has been working as an associate with Tiro Typeworks and giving various type workshops around Europe.
His interest in the world’s writing systems and multilingual typeface design and typography manifests in the award-winning type family Skolar. So far, he has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Gujarati, Devanagari, and various extensions of Latin.
Vaibhav Singh is an independent typographer and type designer from India. He received a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Pune and a master’s in Visual Communication from IDC, IIT Bombay. He was a recipient of the Felix scholarship for the duration of his MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, from which he graduated with distinction in 2011.
He has worked as a typographer, graphic and exhibition designer in Bombay/Delhi and Panjim and is presently based in Reading, where in addition to developing typefaces, he has been researching aspects of the typography of Devanagari and its implications for print cultures in India.
VSUAL would like to thank David for sending in this article. Co-founded by him, José Scaglione and Veronika Burian, Rosetta, an independent foundry has a strong focus on multi-script typography. The foundry has been promoting research and knowledge in the field of typography and also ventures in world-scripts type design.
One of the main objectives of the foundry is to create a retail library of high-quality typefaces that are respectful of the traditions and cultural background behind each of the supported scripts. Rosetta actively promotes team-work and collaboration between designers, consultants and language specialists. To date we support pan-European Latin, Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic for Slavic languages as well as for many Asian languages. The addition of type families for Indian scripts will come soon.
You can find out more about the foundry and see their work here.
&size;&url;&title;&newwindow;&
