Jabbar— A Hand Painted Gujarati Typeface

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Jabbar

A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography Studio Three — 10 weeks Akash Raj Halankar PGDPG (Graphic Design) 2010 Guide: Tarun Deep Girdher

httphandpaintedtype-gujarati. blogspot.com 1

Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission of the copyright holder. © 2012 Akash Raj Halankar Set in ITC Officina and Today Sans

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

A type design project by Akash Raj Halankar 4th Semester PGDPG (Graphic Design) 2010 Guided by Tarun Deep Girdher Studio Three - 10 weeks http://handpaintedtype-gujarati.blogspot.com

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

“A Typeface is the Formal Manifestation of the Authors Voice�.

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Index

Motivation Handpainted type project How it works?

Objective Process

6 7 8 10 10

Gujarati Unicode Learning the Script Calligraphy Categorization Painters Redefined Brief

13 14 15 16 18 20 21

Documenting Existing HPT Form & Visual Representation Visual Grammar Grid Structure Vectorizing Selecting Letterforms Design Development

22 24 32 33 34 36 38

Naming the type Final Character Set Sentence Effects References

45 46 47 48 52

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Motivation

Since Typography Day 2011, held at NID, I was fascinated by typography and type design. Hanif Kureshi one of the speakers in the conference, in his presentation said that he was looking for people to work with for handpaintedtype.com I was also fascinated by the idea of preserving the local street painter art, so that the local painters would benefit from this project and their art would not die out. Also, the type of result in Type Design that had been done before this same subject, were of my liking and I would love to go into the complexities of type design.

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.�

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Hand Painted Type Project

Hand painted Type is a project that is dedicated to preserving the typographic practice of street painters around India. These painters, with the advent of local DTP (Desktop Publishers) shops, are rapidly going out of business with many of them switching to the quicker, cheaper but uglier vinyls. Many painters have given up their practice altogether. The distinctive hand painted signs of India are rapidly being superseded by digital alternatives. HandpaintedType is a project dedicated to preserving the work of those who create them and finding new uses for it

Among the photos of almost every tourist to India will be shots of the handpainted signs for shops and other businesses that, alongside elaborately decorated lorries (‘horn please’) and gloriously decaying palaces make up so much of the stereotypical visual vernacular of the country. But those signs will shortly be a thing of the past, as will the artists who paint them. Digital printing is taking over, with many Indian businesses swapping their distinctive frontages for the worst that a (pirated) copy of Corel Paint in the hands of an untrained, underpaid and overworked DTP operator can conjure.

In order to preserve the work of his country’s street painters and give them an alternative source of income, Hanif Kureshi (who by day is a creative director at Wieden + Kennedy in New Delhi) has set up the HandpaintedType project.

Handpainted Type is a collaborative project. HPT has joined hands with Sarang Kulkarni of WhiteCrow to convert fonts on digital platform.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

How it works?

Because most of the fonts in the Painter series are multi-coloured, they will in effect be digital versions of the once popular Chromatic Type. The style was popular among wood block printers who produced fonts in two components, so each component has its own colour. Instead of different weights, the typefaces will feature versions that include Shadow and Highlights.

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First after explaining the nature of the project and the characters he/she will need to ask the painter to make a cloth sized 3ft x 8ft. (Usually, the banner cloth comes in 3 ft high roll) Painters may use any colour of choice in his signature style. Also try and ensure that the letter height is the same. The width can vary.

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Hand painted type works in layers. All the layers are traced separately, while vectorizing the type.

The typeface is divided into: 1.) base form 2.) effect 3.) motif (optional) When all of these layers are superimposed on each other, the typeface looks complete.

PAINTER UMESH PAINTER UMESH PAINTER UMESH PAINTER UMESH PAINTER UMESH PAINTER UMESH

Painter Umesh — 1

Painter Umesh — 2

Painter Umesh — 3

Painter Umesh — 4

Painter Umesh Complete

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Objective

Developing a Gujarati typeface from a handpainted banner, containing the Basic characters.

Process

Understanding the Gujarati language Learning how to write Gujarati script

The conjuncts won’t be designed in this character set.

Case Studies: Analyzing existing types

This typeface would be a Display type face i.e; the typeface would be used at a size of 30pt. or larger.

Case Study: Hand painters Analyzing existing examples of Hand Painted type in the City Understanding the root letter forms Categorizing the script according to the forms and proportions Preliminary sketches Finalizing a visual language Designing on a digital platform

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

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A scanned page of Akshar Ankan sent to me by Kalpesh Gosavi, my batchmate and a calligrapher himself. This page featured gujarati letter forms designed by Mr. Dattatrya Padekar. The book Akshar Ankan was conceptulized and designed by Prof. Santosh Kshirsagar from Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art and now a PhD student of IIT - Bombay (IDC)

Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Gujarati

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from a language called Old Gujarati(1100 - 1500 AD) which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages. It is native to the Indian state of Gujarat, and is its chief language.

There are about 65.5 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, making it the 26th most spoken native language in the world. Gujarati is one of the twentytwo official languages and fourteen regional languages of India. It is officially recognized in the state of Gujarat, India.

Gujarati script is descended from Brahmi and is part of the Brahmic family. The Gujarati script was adapted from the Devanagari script to write the Gujarati language. The earliest known document in the Gujarati script is a handwritten manuscript dating

Stem

Eye

from 1592, and the script first appeared in print in a 1797 advertisement. Until the 19th century it was used mainly for writing letters and keeping accounts, while the Devanagari script was used for literature and academic writings. It is also known as the saraphi (banker’s), vaniasai(merchant’s) or mahajani (trader’s) script.

The Gujarati Script is like all Nagari writing systems is strictly speaking an abugida rather than an alphabet, is used to write the Gujarati and Kutchi languages. It is a variant of Devanagari script differentiated by the loss of the characteristic horizontal line running above the letters and by a small number of modifications in the remaining characters.

With a few additional characters, added for this purpose, the Gujarati script is also often used to write Sanskrit and Hindi. Gujarati numerical digits are also different from their Devanagari counterparts.

Ascender

Counter Space

Capline X Height

Meanline Baseline

Extender

Descender

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Unicode

Unicode is an international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts, by which each letter, digit, or symbol is assigned a unique numeric value that applies across different platforms and programmes.

When designing a typeface, it is mandatory to follow the unicode standards, so that the type may be used across platforms.

Gujarati script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0. Unicode block for Gujarati is U+0A80–U+0AFF. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Learning the Script

I had a very interesting conversation with Amelie Bonet, when she had come down to NID for a Type design workshop. Amélie is a type designer from Dalton Maag, UK. She told me that there are two ways in approaching a script: 1) If you can read the script, then you find it a little easier to derive it, cause at the back of your mind, you always read it while designing.

2) If you can not read the script, then you consider each letterform as a form. You need to visually train yourself to explore this possibility as it becomes a little difficult to design something that you cannot understand.

I started learning to write Gujarati with the help of Navneet’s - Gujarati Varna Parichaya (Book 1), a handbook for learning the basic gujarati script.

This helps me to understand the construction of th letterforms, i.e; the way of drawing each stroke, and secondly, I would learn Gujarati

Amelie also advised me to observe each letter form consciously and try to follow the way its been traditionally drawn to further understand the type.

This would make the typeface more legible.

I found that some characters are quite difficult to write and have unusual spacing. The “ü¼–ya” and the “[¼–cha”, look the same, even the construction is the same, but are differentiated by just a small curve while drawing the letter. Also, the “m–d” the written character is quite different than the character shown to write in the book.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Calligraphy

I met Mr. Amit Kharsani to ask him about his work as a calligrapher and his views on my project. I told him that I was studying Gujarati from the navneet book, where I had some problems regarding the construction of some key alphabets. When I pointed out, he told me that not only those, but many of the alphabets in the book had been designed improperly.

Every letter form is written with a certain number of strokes. Only by knowing this, you would understand how the Hand painter would be draw his letter forms.

Amit Kharsani showed me works of some renouned calligraphers of India in a book called Aksharyog and later showed the application of calligraphy in typeface design. This showed me the aesthetic beauty of calligraphy, which also has to reflect in my hand painted type.

Aspiring type designers should make it a point to practice calligraphy everyday. Starting with the traditional way of writing the script, one can later explore the script using different tools and techniques.

Calligraphy for type designers is like daily sketching practice for illustrators. You develop new styles and perfect your form by daily practice.

Stroke study for writing Gujarati with a traditional Kitta (Reed) pen.

Gujarati Calligraphy demonstrated by Amit Kharsani

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Categorization

In a script, it is very important to identify the common characters of the script. Other characters are based on these characters. I started analysing and categorizing the script according to it Form. This would make it much easier for me to derive the rest of the letter set.

I decided to categorize the Gujarati script into seven categories

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The next step was to try to come up with a character set, which would have the basic characters of Gujarati.

Here was consciously avoiding any conjuncts as the were not a part of my design brief.

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Tentative first draft of the Glyph set. This glyph set was derived from the basic characters and the Unicode. One should always derive the Glyphs from Unicode as it makes life much easier when you take the character set to a digital platform.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Painters

Ahmedabad is a city filled with Hand painted type.

Places such as Teen Darwaza and Raipur Darwaza in the Old city buzz with Indian street typography. I wanted to understand the design process of these street painter when they take up a job.

I visited Painter street on Ashram road, Ahmedabad.

This street was filled with street painters painting different sizes of canvases and boards. They were mainly into Painting type, but I also saw some replicating graphics.

I met Painter Sudeshrao, who works with a bunch of other painters under him. He has been practicing this profession for around 15 years and loves colors. He says that he hasn’t studied much, but he can replicate anything you give him on a canvas.

The painters here call themselves Painters and not Artists for Artist creates new and Painters replicates.

The decision of the work is mostly taken by the client in terms of color and fonts and sometimes the available colors. Nowadays the amount of work has greatly reduced due to the faster and cheaper printing processes like Flex / Vinyl printing.

Sudeshrao doesn’t favor artworks printed in Flex machines for the quality and the color fades really fast but he is ready to work as a printer as it is what the market demands now and he has to earn money for a living. The painters here believe that there is no future for the Painters, due to the advancement of technology Painters on painter street charge Rs. 15 per sq. ft. for Lettering at an average. Graphics and illustrations have prices according to the content and work.

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Redefined Brief

I had a very important meeting with my guide Tarun Deep Girdher on 14th October 2012, which completely changed my outlook towards the project.

Tarun told me that if I take a different perspective towards the project, I would be able to explore more in type design. Instead of taking a ready style of a hand painter, he advised me to take multiple styles and then come up with my own set. The previous approach will only be digitizing ie; converting it into a font, a hand painted type, which would only help me in developing my software skills and not my understanding of letter forms.

In the second case, I would be creating the characters from scratch. I would be now deciding the X-height, the grid, the negative and positive balance of the letter forms.

By heading this way, I would be creating a display type which will have multiple features, inspired from the types created by hand painters.

To derive a Gujarati display typeface, inspired by the hand painted types of Ahmedabad.

The designed typeface can be used without the decorations of a hand painted type.

Why this approach : This approach would make me understand how characters are formed and constructed. I will be working on the entire visual representation. Also, I will have to take conscious decisions on the characters which I won’t leave it on the hand painters. I can now merge two or more different styles together, creating a possibly new output towards hand painted type.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Documenting existing Hand painted type

Armed with a backpack, a camera and a motorcycle, I set out roaming around Ahmedabad to document hand painted type. I visited chief market places like Delhi Darwaza and Teen Darwaza where hand painters paint on shop boards and signage. I gathered various examples and styles of different hand painted type.

My criteria was to document fancy looking Hand painted type which would have more than 1 colour or would have an interesting construction.

I found one thing to be very interesting, that the hand painted type drawn on boards was usually mono linear and not modulated like the standard script written using a kitta.

The surface area plays an important part when the Hand painters are painting. Hand painters take conscious decisions when they are painting a board most of the time. They tweak and twitch letterforms to fit the surface area in the best possible way. When asked, painter Dashrath simply replied that it looks good.

I concluded that hand painters do associate certain styles with certain professions. A jewelers sign board will have a certain 3D feel to it with a clear geometric construction and stark light and shade. Now, if you look at restaurant sign board, it will be very humanistic. Professions with an industry background like mechanics, oil traders, hardware shops have very bold and heavy letter forms.

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Hand Painted Sign boards of fast food stalls at Vastrapur, Ahmedabad. Notice how the painter has used as specific type of style while rendering the letter forms. Also both these boards have been made by two different Hand Painters

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Sign boards of general stores at Raipur Darwaza, Ahmedabad. The painter has used a very specific monolinear type. In the first case, the painter has also added decoration to the typeface as per the character of the shop

Hand Painted sign boards of jewellers at Raipur, Ahmedabad. The painter has used as specific type of effect while rendering the letterforms.

The typeface looks like a jewel itself. The skeletal structure is also similar.

The next step was to categorize and analyse this entire data, to derive meaning. Together with Manoj Naorem, a Graphic Design student at NID who was also working on Hand painter street culture, we combined our resources and carried out a meticulous categorization processbased on form and visual represenstations making one type distinct from another.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Form and Visual Representation

I started the long process of categorizing our references into “FORM” and “VISUAL REPRESENTATION”.

Visual Representations consists of 9 sub-categories : Shadow The Lettering has a distinctive shadow.

Form, consists of 2 sub-categories : Monoliner Having vertical and horizontal strokes of the same visual weight

3D The lettering has either a distinctive 3D geometrical effect or has a 3D extrusion.

Modulated Having vertical and horizontal strokes of different visual weight

Geometric The lettering is constructed with sharp geometric lines and edges.

Fill in The lettering has colour filled in its negative space.

Decorative The lettering has decorative elements in it.

Outline The lettering has a colour outline.

Gradient 2 or more colours are mixed making a gradient.

Distortion The lettering is consciously or unconsciously distorted.

Exaggeration The lettering has some letters drawn in a completely different way and some elements are exaggerated.

Gradient- Monolinear

This exercise is to figure out the possibilities in Hand painted signs and how I will be able to apply these styles to make my typeface.

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Shadow - Monolinear

Decorated - Modulated

Decorative - Monolinear Outline - Modulated

Shadow - Modulated

3D - Modulated

Exaggration - Modulated

Decorative - Monolinear

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Modulated

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Monolinear

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

This Classification was done by Manoj Naorem on his blog http://streetpainters.wordpress.com/, which greatly helped me give a character to my typeface.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Visual Grammar

In Gujarati script many of the letters are identical to Devanagari, but there are some main characters in the script, that differentiates it from Devanagari. Unlike Devanagari, the script is devoid of the upper line or the Shirorekha. Also The foot of most of the letters are extended, which is one of the key features of the script. Taking this into consideration, I need to work on the visual grammar, so that each letter form has to be seen with respect to forms of other letters.

Skeleton sketches are extremely helpful when defining the design outline of the letters. But when it comes to balancing form and weight one has to work with each stroke. The reason most type designers start with the bold weight first because it is the most challenging weight to manage positive and negative spaces, because of the small counters.

When I had a talk with Sanchit Sawaria and Jyotish Sonowal, students from NID who had worked on type design projects, they advised me to work on the skeleton of the script. Skeleton helps consolidate the design criteria such as proportion, size, movement, and balance. Only after that, can I increase the mass and later add the additional features to the type face.

¬¼ ‡¼ E û¼ Š¼ ÷ ] [¼

Considering the research and analysis done so far, I started with root letters. In the Gujarati script, I chose

After analyzing the existing hand painted types, I decided on the following attributes for my type ­—­ 1) It should be a bold typeface 2) It should be a grid based typeface 3) The typeface should be dynamic ie; it should be legible, even without the effects 4) The typeface can be modulated or monolinear, but it has to have the extender

Demonstration of how to derive a skeleton of the structure and form using a calligraphy tool by Tarun Deep Girdher.

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Grid Structure

Majority of Hand painted Gujarati types are monoliear and very grid based. So, I finalized that my forms would not be organic, but very bold & straight.

At this stage, I started exploring the script on a grid.

While deriving forms on the grid, one has to understand where the grid can be made and then consciously modified.

Some issues that need to be considered here are­— 1) How much a letter form can be stretched with respect to its skeleton 2) Legibility is also a key issue 3) Proportion 4) Width When working on a grid, it is very important to reflect on calligraphy. The counter spacing and the negative spaces should be well balanced. The X-height should ideally be kept constant, and the letter form should be legible.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Vectorizing

At this stage, when the letterforms are vectorized, there is a scope to make multiple alterations of each form. This is most helpful when you look at all the forms together and then match each other to form a family.

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Based on the previous understanding, I made variations of the same character to figure out the visual personality of the typeface. This would define the weight, the form & the balance of the character.

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

I was considering this as my final letter form structure, but I was not happy with this outcome. This form is very rigid and structured, this could be taken forward as a hand painted type, but if seen solo, this wouldn’t suit the hand pained type seen in Ahmedabad. So I started reanalyzing my research and reexamining my work, so that I could to rework on the form.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Selecting letter forms

After meeting my guide, and discussing the changes, we came to a conclusion of having a type, which reflects Ahmedabad. This would make the type more personal to Gujarat and further promote the Indian street typography found especially in Gujarat. Since the brief was redefined, I had more chance to explore.

I started making more sketches and reworking on the form. We decided that this form would be structured as well as organic.

Selecting a letter form from the explorations is a crucial stage again. This stage is where a type is made. To select a letter form one needs to be aware of these factors: Intuition Intuition is essential. But intuition alone is not enough to select a perfect from out from the rest.

Intuition will only act as a pointer. A type designer has to analyze those pointers. Intuition may point to more than one letter forms. As a type designer, one has to measure the qualities of the forms. Here the artist exits.

Scale A mathematician enters. The letter form can be analyzed based on these factors: size, simplicity, motion, strokes, angles, endings, flourishes, links, lines, loops, circles, fly-wheels, pegs, breaks, and dots. And a type designer has to see all this in every letter form before selecting the one that best suits the need. The mathematician exits.

Sensitivity A surgeon enters. With utmost care, every letter form has to be dissected and categorized under a family.

Again when a type designer is categorizing, he or she may use self-defined criteria. Here the scope of work just moves beyond letter forms. The surgeon exits.

Embracing A critic enters. This is the stage where a type designer will embrace a letter form and maybe take it further than expected. At this stage, every letter form becomes an insight.*

* Excrept taken from Chukki: Deriving Kannada letter forms for the web, a process document by Sanjay Basavuraju.

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

I finalized this form for my ‡¼ as it was fitting my brief. It was bold, a little modulated and had an extender. This ‡¼ was also legible without the effects, but had to be further refined and the features has to be extended across the character set.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Design Development

At first, I started sketching letterforms on a grid paper, keping the style constant to the finalized ‡¼.

After getting a rough character set of some initial characters, I started digitising them.

At the digitizing phase, I chose a similar grid of 4x4.

This was done in illustrator as I was very comfortable with the software. Illustrator vectors can be copy pasted on Fontlab, but after that, the outlines need to be resolved.

One more reason I chose illustrator was that Illustrator has a very helpful option of “Snap to point”. This is extremely helpful for getting the perfect curves for the letter form.

This method of making the letter forms on illustrator and then taking it to a font formatting software is a lengthier process and should ideally be avoided, but I was learning Fontlab and editing letter forms on fontlab simultaneously.

When the handmade sketches on paper are ready to be scanned, take care of digitizing them in a proper way. More specifically, take care while converting your scanned image manually with a Bezier based pen tool.

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Too many points on a character, or points at the wrong position can have a negative influence at your font.

Too many points (=nodes) can not only cause technical problems -e.g. the printer can’t print the font anymore- but it is also much harder to control the shapes of a character. Controlling a curve between two nodes is much easier than changing a curve with twelve nodes. Of course it’s possible, but it will not end up in a fluent form.

Having the nodes at the wrong position can cause technical problems -e.g. it’s impossible to hint the font perfectly- but also practically it is recommendable to put nodes at extreme positions at your glyph.

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

When you have created a few basic characters, you also want to create the rest of the alphabet. There are some things which you can do, and some which you cannot do while copy-pasting. Some forms can be just the same. Copy-paste should not change the contrast in your typeface.

But copy-paste doesn’t bring you all the way there. It can work as a starting point, but manual adjustments will be mostly necessary. Whatever way you do it, make sure the inner forms(counters) in the type have (optically) the same amount of white space. Only in that way you’ll get a harmonious rhythm in your type.

This was the first draft of the style. Care should be taken while designing, as you have to balance the weight and proportions of each letter form.

This character set is a very rough look of what was lying ahead. Notice that I have not balanced the counters and proportions, but I have tried to keep a similar weight balance.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Design Development : Quirky

The letter forms needed more character. They were still very straight and monotonous. Even if they were slightly modulated, they were still missing a distinct character.

I wanted the letter forms to be as quirky as Ahmedabad itself. I came up with more alterations to the draft and reworked on some of the characters.

1) Droplet Character 2) Extender 3) Thick bottoms 4) Rounded edge 5) Sharp Corner

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Character : Droplet

After discussing the rough character set with my guide, we noticed that the ‡¼ had a very distinct character. The negative space of the ‡¼ had formed to be like a droplet of water. It was like some water had seeped in a black mass and given it an interesting form. We decided to use this to our advantage and try to add this character in each letter form.

Now this is a very tough task. Not all letter forms are derived from the same root letter. So I had to either add the droplet character or else balance the letter forms by the visual weight, so that all letter forms would seem to be in a family.

Before adding the distinct character form of a droplet

After adding the distinct character form of a droplet

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

A compilation of some of my illustrator files.

The final character set was derived from there letter forms

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Design Development : Matras

The matras of this series were challenging.

Again for these I came up with multiple alterations.

1) Rounded Edges: These edges just highlighted the curves of some characters.

2) Sharp Edges: These edges looked so sharp visually, that they were like isolation points for the characters.

3) 3 side Rounded Edges: I tried this variation, which was neither completely rounded, nor completely sharp. Only the dots in this were going well with the character set.

4.) 2 side rounded : In my opinion this was the best style which suited the Matras. The sharp edges and the rounded edges, bot balanced out each other and made the forms stable. Only the dots were looking out of place.

So it was decided to use the 3 sided round and the 2 sided rounded matras together shown here in red colour.

Rounded Edge

Sharp Edge

3—Side rounded Edge

2—Side rounded Edge 44

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Naming the typeface

It is a very challenging job to name a typeface when its complete. I needed a name, that would be striking and with a nice sound. Also, the name should ideally reflect the character of the typeface, so that people can freely relate to it.

My typeface is inspired from the street typography of Ahmedbad, so I wanted a name which would be very area specific. I listed down the characteristics of the typeface— 1.) Droplet 2.) Structure 3.) Bold 4.) Quirky 5.) Fun 6.) Vuluptious 7.) Ahmedabad 8.) Arty 9.) Hand Painted 10.) Engraved 11.) Flow

Together with my batchmates Kuldeep Goel and Mihir Lele, we brainstormed on the possible words. We had decided that the name would either be ahmedabad specific or Gujarati.

These are the names we brainstormed 1.) Amdavad - Local name for Ahmedabad 2.) Golu - Fatty 3.) Bhajiya - A Gujarati Snack 4.) Bharvadi - Shepherd 5.) Motapo - Fatness 6.) Gomthi - Derived from a village 7.) Tipu - Droplet 8.) Thad - Bark of a tree 9.) Bhopudu - Local village 10.) Goud - Jaggery 11.) Jalsa - Enjoyment 12.) Ghalu - Mad 13.) Jambu - A type of fruit 14.) Pravah - Flow 15.) Jabbar - Mighty 16.) Rasmai - filled with fluids 17.) Saras - Awesome 18.) Jadhadtu - Vibrant 19.) Golya - Rounded 20.) Saru - Nice We shortlisted on 3 names — Jalsa, Jabbar & Saras, and finally, we decided to name the font “JABBAR” meaning Mighty, because after a survey, people were able to relate it to the structure and also Gujarati people in Ahmedabad use this word a lot in their conversations.

If at a later stage, the typeface would have weights, then it would be named Jabbar Mota (Bold) , Jabbar Jado (Heavy), Jabbar nano, etc.

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Final Character Set

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Sentence

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

Effects : the road ahead

Now that the basic character set is complete, I started exploring the effects on the type to finish my project. The main challenge was to come up with a style which appears to be inspired from hand drawn elements, i.e; every letter needs to be altered in a way that the entire family looks balanced and proportionate.

Relooking at the previous analysis, I came up with the following styles­—

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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Hand Painted Type T-Shirts printed at Print Labs at Unbox Festival 2013

Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

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Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

References

http://www.typeworkshop.com/ http://www.typetoken.com/ http://www.typetoken.com/ http://www.thinkingwithtype.com/ http://www.omniglot.com/ http://www.gujarati.com/

Designing Type Cheng, Karen Yale University Press, 2005 Art of Looking sideways Fletcher, Allen Phaidon, 2001 Akshar Yog: Conference on issues relating to Indian scripts Documentation IDC, 1996

http://streetpainters.wordpress.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org http://www.jstor.org/

Chukki: Deriving a Kannada typeface for the web Basavuraju, Sanjay Guide: Immanuel, Suresh Classroom Project National Insitute of Design, 2008

http://unicode.org/faq/indic.html http://davi.cz/Lectures_and_workshops.html http://patelmc.wordpress.com/

Baravu: Revival of the Tulu Script Murthy, Vaishnavi Diploma Project National Insitute of Design, 2006 Type design: Guidelines for Devanagari Moudgill, Milan Guide: Patel, Mahendra Research Paper National Institute of Design, 1994 Letters for tomorrow: Experiments in type-form development Patel, Mahendra Research Publication National Institute of Design, 1990

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Akash Raj Halankar | PGDPG Graphic Design | National Institute of Design | January 2013

Thank You!

Tarun Deep Girdher, for his expert feedback, meticulious eye for detail and constant motivation for making me push my limits.

Hanif Kureshi, for making us aware about Indian hand painters and his project handpaintedtype.com Typography Day 2011, for making me conscious to letters.

Painter Sudhesrao & Bobby painter, for sharing their experiences as street painters.

Sarang Kulkarni, for the Costa Coffee feedback sessions.

AmĂŠlie Bonet, for her express workshop in type design.

Amit Kharsani, for sharing his experiences & Aksharyog.

Manoj Naorem, for helping me out with research Sanchit Sawaria and Jyotish Sonowal for their crash courses in fontlab.

Kuldeep Gohel, for his Gujarati vocabulary.

Soumyadip, Akshan & Nikunj for their valuable feedbacks.

Dadu, Mumma and Sanjana to always be there when I needed them the most.

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Akash Raj Halankar akashhalankar@gmail.com www.akashhalankar.com handpaintedtype-gujarati.blogspot.com +91 98190 00170

Jabbar : A Display typeface inspired from Hand painted Gujarati Typography

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