Indian Typography
LO 2.1 - Research, Mind map and Visual Board
INDEX Timeline
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Scripts Ÿ Brahmi Script Ÿ Devanagari script Ÿ Tamil Script Ÿ Malayalam Script
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Artists Ÿ Achyut Palav Ÿ R.K. Joshi
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Other Ÿ Samarkan font Ÿ Gandhi font
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WRITINGS
Indus Valley Civilization
2600 - 1900 BC î “e earliest script in India so far known is the Indus Valley pictographic script. Over 4000 symbol bearing seals have been discovered in the Indus Valley.
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS
Indus Valley Civilization
2600 - 1900 BC Another seal from the Indus Valley - î “e Harappan signs are associated with at, rectangular stone tablets called seals.
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS Indus Valley Script
2600 - 1900 BC e script of Mohen-jo-daro and Harappa is called Proto-Indian. e script appears to be phonetic and has ideographic origin. e specimen are all in the form of seals. Indus Script it is said to be the ancestor of the both, the secular Brahmi as well as the traditional vernacular scripts of India.
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS Brahmi Inscription
3rd century BC Brahmi, the script of the brahmans is written from left to right. -Ashoka used this script for his inscriptions, carved into the face of rocks or on stone pillars It is the mother of all Indian scripts including the Devanagari script. Fragment of the 6th Pillar Edict of Ashoka (238 BCE), in Brahmi, sandstone
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS Brahmi Inscription
3rd century BC Brahmi, the script of the brahmans is written from left to right. -Ashoka used this script for his inscriptions, carved into the face of rocks or on stone pillars It is the mother of all Indian scripts including the Devanagari script. Fragment of the 6th Pillar Edict of Ashoka (238 BCE), in Brahmi, sandstone
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS Girnar Inscription
3rd century BC î “ese inscriptions on rocks and pillars, proclaim Asoka's reforms and policies and promulgate his advice to his subjects.
- Simpli ed Brahmi î “is are the basic forms of the letters of Brahmi Script
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS Brahmi Variations
3rd century BC to 540 AD î “ese are the variations of the Brahmi Script
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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WRITINGS Brahmi Variations
1st century BC - Phabosa Inscription: Inscriptions from the temple of Parisnath at Phabosa
2nd century BC - Barahut stupa, Brahmi Inscription: e stupa contains numerous birth stories of the Buddha's previous lives, or Jataka tales.
4th century BC - Allahabad Pillar Inscription: e stupa is belongs to Samudragupta, Gupta Script
5th century BC - Siddham Letter 'a' : e siddham letterforms have been used for meditative purposes. ese are a varient of the Brahmi script.
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http://www.designinindia.net/design-thoughts/writings/history/india-history-type-design1.html
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BRAHMI SCRIPT Brahmi (brāhmī) is the modern name given to one of the oldest writing systems used in South and Central Asia during the nal centuries BCE and the early centuries CE. Like its contemporary Kharosthi, which was used in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is an abugida. e best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. e script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the East India Company. e origin of the script is still much debated, with most scholars concurring that Brahmi was derived from or at least in uenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, while others favoring the idea of an indigenous origin or connected to the much older and as-yet undeciphered Indus script. Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script, that is "stick gure" script. It was known by a variety of other names until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with the Brahmi script, the rst in a list of scripts mentioned in the Lalitavistara Sūtra. ence the name was adopted in the in uential work of Georg Bühler, albeit in the variant form "Brahma". e Gupta script of the 5th century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". e Brahmi script diversi ed into numerous local variants, classi ed together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most in uential writing traditions. One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it.
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http://www.ancientscripts.com/brahmi.htmll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script
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DEVANAGARI SCRIPT Devanagari is written from left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines, and is recognisable by a horizontal line that runs along the top of full letters. In a cursory look, the Devanagari script appears different from other Indic scripts such as Bengali, Oriya, or Gurmukhi, but a closer examination reveals they are very similar except for angles and structural emphasis. e Nagari script has roots in the ancient Brahmi script family. Some of the earliest epigraphical evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nagari script in ancient India, in a form similar to Devanagari, is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in Gujarat. e Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE and it was fully developed by about the end of rst millennium. e use of Sanskrit in Nagari script in medieval India is attested by numerous pillar and cave temple inscriptions, including the 11th-century Udayagiri inscriptions in Madhya Pradesh, a brick with inscriptions found in Uttar Pradesh, dated to be from 1217 CE, which is now held at the British Museum. Devanagari script has forty-seven primary characters, of which fourteen are vowels and thirty-three are consonants. e ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters. e script has no distinction similar to the capital and small letters of the Latin alphabet. Generally the orthography of the script re ects the pronunciation of the language.
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Vowels
Consonant letters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
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TAMIL SCRIPT e Tamil script is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere to write the Tamil language, as well as to write the liturgical language Sanskrit, using consonants and diacritics not represented in the Tamil alphabet. Certain minority languages such as Saurashtra, Badaga, Irula, and Paniya language are also written in the Tamil script. e Tamil script, like the other Brahmic scripts, is thought to have evolved from the original Brahmi script. e earliest inscriptions which are accepted examples of Tamil writing date to a time just after the Ashokan period. e script used by these inscriptions is commonly known as the Tamil-Brahmi or "Tamili script", and differs in many ways from standard Ashokan Brahmi. For example, early Tamil-Brahmi, unlike Ashokan Brahmi, had a system to distinguish between pure consonants (m in this example) and consonants with an inherent vowel (ma in this example). In addition, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, early Tamil Brahmi used slightly different vowel markers, had extra characters to represent letters not found in Sanskrit, and omitted letters for sounds not present in Tamil, such as voiced consonants and aspirates. Inscriptions from the second century use a later form of Tamil-Brahmi, which is substantially similar to the writing system described in the Tolkāppiyam, an ancient Tamil grammar.
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Vowels and Vowel diacritics
Consonant letters
http://www.ancientscripts.com/tamil.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_script
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MALAYALAM SCRIPT e Malayalam script is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 35 million people in the world. Malayalam script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala. Like many other Indic scripts, it is an alphasyllabary (abugida), a writing system that is partially “alphabetic” and partially syllable-based. e modern Malayalam alphabet has 15 vowel letters, 36 consonant letters, and a few other symbols. e Malayalam script is a Vatteluttu alphabet extended with symbols from the Grantha alphabet to represent Indo-Aryan loanwords. e script is also used to write several minority languages such as Paniya, Betta Kurumba, and Ravula. e Malayalam language itself was historically written in several different scripts. Malayalam was rst written in the Vatteluttu alphabet, an ancient script of Tamil. However, the modern Malayalam script evolved from the Grantha alphabet, which was originally used to write Sanskrit. Both Vatteluttu and Grantha evolved from the Brahmi script, but independently. Malayalam was rst written in Vatteluttu. e Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE. In the Tamil country, the modern Tamil script had supplanted Vatteluttu by the 15th century, but in the Malabar region, Vatteluttu remained in general use up to the 17th century, or the 18th century.
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Vowels
Consonant letters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
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ACHYUT PALAV Calligraphy is essentially an art form though in a literal sense its meaning is “beautiful handwritingâ€?. î “e strokes when conformed to writing will give you various fonts and typesets but when one opens the inner eye and lets his imagination run wild, art masterpieces get created on plain canvases. When a person learns to write, he becomes literate and when he understands the essence of letters he transforms into an artist. Calligraphy is equally beautiful in black and white as it is in colours. A true artist will manipulate its strokes to create paintings. To become a calligrapher one need not be good at drawing, nor have good handwriting. He just needs a broad mind, a yearning to see beyond the certain rigidity of letters that has been embedded in our minds.
Style Be it Devnagri or the English scripts, a constant thirst for knowledge and passion for perfection continues to give a special meaning to my quest in Calligraphy. Even today he says, that he has just begun the journey towards his destination and he still have a long way to go. He has used calligraphy successfully in weddings, fashion, interiors, paper articles as gift items, cards, body painting, architecture, installations, ceramic, print and electronic media. I have even used calligraphy as a therapy for personality development. I have experimented with tools and media alike.
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R. K. JOSHI Professor R K Joshi (born 1936 in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India - died 5 February 2008 in San Francisco, USA) was an academic type designer and calligrapher. He designed the core Indian fonts used in Microsoft Windows. Joshi was born into a middle class Indian family. He was brought up in the town of Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He developed an interest in alphabets, their shapes, styles and design. In 1952, he decided to study art at Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai. During this time he found a scarcity of typefaces in Indian languages. He took up extra classes at the Government Institute of Printing Technology, located within the institute premises, where he learned that Indian typefaces were intricate and had many problems in typesetting. He participated in the rst exhibition on Indian typefaces at the college.
Style In uenced by the books of Italian Masters like Arrighi, he found a new world of calligraphy to explore. He applied it to the Indian context and explored Indic scripts in Calligraphic styles. He studied the rarest manuscripts in Indic languages, of which his inspiration was a book titled Bharatiya Pracheen Lipimala by an Indian Author Ojha. î “is book brought to him the world of ancient scripts, like Brahmi, Sharda, Kautilya and Gupta scripts. After an intense research on these scripts, in 1966, he designed his rst two fonts.
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SAMARKAN Samarkan is a font which has been made by implementing styles of Indian fonts. e font is licensed as Shareware. e font is available as a trial. e font is designed by Ananda K Mahajan. Samarkan’s origins are mysterious, but it is increasingly visible these days as a sign of something desi, whether in India or abroad
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GANDHI FONT Leo Burnett India has, in its own way, attempted to keep Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi alive and relevant in the hearts and minds of youngsters in India. e ad agency has, under the wish of its national creative director KV Sridhar (Pops), crafted an alphabetical font in the Devanagari script that has the trademark Gandhi glasses subtly incorporated into every letter.
Objective e agency hopes to propagate the use of this font to popularise Gandhiji’s quotes and teachings amongst the younger generation.2010 marks Bapu’s 141st birthday and the font is an effort to commemorate it by bringing alive his values of truth and non-violence. e font makes use of Gandhiji’s trademark glasses as a visual representative of him, as glasses also symbolise ‘vision’ and the effort here is to bring alive his visionary thoughts. It is the perfect tribute to the man affectionately called ‘Bapu’ by the entire country. e way he saw the world is completely different from the way we do - and hence the glasses, to subtly nudge people into thinking like him again.
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Siddharth Thampi