Typography Day 2011 started
our outlook towards typogra-
identity that describes us com-
with extreme energy and a huge
phy across Nations. The student
pletely. A lot of work showcased
amount of excitement as students,
speakers built an inspiring atmos-
typeface and letter designs in-
visitors, delegates and the media
phere for all the students in the
spired by a very local context and
amalgamated at the auditorium of
crowd who dream of becoming
a few took inspiration from his-
National Institute of Design, Paldi
future typographers.
tory. It was also very interesting
campus to eagerly await the opening of the conference.
, Turkey
The creation of this newsletter
in scripts other than their own
‘Type Hype’ was exciting, with
native languages, how they found
The happiness, joy and passion
mind boggling deadlines and live
their own ways to adapt them-
shared by typographers which
content generation throughout
selves to scripts that were new
included students as well as stal-
the event. The challenge of the
to them, and how they looked at
warts in the field of typography
newsletter to be printed over-
the visual appeal of letter forms
found expression at the beginning
night and available for distribu-
which are merely a set of shapes
of the conference. The typo team
tion next morning was made pos-
put together. A new concept of
2011 from NID were up early and
sible by the staff of printing labs
3D typography and anaglyph ty-
ready to assist all the visitors with
at NID who worked extra hard
pography interested everyone.
their queries, passing them con-
to make this happen. Also, live
ference kits filled with goodies
video screening of the conference
A warm thank you to all the peo-
and guiding them to the venue of
across all the NID campuses in-
ple who helped in organizing this
the presentations.
cluding Bangalore and Gandhina-
conference which include the
gar added a new dimension to this
faculty, students, and administra-
in-
event where knowledge could be
tion of National Institute of De-
spiring talk and his memories
shared across physical limitations
sign, Ahmedabad and Industrial
of remembering Prof. R.K. Joshi
of a venue.
Design Centre, I. I.T Mumbai.
Professor G.V. Sreekumar’s , India
to see designers design typefaces
gave the conference a warm start.
Also the supporting institutes
His vision of designing a curricu-
An interesting argument that
India Design Association and
lum for the future was appreci-
seems to emerge out of all the
Aksharaya teams for keeping our
ated by the design educators om-
gripping discussions is whether
energies running. We sincerely
nipresent in the crowd. Enriching
designers must design for a more
thank Font Lab for sponsoring the
panel discussions and inquisitive
general platform or whether
event and helping students redis-
students asking their doubts and
the design must cater to the lo-
cover their love for typography.
queries added a rich flavor to the
cal context. For multi-cultural
conference and made it more in-
countries, with a vast variety of
Today 11 exciting workshops are
teractive. Professor Mahendra
cultures, subcultures and various
being offered. It is time to explore
Patel’s constant inputs generated
influences, it is an issue to form a
all our thinking, learnings and
lots of energy among the visi-
single identity. We, in India have
skills. Hoping the last day of this
tors. The international speakers
at some point or the other faced
conference is as memorable for
shared their unique experiences
a situation where we have been
all of you as it has been for Team
with type design and broadened
unable to form a single ‘ Indian’
Typo at NID.
Comic Types
By Reuben & Rahul
Typography Day 2
Through the eyes of Turmeric Design
From the X-rays it's clear that you have a terminal illness... I know how it feels.
Language is the dress of thought. That being the case typography can be viewed as one of the swatches of fabric from with the dress is made.
Crossword Answers
Answers to the crossword published on the first edition of Type Hype, distributed to you on the first day of Typography Day 2011. Check to see if you managed a full score.
I fell in
with typography an hour ago.
Srishti Dutta Roy (The youngest participant of Typography Day 2011)
Dan Rhatigan
Type/Graphic Designer, London
Proof Reading
Try proof-reading this article!
* Source Shirish Bhai, Co-ordinator, NID Printing Labs
Organising a Conference in 5 Easy steps Deciding the subject or theme of the conference: After infinite cups of chai and innumerable scribbles and brain boggling deadlines, the theme of the conference was decided to be typography and expression. But expressing what? Our emotions? Our Creations? Or the culturally rich topic of the Indian expression? The biggest challenge is the thin, narrow, teeny line of not hurting the sentiments of a huge democracy like India. The Indian expression is usually portrayed as a western concept wherein certain visual forms like the autos, cabs, trucks, colour, chaos and cows are accentuated. Finding letters inspired from such forms would be interesting. Thus the theme was decided. So a theme that feels right from that little corner space of your heart…just freeze on it. Inviting Speakers and organizing Workshops: Are there enough typographers around? That is the first question that arose but got poofed
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the moment one sat to research on them. That is a myth! There were so many that it was difficult to narrow down on them. The usual image of a type designer is usually that of an introvert sitting in a corner of a studio or lab with large wooden tables and laptops becoming sensitive to the width of the letters and the type anatomies. This image completely proved to be wrong at the conference when we came across the tattoos of Dan Rhatigan. So inviting speakers from all across the globe was a challenge but it was a great eye opener that so many typographers exist in their unique styles breaking the stereotyped myth.
Branding: Branding? What? Not again? Why does everything have to be branded? Starting from the shampoos we use or the shoes we wear, everything is a brand. “Let this conference be unique”our hearts screamed out for this aspect. Yet we decided to brand it as while we did it, we realized
Proofreading symbols or marks are shorthand notations through which the proofreader tells the compositor what changes to make to a proof sheet,, galley or blue line before publication. They differ from editing marks and should not be confused although some are similar or even the same. Editing isa different process than proofing. A proofreader is a person who is supposed to leave his standard proofreading marks as he proceeds through the documents. These are The correction proofreader marks that one makes on the document to point out a mistake and suggest a correction. Some follow the general trend, others create their own trend. Likewise, some proofreaders find it easy to work according to the standard norms; while many others find it extremely difficult to cope with the standard symbolism of proofreading. The proofreaders marks provide consistency and help avoid miscommunication. Whether sharing work with others or proofing one’s own work, proper use of proofreaders' marks saves time and frustration. To make things easy, most of the companies now a days have their own customized set of proofreader marks. These marks are a combination of shapes and letters to mark a certain type of error in the document. Due to this trend of marking, all the documents given for proofreading are double spaced so that there is enough space for the marks. Some of the standard marks include a circle with ‘sp’ in it around a number written in digits which had to be in spellings, a circle with ‘cap’ written in it indicating that the nearby underlined letter or word is to be written in capital, a line from a word to a space between two words depicting that the word had to be there and many more. With time a proofreader gets accustomed to the marking system and becomes expert
in proofreading. The proofreader while proofing a document doesn’t cut and rewrite the whole thing, making the piece of paper illegible. Rather he uses a predefined standard set of proofreaders symbols to mark certain type of errors in the document. These symbols are universally accepted and are standard unless specified by a particular organization. Some large companies have their own requirements and limitations so they don’t use the standard set of proofread symbols. They have their own set of symbols to mark errors. Nearly all over the world, proofreaders use red pen to mark symbols corrections because it is contrasting and clearly visible to the reader. In the digital age, where proofreading is done on computers these symbols are not of much help since editing of the document is possible without any fuss, on the document; since no paper is involved. Yet, at some places, symbols are used by even if they working on computers.
branding was merely not attaching a sticker of the same logo to things but building a unique identity and a system. So we took scissors and CUT, SNIP, CUT paper and the logo was born.
we are designers and have to be functional, we thought of giving something innovative and educative. So the visitors were given mementos to take away which had a hand painted design saying ‘Dhanyavad’ meaning ‘Thank You’. It was a small way to show our respect to the dying art of street painters. If you don’t thank people…then no conference can happen. It’s simple. So be warm and grateful to people around you. A good conference can only happen with a very hardworking team. Distributing 5-Stars in the middle of the night when hunger is taking over the mind makes a lot of difference. So smile and say thank you…always!
Registration For this step you need to know Microsoft Excel really well. Ohh… the mac users text edit is a must. Dealing with calls, good interpersonal skills, being firm…(at times), being soft and being diplomatic are a MUST! The money part is another whole thing. If sponsors are not there, charging a bomb to cover the costs is always advisable and voila the conference can happen beautifully! But really having patience is the key idea of this stage and resolving conflicts fast, super fast is a must! Collectibles, Freebies and Thanksgiving The golden rule of any good conference is to give a lot of freebies, and stuff that evokes sweet memories about the event but at NID we thought a little bit more. Since
Some of the common proof reading symbols include an insertion symbol where a small carrot or arrow is marked at the place where a letter or a word is missing and the letter or the word is written above the line. The symbol to delete a particular word or letter is a simple straight line cutting the word or letter. A special symbol resembling a mirror of P is used to mark a change in paragraph. There are various other symbols, as well. It is quite clear that the job of a proofreader demands a pen to be used since typing proofread symbols may not be possible for all kinds of symbols. A proofread copy looks like a pattern of red and blue or black or whatever ink has been used in the proof. The more there is red color on proof copy, it indicates there were more errors in the proof.
* These are experiences of Team Typo through the two months they spent working on the organisation of Typography Day 2011. And as you might have guessed it's not meant to be seriously.
Featured Student Project Over 35 million people worldwide speak the language, Kannada. Sanjay Basavaraju, a Graphic design alumnus of NID is one of them. Kannada’s first written record can be traced to 230 BC. The Kannada script has entered the Web medium. Recently, while groups such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and AOL, are looking at local content as the solution to reach out to specific user groups, there isn’t any Kannada type designed for the web. Readability is the main concern of text appearing in large volumes on the screen. Inconsistency in intensity, improper leading, hinting a font for web originally designed for print etc are some issues that make the letterforms illegible and make them look like lumps of pixels put together. Sanjay clearly recalls his mother commenting on how it was uncomfortable to read news on Yahoo Kannada, online, because the text looked rough and it seemed as if they were still working on the page. It was this conversation with his mother that sparked off Sanjay’s interest in taking up Kannada typeface design that would attempt to resolve these issues as his classroom project. Under the guidance of Immanuel Suresh, he developed the font ‘Chukki’ by deriving the Kannada letter forms for the computer screen by decisively laying pixels.
Sanjay Basavaraju designers. He runs Avalokana, an independent publishing firm based out of Ahmedabad, with his partner Armeen Kapadia.
Outline of selected freehand forms
The Kannada script being curvy, right decisions needed to be taken when the forms were derived on the pixel grid. After enough analysis of the size of the Kannada typeface used on the Web, he concluded that only with 7 pixels x-height, one would be able to do justice to the Kannada letterforms. So ‘Chukki’ is designed in 7-pixel x-height. It requires less leading and looks more compact. A lot more text can be fit into the column. ‘7 Pixel’ is also an ideal size for any other devices with lesser resolution and smaller screens such as a hand held phone. According to him, it would be an irrational decision to actually create weights at this size as Indic scripts can’t be visualized in bold or italics and the concept of weight system for the Web needs to be relooked at. Sanjay believes that, when a type is designed, two main aspects— legibility and elegance, should be looked at.
So he also did an exercise in taking all the base forms figuring out metaphors for them in an attempt to relate them to images and not sounds. He is also in the process of designing the hintable version of ‘Chukki’ called ‘Gaganachukki’(Beyond the Objective Through ‘Chukki’, he says, “we would be able to challenge the Language and the Medium to co-exist.” Chukki, at the moment, stands not just as a bitmap Kannada typeface, but also as a system which can be applied to derive any forms for the Web. Chukki is a small contribution from a design student to the Indic type designers’ community. The research process can be followed at www.chukki.wordpress.com. Sanjay has also written a book— Making Sense of Design.Working with Amazon Kindle is one of his dream projects which he feels is an area having tremendous opportunity for Indic typeface
Beyond good proportion and legibility, the type form has to relate to the aesthetic forms in our mind.
We have often spotted Satya Rajpurohit, co-founder of the Indian Type Foundry (ITF) in and around the campus of NID of whom he is an alumnus. Last week, we cornered him at the Chai gate and bombarded him with questions which he readily agreed to answer. For all students and type enthusiasts, Type hype shares with you some excerpts from our conversation with the guy who in such a short span of time, took Indian Typography to a new level.
Favourite Typeface Designer Adrian Frutiger & Robert Slimbach
Favourite Typeface
Serif: Trinité by Dutch type designer Bram de Does Sans: National by Kris Sowersby
TypeHype: Would you explain how Type design is different from
other aspects of typography? Satya: Type design is more of a craft. It is a lengthy process of designing typefaces. While the initial conceptualization would amount to as little as 10% of the project, the remaining 90% requires one to work on it patiently and tirelessly. It can become boring after a few weeks, when all the creative thinking is done, but I really enjoy the process. Typography, on the other hand, is to design layouts or compositions by using these typefaces. It focuses on the arrangement and appearance of matter printed using type. Simply put, one is about creating tools and the other about using them.
TypeHype: Having worked on a variety of Indic fonts, how im-
portant according to you, is it to know the language along with the script before designing a typeface? Satya: While mastery over the spoken language is not necessary, it is important for a type designer to study the forms of a new script and get familiarized to word formation structures peculiar to the script in order to be comfortable in writing it.
TypeHype: So, how many Indian scripts do you know? Satya: It takes me around 2-3 months to learn a new script. I am
Kohinoor super type family
quite comfortable with Gujarati and Devanagari, and can read-andwrite Bengali and Gurmukhi scripts. I had a tough time learning Tamil for designing a typeface for my diploma project. But now that I am learning Kannada, Tamil seems much easier as it does not have too many characters as in Kannada.
Geometric construction of a character
Extraction of pixel forms
CHUKKI: DERIVING KANNADA TYPE FORMS FOR THE WEB Sanjay Basavaraju Guide: Suresh Immanuel
TypeHype: Can you share some insights with students interested in type design? Satya: While most design institutes here have typography as a subject, there is not much focus on type design in particular. Also, very little work is done in the area of Indian scripts, meaning there are no defined principles for designing regional scripts. Your mother tongue could possibly be as foreign to you as another. Indian scripts have hundreds of characters which make it a huge task for a beginner. I would recommend them to first study the basic principles of Latin type design and then apply them to design other scripts. Another thing to keep in mind is that type design is not about personal preferences. Universal legibility and readability should always score higher while taking design decisions.
TypeHype: Could you share how things work at ITF? Satya: ITF basically follows two models i.e. designing retail fonts
for our library and custom fonts that meet the requirement of specific clients. While I handle the designing part, my partner Peter Bilak, help me with other important activities like ITF promotion, lectures, workshops, articles and with Latin type design. Often people wonder how we coordinate in spite of us living in two different countries, but internet enables us to manage quite efficiently.
TypeHype: What are you currently working on and what would
be your dream project? Satya: Presently, I am working on developing a custom typeface for a Kannada Newspaper. My dream project would be to develop a typeface family that extends to major Indian scripts plus Latin. Such typefaces would enable uniformity in visual language in multilingual design projects. The ITF typeface ‘Kohinoor Multiscript’ has released with its Devanagari, Latin and Tamil versions, and the Gujarati, Bengali and Gurmukhi versions are on their way. The plan for 'Kohinoor' is to make it the biggest typeface family ever created with support for 9 major Indian scripts and Latin.
TypeHype: It is an unfortunate reality that lots of people distort
fonts and spread font piracy while type designers painstakingly create them. What do you suggest would make them more sensitive towards ethical use of type? Satya: Changing the mindset of people would be a huge task but we could try initiating a dialogue with them. While type designers cannot expect people to see type the way they do, awareness could be created by giving simple examples such as ‘Distorting a typeface would destroy its identity just like squeezing or stretching your photograph would’.
Behind The Scenes This conference would not have been possible without the massive effort and co-operation of the following National Institute of Design Pradyumna Vyas Vijai Singh Katiyar Dr. Subir Das Siddharth Swaminarayan Viral Rajyaguru Dr. Vijaya Deshmukh
See you at Typography Day 2012
Industrial Design Centre Ravi Poovaiah Girish Dalvi G V Sreekumar Aksharaya Santosh Kshirsagar Sarang Kulkarni InDeAs Ajanta Sen Font Lab Ted Harrison and his team Print partners Shreedhar Printers Pvt. Ltd. Shrirang Cards Creation Siddhi Printech Printing Lab Mr Shirish Shah Mr Bharat Suthar Mr Bharat Patel Mr Sudarshan Anija Mr G C Pal Mr Suresh Kuntmal Mr Manilal Someshwara Mr Hasmukh Prajapati Mr Hardik Sanghavi Mr Sachin Panchal Auditorium Team Rohit Parmar Rahul Patel Sudhir Shah Jitendra Sagar Rupesh Vyas, Bhaumik Nagar and the entire IT team Meena Shah, Shambhu Paswan and team Nikhil Mehta, Kapil Patel, Khoda Bhai and their team Govind Bhai and HetChint All Speakers, Session Moderators and Workshop Moderators
Type Hype Credits
Printed and Published by Tarun Deep Girdher for Graphic Design discipline at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Edited by Dhwani Shah and Mrinalini Sardar Printed by Shirish Shah at NID Printing Labs, Paldi Ahmedabad-380007.
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Entire Graphic Design team of Faculty, Students and Graduates.
Designed by Pragya Mishra and Vinu Chaitanya Printed on JK Natural Shade Map Litho 80gsm Set in Warnock Pro & Din Printed on Roland Parva IIB, 1964 Vintage using CTP (PS Plates) Printed, gathered, folded at NID Printing Labs
Masthead Design by Akash Halankar
Proof Reading Article by Mrinalini Sardar and Dhwani Shah
Closing note by Mrinalini Sardar and Dhwani Shah
Type Hype live Reporters Mrinalini Sardar, Mohita Janbandhu and Asmina Shaikh
Write up on Zuzana Licko compiled by Pallavi Apte and Lalith Prasad Portrait of Zuzana Licko by Poshika Singh Write up on student projects compiled by Dhwani Shah
Type Hype live Illustrator Akash Halankar Type Hype Photographers Anurag Gautam, Naorem Singh, Amrit Pal Singh Typo quote Illustration Abhisek Behera
Disclaimer: Any part of this publication and/or opinions expressed therein remain solely those of the author(s) and people duly copyrighted for reference. No content of this publication or opinions expressed therein bear responsibility to hurt public sentiments. It is for academic purpose only. The purpose of this newsletter is just to evoke the unending love for typography.