As a shoddy neologism, it is derogatory, misleading and hypocritical. These same conditions initially exploited by Emigre and others to flourish now allow thousands to thrive, and there are no signs it will slow down.īut “In-fillism” is merely a sleight of hand. Reasonably affordable typeface design software and accessible online distribution are now used by a great volume of people to make and sell typefaces. Sure, these are limitations of the “font business”.I have no doubt that “Infill-ism” is a sincere belief and concern for VanderLans. It doesn’t help that the Latin precedents happen to be bland bread-and-butter serifs and sans serifs which necessitate equally sedate Devanagari companions. But the fact remains: Latin first, then the others. Sure, that is more than a shift in semantics: designs draw from their script histories rather than simply plastering the shapes of their Latin counterparts. Fortunately, multiscript type-design assignments have shifted from an exercise in “matching to the Latin” to an exercise in “harmonising with the Latin”. Much of this owes to the number of multinational brands looking to make their presence felt in the Indian market, with brands learning to speak the languages of the country. There’s been a spate of Devanagari typefaces released in the recent past. Implicit (complicit) in every utterance of tradition is a survivor bias: we often forget alternate histories only to find ourselves submerged in a sea of bland uniformity. Though at times a guiding spirit, the slightest atavistic impulse renders “tradition” into a monolithic phenomenon. But there is a warmth to this as well: notice the vertical-horizontal joinery on the Va (व) and you’ll find that the squarish structures have been tempered with gentle curves knots on the Na (न) and Ma (म) remain bulbous and droop to fill in the white space the kanas retain the swerve, reminiscent of the calligraphic hand. That is best illustrated in the wedge terminal along the shiroh where curves have been traded in for a sharper chamfered triangular structure. The result seems less a revival and more a translation, specifically a digital one. So much so that their process reveals not just a route to the final design but a gamut of alternate futures. But designers Maithili Shingre and Girish Dalvi have combed through the manuscript, considering each variation as a possibility. The identity and temperament of the hand vary across each page and line, making this as much of an exercise in curation as it is in omission. Reviving letters from a manuscript is tricky business. It also helps that the matras are extremely short-barely a nib width-and vertical letters and matra conjuncts remain stacked within the kana height. Disconnected shiroh rekhas, kinked kanas, blotted knots, loops and wedges, and largely squarish structures allow each letter to coalesce, clotting them into a dense texture. The manuscript, penned in Devanagari with ink and boru on paper, is a sanctuary of forms distinct from the garden-variety Balbodh seen today. Jaini references the calligraphy found in the Kalpasutra, an illustrated Jain text of the Svetambara sect. And it is in this context that the release of Ek Type’s Jaini seems timely. Monolinear typefaces too, when not a clear nod to street lettering or handwriting, have begun to refer to the same model, further elevating this style to the status of tradition. Specifically, it refers to the Balbodh style of Devanagari calligraphy, popularised by the Nirnaysagar Press and now proliferated across text typefaces on the market today. But the word “traditional” needlessly does a lot of heavy lifting. The image conjured by the above description will, for most readers, be similar.
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