talk
Designing the first layered font in Telugu
Looking at the Indian subcontinent from a language perspective, all Indian languages take root in four regions. Indo-European, Dravidian, Mon-Khamer, Sino-Tibetan. Languages originating from the Indo-European are spoken in northern and central regions, whereas the ones originating from Dravidian are spoken in southern region like Telugu which is spoken in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states.
Telugu script has a characteristic curvilinear shape to it as it has been designed circa 5th century keeping in mind the writing material: Palm leaf. Care has been taken then, to design the script in order to avoid any tearing in the leaf during inscription; thus, avoiding any horizontal strokes which were specifically in-line with the grains.
Challenges like designing of glyphs due to absence of horizontal and vertical strokes; volume of characters to be designed which accounts to 1200+ for a workable font; the “vattu” which are similar to diacritic marks are dynamic and dependent on the character/context in which it is written are only a few intricacies which make the font complex and thus implicable to explorations.
‘Sri-Kari’ is a project designed to honor the dying art of sign board painters and their ingenious job of representing culture in art, preserving and passing it on to next generations. Bright colors, squeezed letters along y-axis, heavy lettering style with distinctive hair line shadow inspired me to design this typeface making it the 1st multi layered font in Telugu