Changing the typographic landscape of a country: one letter at a time

Posted by Remya Padmadas on December 14, 2016

by Pooja Saxena

   

Pooja Saxena makes and works with typefaces, especially those in Indian scripts. See her work here, or follow her on Instagram.

My interest in designing typefaces in Indian scripts grew out of years of disappointment with the way most Hindi books I came across looked. Apart from a few exceptions, they looked like poor cousins of English books. Whether it was a children’s story book or a novel or magazine, there was usually the same drab typeface. Some letters didn’t look like what we were taught in school, on others the matras (vowel marks) didn’t arch at the right places. Overall, the books and the letters inside them had an air of neglect. They looked old and completely unexciting. When I first learned that designing typefaces was a real job, I thought here was the opportunity to change all that. 

Cambay, Devanagari typeface designed by Pooja Saxena for Google Fonts 

Changing the typographic landscape of a country as diverse as India is not a one-woman job, but every now and then a project comes by that has the potential to make a small difference. Two years ago, as a result of a conversation with Subhashish Panigrahi, the Access to Knowledge programme at the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a Ol Chiki typeface family. The Ol Chiki script, about which I knew precious little at the time, is used to write the language Santali, which is spoken by over six million people in India and its neighbouring countries. At the time that we started working on this project, there was no Unicode compliant typeface available in the script, making it impossible for it to be used on computers and cellphones, and online in a consistent and future-proof way. We hoped to change that by designing a small, but useful typeface family (it comes in regular, bold and italics) along with input methods and keyboard layouts that would allow a person to type Ol Chiki text easily. 

Guru Gomke, Ol Chiki typeface designed by Pooja Saxena with research inputs from Shubhashish Panigrahi,

for the A2K Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society. 

This project was especially challenging because not only was Ol Chiki a completely unfamiliar script to me and Subhashish, but there was limited material available for us to consult. While designing a typeface in a script one reads and/or writes, or is at least familiar with, one’s experience with those letters can act as a guide. By writing them and seeing them printed in different fonts, in many people’s handwriting — some good, some bad — and on hand painted signs, one develops an instinct for identifying which parts of a letter make it recognisable. That way we know what parts of the letter can be exaggerated, and what others can be played down without compromising legibility. For an unfamiliar script, this visual vocabulary and the traditionally correct way of writing letters must be learned. Manuscripts, printed documents, handwriting manuals and samples, metal type, linguistic information about the script, feedback from native readers — all form parts of a puzzle that needs to be put together to design a competent typeface.

The story of Ol Chiki script is fascinating. The script is less than a century old, and was devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who wanted to create a script that could accommodate all the features of the Santali language — something that the scripts used to write Santali so far had failed to do. Legend has it that he based the design of the letters on objects commonly found in the everyday environment of the Santals. Even though the script was created between 1920 – 1940, the Santal community has many myths about how it was created. One says that the script came to be at the time when the Earth itself was created, another says that the script was given as a divine gift to a learned man, Pandit Raghunath Murmu. It is after Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who is reverentially called Guru Gomke, that the Ol Chiki typeface that I designed was named. You can find out more about the Ol Chiki typeface and input methods project here

 

Custom lettering for the Tamil branding of the Coovum Art Festival, designed by Pooja Saxena 

If you’re interested in Indian type design and le ering, consider following the work of these exceptional designers — Noopur Datye, one of the co-founders of type design collective, Ek Type, who has designed custom typefaces TV channels like LifeOK; Kimya Gandhi, who is partner at Mota Italic, and recently designed an inventive Devanagari handwriting font; or Lipi Raval, whose flamboyant Gujarati typeface Mogra is a complete head-turner. 

 

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8 stories. 113 avatars.

Posted by Remya Padmadas on February 24, 2016

Yamini Vijayan, Content Manager, StoryWeaver writes about the recently concluded Weave-a-Story campaign and how the collaborative spirit of a community helped 8 stories find their way to 113 translations of which 89 were in Indian languages. 

For over a year before StoryWeaver was launched, our team was working on making existing Pratham Books' stories available on the platform. Pratham Books does have a fantastic collection of multilingual stories for early readers, and we were eager to make these easily accessible - digitally, and in a way that is super easy for our community to use, reuse and recycle. But all this was content that was already published (in print). Shouldn't a brand new platform like StoryWeaver also have brand new stories, we wondered.

And it was this, in a sense, that led us to the 'Weave-a-Story' campaign – a campaign rooted in ideas of inventiveness, diversity (in language) and collaboration. The campaign inspired 8 enchanting children's stories. For four of these  ('It's All the Cat's Fault', 'Ammu's Puppy', 'दीदी का रंग बिरंगा खज़ाना' and 'चुन्नु-मुन्नु का नहाना') we requested illustrators to create fresh artwork. Three of the stories ( 'The Day it Rained Fish' , 'The Story of Stories' and 'துப்பறியும் துரை') were woven around sets of illustrations created for #6FrameStoryChallenge, a campaign aimed at building a rich image bank for StoryWeaver. 'Mangoes for Moidooty'  was created by a community user, who had used existing Pratham Books illustrations to string together a rather charming story.

In fact, one of the things that got us really excited was that 'It's All the Cat's Fault' – the story that we launched with – was written by Anushka Ravishankar, a co-founder of Duckbill, one of the leading children's publishing houses in India. To us, her openness to contribute was a sign – of a sparkling future for an open-source story platform like ours (read more about the journey of Anushka's story here).

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the creation of these 8 stories, we reached out to the growing community of users and friends of Pratham Books to support the campaign by translating these stories into AS MANY LANGUAGES AS POSSIBLE. And once again, our community jumped right in and gave us enough reason to be eternally optimistic. We're delighted to say that as part of the campaign, we added languages such as Mundari, Sadri, Konkani, Khmer, Portuguese, etc. Today, you can find stories in over 30 languages on StoryWeaver and while we're thrilled to bits, we continue to be eager to add more in the hope that children across the world will be able to read good stories in languages of their choice.

We closed the 'Weave-a-Story' campaign on February 21st which was International Mother Language Day and what we'd like to share with you more than just numbers and figures is this: our growing realization that collaboration is truly at the heart of the work we do and without this, it wouldn’t be possible for us to do what we set out to do (“a book in every child’s hand”). Besides, the journey has been far more memorable and colourful with folk like you for company. So while this campaign is ending, we're really seeing it as a beginning, for StoryWeaver's collaborative efforts. So you – yes, you! - it's you who can help us transport these stories to children, so do stay with us and together, let's build a world of young, multilingual readers.

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StoryWeaver Spotlight: N. Chokkan

Posted by Remya Padmadas on September 29, 2016

1.     What do you usually read? Which language do you prefer to read in?

Like most readers, my preferences change every few years. For the previous five or six years, I am mostly reading poems (and few stories/articles) written at least few hundred years back. It is fascinating! Given a choice, I would ONLY read Tamil books :) Mainly because there is so much to read there and I am quite comfortable reading Tamil. I usually read English books for relaxation or when my work demands it.

2.     Is there a favourite book / author and why is it a favourite?

Favourite book: there are many, don't want to name a single one :)

Favourite authors: J. K. Rowling in fiction, Nammazhvaar, Kambar and Bharathiar (All Tamil) in poetry, Sujatha (Tamil) in Nonfiction.

Reason: when you read just a few paragraphs from any of their work, you will immediately know that they care for their readers. I feel that is an important skill for an author.

3.     You have contributed for us immensely. How has the StoryWeaver journey been?

Amazing. I loved the concept of infinite stories in different languages in a single platform. I am enjoying it!

4.     Could you share one big thing that you take away from this experience?

I guess the biggest thing I learnt from StoryWeaver is that stories and images don't stop within a book.

I mean, when you read a printed picture book, you are focused on it, you complete it, close it and then you pick up the second book. A similar experience is possible with StoryWeaver too; one can read each story separately and enjoy it. But, the fun increases multifold when you look at the "picture repository". Suddenly, you see all those images at your disposal; I can mix two images from two different stories and create a third story. Someone (coming from a different background) may mix those images backwards and create a fourth story. This means you have an unlimited supply of stories, most of them may not even be written!

5.     How does it feel when your story gets published online?

It doesn't create the kind of excitement I get when I see a story published in print. But then, I am not a digital native and I still love print books. So don't take this feedback personally!

6.     You have translated / reviewed a handful of stories for us. Which one has been your favourite and why?

That would be "A Helping Hand" by Payal Dhar, illustrated by Vartika Sharma.

I enjoyed reading this story which talks about friendship and fitting in. It has an implicit message, even some scientific facts, but they don't disturb the story flow, which fills us with positivity.

7.     What is your key driver in taking this up?

Very simple, I like writing, and I keep looking for new ways to write and learn. As I told earlier, StoryWeaver gives me unlimited options to do so.

8.     How else do you think we can join hands in taking bigger steps for children’s literature?

I know there are many kids' books (stories and images) which are in public domain. I feel StoryWeaver can have a crowdsourced project to bring them to its platform.

Also, given the fact that many of your target audiences may only understand their regional language (even their mother tongue) and can't read, you can think of adding the audio capability to story pages. I mean, one volunteer can read the story and hundreds of kids can listen to it, even if they can't read that language.

9.     How has the overall experience with StoryWeaver been?

அருமை! ஒரு வாசகனாகவும் எழுதுகிறவன், மொழிபெயர்க்கிறவனாகவும் StoryWeaverஐ மிகவும் ரசிக்கிறேன்!

Excellent! I love using StoryWeaver as a reader and as a writer/translator!

10. What’s the secret behind your awesome professionalism?

Ah, finally an easy question :)

My teachers (in and out of school) taught me that professionalism is as important as (if not more important than) the talent. I am just trying to follow their advice. If at all I am doing well on this aspect, credits should go to them!

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