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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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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Duration - 6 months extendable up to 1 year 

About Us 
Pratham Books (www.prathambooks.org) is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India. As a publisher serving every child in India, Pratham Books has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to exploring innovative ways in which to create access to joyful stories and have been fortunate in finding partners to collaborate with who share this vision. 
In 2015, Pratham Books increased its footprint by going digital. StoryWeaver (www.storyweaver.org.in)is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned, or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform are openly licensed. 

We are looking for a Project Manager based out of Chhattisgarh who can spearhead a statewide campaign. The person is responsible to successfully implement the campaign and deliver on the KPIs while managing internal and external stakeholders. 
An ideal candidate should have proven experience in campaign and project management. 

Key Responsibilities: 
As a Project Manager, you will manage the day-to-day communication and operational aspects of the project. Your core responsibilities will be to: 
● Create and maintain detailed timelines/work plans for all project deliverables and key milestones; hold internal and external teams accountable to project plans. 
● Serve as the primary point of contact for all operational questions about the project internally and externally 
● Establish and nurture government relationships in the state education department to further the campaign outreach and impact 
● Design and deliver campaign outreach initiatives in the state and ensure mobilization of resources at the ground level 
● Identify stakeholders and attendees for crucial recurring and ad-hoc discussions; capture meeting notes and escalate communications to align on deliverables and troubleshoot roadblocks. 
● Deliver project status updates to internal and external teams 
● Undertake ad-hoc translation requests for short messages and social media posts. 
● Support in preparing project launch, weekly check-ins, to identify and capture recommendations for future execution.
● Working closely with other team members to capture feedback throughout the project lifecycle and to contribute to the iteration of existing processes aimed at making project delivery more effective. 
● Support the organization in monitoring and evaluation exercises 
● Gathering and summarizing key takeaways for monthly project reports 

Required skills and experiences: 
● Minimum 2 years of experience in the education sector, project management or social media outreach campaigns 
● Bachelors / Masters degree with relevant experience will be considered for the role 
● Proven experience in project management, social campaigns, digital marketing campaigns and/ or project management preferably in the education sector 
● Exceptional communication and project-management / organisational skills 
● Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within a cross-departmental team 
● Excellent track record of time management, systems organization, and follow-up

● Agility and flexibility towards evolving responsibilities and last-minute project changes 
● A confident facilitator to coordinate discussions between multiple internal stakeholders (such as an interdisciplinary team of different specialists across different geographies) 

Language Skills: 
Excellent proficiency in reading, writing and speaking Hindi. Additional knowledge of local languages of the state is desirable 

Nice to have but not mandatory: 
● Past experience in the education sector. 
● Masters degree with past work experience in social sector organising and advocacy. 
● Experience running lean campaigns that emphasize scaling of success, ideally within the education/social sector 
● Willingness to travel around the state if required 

Location: Raipur 

Write to us: 
Email your resume with the Project Manager (Chhattisgarh) -StoryWeaver in the subject line to [email protected]. Also, send us a short paragraph on why you think you are suitable for the position.
 

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