When you set out to design typefaces for a language that you don’t understand, it is important to do some preliminary research. True, typeface design is necessarily systematic, and it is possible to draw abstract shapes based only on the interaction of foreground and background, creating balanced letterforms that connect to form words, sentences and text. Still, it helps to know something about a language when you design typefaces for it. It simply makes the design process faster. Knowing, for example, what letter combinations are used in the language keeps you from wasting time evaluating combinations that never occur.
Just as it is difficult to distinguish individual words when listening to a foreign language, it is difficult to recognise individual characters when looking at an unfamiliar writing script. And it is doubly difficult to distinguish the essential structure of the letters from the decorative elements. Studying fast handwriting helps: it is usually free of any decoration, utilising just the essential strokes required to identify each character. It was fascinating to study the same text rendered by different people, find possible letter alternatives, and discover culturally preferred forms. Once the structures of the letters became clear, the design process became a formal game of black and white again.
For the preliminary research for Fedra Hindi we collected samples of handwriting in Indic scripts. These samples of Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali became the foundation for our future designs. With this material in hand, we could choose the letter forms which suited our purposes. Without it, we would have merely replicated what had already been done, probably propagating common errors in our lack of knowledge. Thorough research doesn’t restrict you; on the contrary it gives you the freedom to make intelligent choices.
