The Journey of a Letterform on to Your Screen
summary
Pressing one key traces a specific Devanagari akshara from Brahmi inscriptions through colonial printing where the first metal type cast in Rome appears, through the Linotype and proprietary encodings that resist Unicode, into fonts that actually implement OpenType substitutions for conjuncts. The talk shows concrete projects: a width-variable Fit Devanagari, a 3,500-glyph handwritten family, spice-jar labels and Devanagari watch numerals, and documents the social facts — 28 states, 12 scripts, 22 languages — that drive design choices.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:52From Mumbai to type design
- 4:35India's typographic landscape
- 6:21Devanagari vs. Latin
- 7:27Pressing one key — the journey begins
- 9:02Brahmi, metal type & colonial printing
- 11:02Linotype, digital age & the Unicode problem
- 15:21India's visual landscape today
- 20:11Conjunct characters & OpenType features
- 23:51Project showcase: Fit Devanagari & beyond
- 29:48Why representation matters
- 31:5115 years of letterforms
related talks
24mCapital additions to Georgian typography
22mDesigning and Evaluating Livefonts
44mThe Art of the Font
43mCracking the Code
58mFrom Hot Metal to HTML: The Story of Typography
37mType with character(s) – reclaiming control over OpenType fonts
05mInterview with Erik Spiekermann
01h 03mFonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography