Title: Designing letters for script harmony
Abstract: Multilingual environments are not uncommon anywhere in the world today. In India, however, designing types for multiple languages may also involve multiple scripts. Although Indian scripts descended from a common ancestor, they have evolved into many different forms over the centuries. We see multiple scripts in a single document, poster or signboard all over India. How do we design them so they play in harmony with each other.
In this workshop, participants will be asked to pick a few characters from two different scripts and attempt to design them for harmony.
About Instructor:
Muthu Nedumaran
Typographer, Founder of Murasu System Sdn Bhd, Malaysia
Muthu Nedumaran has over 3 decades of experience in typography. He started out by drawing large banners and posters with Tamil and Latin inscriptions while he was at school in the 70s. His initial works in the digital space were bit mapped fonts for the computer screen and dot matrix printers. Fast foreword a few decades, Muthu’s type design for all of the Indic and Indo-Chinese scripts are now bundled into operating systems like Mac OS X, Windows, iOS and Android. The popular Tamil type called 'Inaimathi' continues to render Tamil text beautifully on iPhones, iPads, HTC Android devices and even the Apple Watches. The same typeface is used as the standard type for Tamil text by the Ministries of Education in Singapore and Malaysia. Besides Typography Muthu has also innovated and built fast and efficient input methods for all the languages he works on in various platforms.