Creating an Equivalent Devanagari Typeface 

Creating cohesive, multi-lingual type families, especially for retail release, is a challenging exercise. The designer must balance many different considerations  – the need for familial uniformity, the unique characteristics and historical roots of each language and the challenges of diverse interfaces.

Yet, the number of applications using local typefaces is growing, as is pride in their use and cultural significance.

Recently November created a Devanagai typeface for Grill Type, which began as a custom typeface project and evolved into a retail typeface release. 

We caught up with Shiva Nallaperumal, Founder, November, and type designer, Hitesh (Rocky) Malaviya, to understand what it took to develop GT Devanagari. 

A Hybrid of Two Distinct Genres

GT America marries features of American Sans Serifs (called Gothic) and European Sans Serifs (called Grotesk) to create a modern hybrid. American Gothics are usually much more affable than their European counterparts which tend to be cold and industrial.  Says Shiva, “These stylistic concepts are native to Latin typography but don’t exist in the Indic cannon — there’s no concept of Gothic or Grotesk for Devanagari. We had to interpret the typeface purely through form and texture. The Devaagari had to be structured, neutral and affable, and match the Latin in spirit and form, if not in historical roots.”

The end-result is a Devanagari typeface that reflects the duality of GT America’s visual grammar, combining the old with the new while preserving the script’s innate beauty and readability.

Addressing the Challenges

This characteristic of GT America’s typographic system, where two distinct genres from different eras converge, posed unique challenges while translating its visual grammar into Devanagari. 

Rocky lists some important measures he took to avoid overly simplified letterforms, preserve the script’s warmth and natural feel, and prevent it from becoming cold and artificial.

Devanagari letters with conventional structures often have knots that indicate overlapping continuous stroke movements. These knots were carefully removed from some letters to simplify the design, maintaining the inherent character of the conventional structure.

Some Devanagari letters have broken shiroline (topline/headline) and loops where default matras (vowel signs) don’t work. To address this, alternate forms were created for these special cases. For example, for the extreme black weight, separate sets of matras and shifted Nukta forms were designed to avoid consonant clusters, ensuring legibility and readability.

In GT America, as the weight increased, the terminal angles became steeper, helping to keep the apertures open and maintain a smooth stroke flow. This required careful adjustments to ensure readability and visual harmony across the different weights. Devanagari forms are more complex than Latin, and incorporating the Latin feature of the terminal angle was challenging to achieve. 

The team took the precaution of deciding on the final design before expanding the full-character set, which helped to avoid iteration later on. 

The Use Cases

“The potential use-case informs the design in very crucial ways,” points out Shiva. “If the typeface is intended for large sizes, there are specific decisions to be made. If the typeface is intended for very small sizes in print vs in UI, those are again very different decisions. But if a typeface is meant to look good in all of these cases, that’s a much larger problem to solve — GT America lands in the third case.”

Rocky adds that he foresees GT America Devanagari being used extensively in modern branding and editorial design in the modern Indian landscape.“Its blend of traditional Devanagari forms with contemporary elements makes it ideal for corporate identities, advertising, magazines, and digital interfaces. This typeface can enhance the visual appeal and readability of multilingual content, ensuring consistency and harmony across both Devanagari and Latin scripts within a cohesive design system,” he adds.

Shiva also sees great potential in GT Devanagari’s use in advertising. “Each weight is designed to perform functions specific to that weight: for example, the UltraLight and Black are Display fonts with exaggerated features and design details. The Black weight especially looks very distinct and identifiable in very large sizes: It would perform well on a large hoarding as well as on a piece of packaging where the user’s attention is the goal. The middle weights are more suited for neutral text settings, in both UI and print. Because the typeface comes with both Latin and Devanagari sets, it makes it a very powerful tool for modern design.”

“Each script has its own evolutionary history and intricacies — the challenge is not to dilute those details when looking at the larger picture of matching to a system. We were always focused not on creating a Devanagari version, but a Devanagari equivalent,” says Shiva.