Hello, and happy new year! I’m back from a little rest in December, and this month, I spy with my typographic eye a new Devanagari adaptation of TypeCooker, and to mark India’s Republic Day, a look at the postage stamps released to celebrate the first one in 1950.

For the last five years or so, I have toyed with adapting Erik van Blokland’s TypeCooker to Devanagari. The thought came to me after I finished drawing the letter क in a different style every week in 2017, and was looking for new ways to exercise my mind and muscles when it came to drawing Devanagari letters.

In case you’re unfamiliar with TypeCooker, the idea behind it is simple yet brilliant. In Erik van Blokland’s own words — “TypeCooker is a simple exercise generator for those interested in type design and lettering. It chooses randomly from lists of carefully picked parameters, in varying degrees of difficulty (more or fewer parameters) and complexity. The task is then to draw letters that incorporate as many of the parameters as possible.” He writes in some detail about it on his website, and I would urge to you to check that out.

Making a Devanagari TypeCooker

Obviously, I am not the first person to come up with the notion to extend or reimagine TypeCooker, and definitely not the first one to execute it. Mota Italic’s Indic TypeCooker sheds the original’s Latin-centric point of view in favour of a wide-ranging tool that can be used for a range of Indic scripts, including Devanagari. Martina Flor’s LetteringMaker is another example. In the holidays, when I revisited my efforts to make Devanagari TypeCooker into something more than the stop-gap version I had put together for myself, I asked myself why it would be useful for others too. The single word answer was “specificity”, but allow me to explain.

In my early attempts to use TypeCooker for Devanagari, I would either ignore the Latin-specific instructions, or adapt them to the closest Devanagari counterpart I could think of. This worked, sort of. But it rendered the tool limiting because it wasn’t dialled into all the features of the script that can be modified to create different textures and expressions through type. I ran into a similar challenge in using Indic TypeCooker, though to a smaller extent. Because it has to be useful for a number of Indic scripts, it has to be general enough and shun particularities. To make a TypeCooker attuned to Devanagari, I had started collecting samples of Devanagari typefaces and lettering and making notes about their features in 2018. Finally, last month, armed with notes and drawings from years past, and help from my brother, Prateek, I got to work. And here it is now, Devanagari TypeCooker!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you end up using it to generate drawing exercises for yourself or for students you’re teaching. I can be reached via email or social media, and the project lives on Github.

Parameters for a Devanagari TypeCooker

So what parameters did I decide to include? Let me walk you through them, alongside some illustrative samples from three of the sources I consulted — Practical Guide to Lettering by KC Aryan, Modern Hindi-English Lettering by AH Hashmi, and Chitraksharam by Kamal Shedge.

Horizontal Proportions

For this, I stuck to the parameters that come with the original TypeCooker: Weight and Width, though I tweaked some explanatory texts and changed the options around a little bit.

Vertical Proportions

The first set of parameters to set vertical proportions was easy. Matra Height Above Headline and Matra Depth Below Baseline can control the relationship between the size of the letters with the mātrās that attach to them.

Note the variation in the height of mātrās above the headline, and their depth below the baseline in these examples. This play of vertical proportions serves functional purposes, like fitting Devanagari in limited vertical space when being matched with Latin, as well as expressive ones.

But that’s not enough is it? What about the vertical proportions within the letters themselves, everything that happens between the headline and baseline? This is where I ran into a roadblock: terminology for Devanagari letterforms isn‘t quite as well-accepted or known as in Latin. To be honest, I couldn’t find any terms that could be used here that would be instantly familiar, and so I ended up using the location of the upper and lower mean lines (as seen here) as a way to exercise control over where the action happens: are the half stems long or short, how high or low are the bowls, and what is their overall height, etc. Arguably, this means that Devanagari TypeCooker needs a reference document explaining all the terms used in it, and I hope to work on one sooner than later.

These maybe rather extreme examples, but they show us how a change in the vertical proportions can really transform Devanagari letterforms.

Contrast

The notion of Contrast from the original was re-oriented to make it meaningful for Devanagari. I moved away from Noordzij’s concepts of “translation” and “expansion”, and towards Girish Dalvi’s terminology of Axis, which is described in the Devanagari Search Tool built on the foundations of his doctorate work. Devanagari TypeCooker offers four options for Axis: Left-inclined, Right-inclined, Vertical and Horizontal. And with where thick and thin strokes should go determined, the extent of difference between them is specified by the parameter, Contrast Amount.

Even though the first two samples here have unconventional axes: left-inclined and horizontal, I think they give us opportunities to think carefully about what makes Devanagari letters what they are.

Stroke Ending

In the parameter Stroke Ending, I have, perhaps controversially, included the direction for adding serifs. Serifs may not be traditional in Devanagari, but they exist. Case in point, Manushi Parikh’s typeface, Begum, and Namrata Goyal’s Devanagari wordmark for political magazine, The Caravan. So why not explore pleasant ways of incorporating them? Apart from this and other run-of-the-mill choices, there is also the instruction to add out-strokes. Out-strokes can exist in so many shapes and styles, and it always disappoints me that they don’t show up as much in contemporary typefaces.

From exaggerated calligraphic strokes to pen flicks and everything in between, out-strokes add both interest and challenges to Devanagari letters. How, for example, would you solve the issue of adding below-base mātrās to such styles?

Headline

Like I wrote in the first issue of I Spy with my Typographic Eye, in Devanagari “… neither the baseline nor the headline [are] unyielding and unbreakable”, and there are options to play around with this flexibility in Devanagari TypeCooker. Some of the more out there choices only appear rarely and in advanced levels, but the options to have continuous, broken and missing headlines show up often and early.

The form of the headline alone can make such a big difference to what Devanagari letters can express. Do you have a favourite style?

Knots

For Knots, I once again referred to Dalvi’s terminology. Combining his concepts of “middle knot” and “end knot” into one, I decided to keep it simple with three choices that one would most commonly encounter.

Pay attention to the letter म in these samples: the first one has a filled knot, the next a closed one, and the last example has an open knot. This one change can have a big impact on texture because knots repeat themselves in different letters quite often.

Special

Things are brought together with a parameter from the original, Special. It adds a layer of interest by asking for the design to be drawn as a stencil or script or bitmap, for instance, or with different types of flourishes. These are tempered with more functional instructions for including specific matra combinations and particular conjunct types.

The parameter Special has some options that add flair to your drawing, like in the examples above.

Could there be more or less parameters in Devanagari TypeCooker? Yes. But then how many is enough? I found that these many gave me interesting recipes to draw letters. And I hope they will work for you too! I would absolutely love to see what you draw using Devanagari TypeCooker. You can send me an email, or ping me on Instagram or Mastodon (or even Twitter, though I might be quite slow to respond there).

Postage stamps for a new republic

Through the holidays, I also spent some time reorganising my stamp collection, and thought, with it being January when India celebrates its Republic Day, I would share the stamps released in 1950 to commemorate the first one.

They were designed by D.J. Keymer & Co., an advertising agency based in Calcutta. Like me, you might remember them as Satyajit Ray’s employers at the time he turned to filmmaking. D.J. Keymer & Co.’s origins can be traced back to 1928, when its parent establishment, a trading company, was set up with a department dedicated to create advertising for its products. The trading company folded up shop, but they continued on as an advertising agency.

All four stamps show a young boy and girl. In the first they are looking at a rejoicing procession; in the second, at a charkha or spinning wheel; next, a plough and grain; and finally, a quill and ink pot and verses of a religious song popularised by Gandhi. The Latin letters on these stamps immediately reminded me of Berthold Wolpe’s Albertus. That felt jarring because Albertus transported me to London, where the typeface appears on street signs and even on the city’s coat of arms. Albertus’ application in the visual landscape of London came only in 1988 as far as I know, but still, what irony!

If you collect stamps or are keen on them, the National Philately Exhibition is happening in Delhi in February. The last one I visited was in 2011 and it was super fun, so I can’t wait to go back next month.

Let me end with some housekeeping: since I sent my last newsletter in November, I have begun using Mastodon, where my home is a typography-centric server called typo.social. If you’re on Mastodon, please say hi 👋🏼 I’m @matratype@typo.social. I don’t know whether it is the newness of the platform, or its unhurried pace, but I find myself posting there more often than I had on Twitter in years.

This issue was first published on January 11, 2023.