Anek Bangla

Anek means many, and the people at Ek Type in Mumbai took the name at its word: 10 scripts, a long roll of designers, and weights and widths spread across the whole project. Before anyone drew a letter the group settled on a shared pool of visual features, and each script was then left free to pick up habits from its own typographic culture and from whoever had the pen. The Bengali in this family is Sulekha Rajkumar’s. Yesha Goshar did the Latin, the same Latin that turns up in the other Anek families.

What you get here is 8 static weights, Thin at 100 through Extra Bold at 800, upright only.

Ek Type says the family comes alive at the heavy end, where the terminals turn sharp and the joins taper, and on this one we would take their side. The Thin and Extra Light look fine in a big title on a pale background, but a hairline weight at small sizes eats the detail inside Bengali conjuncts fast, so keep those for large settings and let Regular or Medium carry the paragraphs.

Some practical things sit in the Latin half. There are fractions, superscripts and subscripts, ordinals, tabular figures and a slashed zero, and the character set has both the taka sign and the rupee sign, so a price list for Dhaka and another for Kolkata can come out of the same file.