Anek Devanagari

In Devanagari the base letters hold the middle of the line while vowel signs and conjuncts climb above them, hang below or tuck in at the side, and a sans family has to keep all of those parts in step from its lightest weight to its heaviest. Kailash Malviya drew this Devanagari for Ek Type’s Anek project, with Yesha Goshar responsible for the Latin that comes in the same file.

Anek was split by script. 10 designers each took the one they knew best, and the group, scattered over 8 cities during lockdown, met on video for 3 or 4 hours every week to mark up drawings and vote on decisions, sometimes by majority, sometimes unanimously. What they agreed on became a shared pool of features; what each designer brought from their own script’s printing culture stayed in. The family later collected a TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence and a D&AD Graphite Pencil.

There are 8 weights in this download, 100 to 800. Ek Type says the design comes alive at the heavy end, where terminals sharpen and joins taper, and for a poster or a masthead we would start there too. The Thin is another matter, those small marks above and below the letters get faint fast, so give it room and size.

The Latin side carries more kit than a headline face needs, with a slashed zero, fractions, ordinals, superscripts and tabular figures, which helps on a menu or price list set in 2 scripts.