Anek Gurmukhi

Anek means many, and the project lives up to it: 10 scripts, 9 of them Indian plus Latin, drawn in a range of weights and widths by 12 people. Ek Type, the Mumbai collective behind it, ran the work during the pandemic lockdown with the team spread over 8 cities, from Mumbai and Pune to Bengaluru, Baroda and smaller towns, and speaking 3 languages among themselves.

The way they worked is the interesting part. Each of 10 designers took the script they knew best, Sarang Kulkarni the Gurmukhi you see here, Yesha Goshar the Latin, while 2 more handled engineering and project management. Every week they met on video calls of 3 to 4 hours and marked up each other’s drawings with arrows and emojis, and decisions went to a vote. The shared look of the family came from a pool of features they agreed on together; within it, each script was free to follow its own typographic tradition.

It paid off. Anek collected a TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence and a D&AD Graphite Pencil.

This page. Anek Gurmukhi in the normal width, 8 weights from Thin to Extra Bold, Gurmukhi and Latin in each file, with tabular figures and a slashed zero. The full design runs to condensed and wide versions as well.

For Punjabi interface text, Regular or Medium. The team itself says Anek comes alive in its boldest weights, and we would agree, though in Gurmukhi the heavy headline bar fills in fast, so give Extra Bold plenty of size.