Anek Latin

Yesha Goshar drew the Latin of Anek, and in the same project the Odia as well. That doubling up says a fair amount about how the family came together. Ek Type, a Mumbai collective of type designers, split Anek into 10 scripts (Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, Telugu and Latin) and handed most of them to whichever designer knew that writing system best, with Noopur Datye running the project and Girish Dalvi doing the font engineering.

It was made in lockdown. 12 people in 8 Indian cities, speaking English, Hindi and Marathi between them, met on video calls of 3 to 4 hours every week, scribbled arrows and emoji over each other’s drawings and settled the open questions by vote. Datye said later that working apart let each person wander off in their own direction without picking up the others’ habits. The family went on to win a TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence and a D&AD Graphite Pencil.

For the Latin, all this means a sans that was planned from day 1 to sit on a line next to Devanagari or Tamil, sharing a pool of visual features the team agreed on.

Ek Type’s own notes point at the heaviest weights as the place where the sharp terminals and tapered joins come through. We’d go along with that and keep Extra Bold for a headline or a wordmark, with Regular or Light doing the paragraphs underneath. There are 8 weights from Thin at 100 to Extra Bold at 800, upright only, and the 683 characters cover extended Latin and Vietnamese. A slashed zero, tabular figures, fractions and real superscripts are there too if you need numbers to behave.