Baloo 2

Tag a paragraph as Marathi and 2 letters in Baloo 2 change shape. The ल and the श switch to the forms Marathi readers expect, and the conjuncts built on them follow. So do the numerals 5 and 8. Hindi, or text with no language set, keeps the default forms. The same swap sits in the first stylistic set too, for apps that never pass a language tag to the font, and a second set offers another drawing of the e and ai vowel signs.

This is the member that kept the plain name. The project runs to 10 families and every other one goes by its own name, Bhai for the Gujarati, Thambi for the Tamil, while the Devanagari stayed Baloo 2 and was drawn at the studio together with the Latin. Girish Dalvi did the engineering, with some design help on top.

The shirorekha, the bar each Devanagari word hangs from, is as heavy as the stems. At Extra Bold it becomes a thick black lid over the word.

Where would we put it? On a Hindi children’s magazine cover, or on the box from a sweet shop at Diwali. The Regular can carry a short paragraph if you open up the line spacing, because the vowel signs above the bar and below the baseline need the room; a full page of it would wear on the eye. ₹ is in the character set, along with ꣻ, the headstroke sign from the Devanagari Extended block. For a price list there are tabular figures.