 edition of design lecture series. Today, we have a renowned fund designer, fund engineer, and a very creative person, Mr. Muthu Nandamiran. As we go towards the first anniversary of Typography Society of India, we have a lot of interesting talks lined up over the next few months. First of all, on behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to extend a warm welcome to Mr. Muthu Nandamiran. I'll just give a short introduction about him. He is a legendary fund designer and fund engineering expert in Indian languages. And all those who are using Apple devices will realize that all the Indian language fonts and Indochinese fonts you see in Apple OS, all of them are designed and executed by Mr. Muthu Nandamiran. It is a very proud moment for us to have him as a speaker today. He was keynote speaker in Typography Day also earlier. He has over three decades of experience in typography. He started out by drawing large banners and posters with Tamil and Latin inscriptions while at school in the 70s. His initial works in the digital space were bitmap fonts and lower resolution fonts for printers. Later, his type design for all the Indic and Indochinese scripts are now bundled into operating systems like Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android. The popular Tamil type called Inai Mati continues to render Tamil text beautifully. All this iPhone, Cypher, Apple Watches, HTC Android devices, the same typeface is used on standard type for Tamil text by the ministries of education in Singapore and Malaysia also. Besides typography, Mr. Muthu Nandamiran has innovated and built fast and efficient input methods for all languages he works on various platforms. Over to you, Mr. Muthu Nandamiran for your talk. Thank you for joining us. First of all, I'd like to thank the Topography Society of India for giving me this opportunity to present about some of the work that I've done and particularly one special project that I'm working on right now. So, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get started right away. Now, I'd like to introduce myself and say a few things about what I did when this whole thing about my love for typography started. When I started getting interested in typeface design, I didn't know the term typeface design. The word font didn't appear in my vocabulary at the time, but I was very interested in what happened in printing presses because my dad was a writer and I used to follow him to all these presses where his publications were printed, his invitation cards were printed, his brochures or posters were printed. And I was very intrigued by the way they assembled letters and got his blocks together to get some text printed on hundreds of thousands of pages. So, that got me excited looking at each of those slots, each of those metal pieces and how letters were carved under them and how they inscribed beautiful letter forms of print. My dad was a Temmel writer, so a lot of the presses that I visited had typefaces that were designed for Temmel scripts. But the frustration sat in in the year 1983 when we started doing events for school children and we wanted to publish books and magazines in three different scripts. And we had an issue. When you want to do something in Temmel, it cost a lot more than what used to cost the cost of a page in English or Malay. Malay uses the Latin script by the way and it was a lot cheaper, a lot easier. But in Temmel you cannot edit once they have composed the page. You cannot make changes. There are no typefaces. You can't have a bold text when you want it. So we had all these issues. That made me angry and I wanted to do something about this. So when I graduated in 1985, there was this MS-DOS computer. That was the first computer. It was 1985. I don't know if all of you were born by then, but you know, that was the state-of-the-art machine that I had. How do I make these machines speak Temmel? Will this have an answer to this question, to these frustrations that we had? So I started to get an engineer by qualification. I graduated with a degree in electronics engineering. So I looked at some of the devices, some of the parts of the computer and started looking at where these characters are generated. These characters that appear on the screen, where they're generated, can I reverse engineer that and make them display Temmel text instead of English or alongside English. So I found that particular chip that's called the character generator chip and I started looking at how characters are stored into them. And that's how they are stored. They are like big maps of all the Latin text that we know of. Now, how do I get my text to display on the screen that only can display 80 characters, wide and 25 lines? And it has a limited number of space. A limited amount of space for you to put a character inside. And how do I get the keyboard to send Temmel keys when you're pressing the English text? So I started writing programs. I started designing text and a bit of what I did was this. This is the character generator, how the alphabet capital A is stored. I want to skip all that because I know we are designers, we're not engineers, but you give the idea of how the text is stored on the device. And you know, if I gray out all the zeros, you can see the ones appearing and that's how A is stored. And I copy the idea and store Temmel letters like that's how A is stored. And you see that, you know, that's the vertical line space, the vertical character space you have that's just one zero, one line of zero, so you can't fill out the entire eight zeroes that you have. So you have to like squeeze your Temmel in there. And that's your baseline, that's your extender, that's your descender. That's the limit you have to work with. You cannot set your own extender or descender. So with that, I got the screen done. And how do I get the printer done? Using the same technique, I wrote assembler routines, programming every pin as you know, how it should hit the paper when the print head moves from left to right. This was dogmatics printers. This was before laser printers were popular. So again, that's how I designed the letters. And this is the first publication that was done with dogmatics printers. A publisher who was a friend of my father's wanted to be a Temmel publisher to publish a book that was printed with the system that I designed at the time. Then came laser printers like mid-80s. And then again, using the same technique, I designed PCL bitmap fonts. Scalable, TrueType, or Adobe's Postcode fonts were not yet popular. And this is the time. And then I've heard of Daily's, Monthly's, Weekly's, Periodicals and all that started using my system because they were now able to make Temmel pages a lot easier. They can edit, they can change stacks, they can put different typefaces and all that stuff. Now this was done at the time when there was no internet, there was no Google, and there were no mobile phones. I don't know if you can imagine such a time, even I can't, because although I did come from that time, I can't imagine there was a time when there was no internet, no Google. I couldn't Google to find out how this programming language worked, how this PCL specification worked. No, I couldn't find. I can do that now, even for technologies that emerged at that time, but I couldn't find then. So, what were my tools? 1985, what were the tools that I used to make this? Well, that's my first tool. That's the second one. If some of you have used MS-DOS computers, that's a text editor. And that's the assembler language, which was used to write programs for the Intel architecture, Intel CPU. So that's square paper, text editor, and assembler language. Those were my tools. Then came Microsoft Windows, which had graphics, user interface, you can use a mouse to move things around, and this was the most sophisticated tool for me at that time because it could register a pixel. Every time I click on the screen, that pixel is registered, and then I would go and write programs to the pixels and I could run them to fonts. But that was all the fun stuff. Anyway, 25 years later, because there's a lot more stories to tell you when there's no time, so 25 years later I had these typefaces for all of the Indian languages, Indo-Chinese languages, Sri Lankan languages included in IOS and macOS. So that gives you a chronology of things that I did from 2010. Anyway, today, I'm going to talk about this new typeface, which is like the style of today's talk. I'm calling it unnamed. Unnamed Tamil means mother. That's because this is a derivative of another typeface that I did much earlier called Amma, which is also another name for mother. So because it's a derivative of both of these, I dedicated to my mom, my late mom. The metaphor is, how would you like a typeface, you know, for a letter that is writing to your mother? So it's like your handwriting. Not too formal, but it's pleasant for your eyes. I'll give you a little bit of insights and briefly describe what this typeface looks like and then talk about some internals. What is this good for? It's ideal for informal texts, secondary voice, if you want to say something while you're saying something formal. For call-outs, posters, banners, presentations like what I'm doing now. And it could be a single template for multiple scripts. If you're doing a presentation in English, Tamil, and Hindi or Marathi, this could be a typeface that you can use it for because then you have something that harmonizes across all the languages. It could be an ideal typeface for a notepad because it resembles a handwritten typeface. Now the primary goal of this is to be a multi-script typeface. So I wanted to make sure that Devanagari which covers Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and a lot of those Latin languages they all harmonize together. So if you have Indians living in abroad, in France for example and they are preparing a poster that has something in French and something in Hindi and something in Tamil, they can have a typeface that harmonizes across all of their messages. Now in Devanagari I've also included Vedic signs for those who are interested are people using it today? I don't know but we wanted to make it complete so we included that. We included Tamil fractions. I'm sure nobody is doing that today but we wanted to make sure that this font has it. So if somebody wants to look at how Tamil fractions look like, this font will be able to render that for them. And our goal is to cover all the major Indian scripts not that we don't, I'm not interested in the minor ones, we'll get them to that get to them later. All of the Southeast Asian scripts including Myanmar, Laos, Kenya, Balinese even had some points. That's the goal. Now let me go through some unique features of each script and then talk about some couple of issues that I can share with some internals, some take-home messages that you can also use in your designs. Now that's Devanagari and you can see the start and the end of the Cheroreka which is the headline has got a block. Now that's some magic in there when you break this word into two you'll see that block added I'll show that demo to you later. You'll see the vertical strokes they're all identical. In fact these vertical strokes are the same strokes that will appear in Tamil if you're using Glyphs app those are like component glyphs that you can actually paste them across when you design. The same strokes appear in like capital L or small case L or I in Latin and they're all based on the T sign that you see where the armatra meets the Cheroreka that's the same junction you will see even in Tamil armatra because they look the same. Now this is the magic that I'll show you. These are two separate words and each of them you can't actually do this because when you design these two letters you will see the blocks you know knocking on each other but we did some magic on that. Now these things will work across AAT which is Apple's advanced typography technology as well as OpenType Well Apple also supports OpenType very beautifully so you can actually do this entirely in OpenType but there are some issues which we can talk about in a question later. Now the blocks that I talked to you about so this is like one word and every letter is connected now if I split the letter you see that the blocks are getting inserted with them and the end of the first letter and the beginning of the second letter when I merge them the blocks they appear okay so that's some magic that I can explain to you how we do that later on in Tamil you see the same strokes that you see in Devanaguri especially the terminals the first letter you can see that it's written the entire letter is written without a pen lift likewise the spaces between the matras and the base letters are all taken into account so they harmonize very well with the design that we did for Devanaguri as well now we also included the old style letters these are no longer in use but you need them to say that they are no longer in use at least to say they are no longer and some people are loving this they are trying to bring their usage back I use those even when I write today they have gone disappeared like decades ago but people are not forgotten I think it's the same issue for Malayalam because people are going back to traditional Malayalam typography orthography although the modern one the reformed one has become an official one but people are going back to the reform technology allows that so we included that as well but matching Latin we have contextual forms we have legatures all the good stuff that we have seen on Latin now for Latin we had the I had the privilege of working with my good friend her colleague who are Malaysians as well they have been long-time and interesting that we had to meet in an overseas to realize they were Malaysians they are very generous and they work with me in finishing the Latin and extending that design to all the extended Latin languages that use that extended Latin script like German, French, Vietnamese all that now this is some of the work that we had used in our discussions we looked at how we wanted to unify the way the terminals end in each script the connecting points to make sure that there are not too much smudging and also to reduce the congestion especially when in the numbers like 6, 8, 9 similar things exist in terminals which I'll show you shortly now the finished product gives you a very harmonious look across all the three scripts and we want to realize the same thing across the other script that we were planning to add on to this family that's another example of Latin they have not been in terminals appearing in one screen they have some design insights first let me talk about Latin this is the original design, you can see that it's slightly broader than the new one when you compare to the Tamil one and I had the privilege of showing this to the late Hara Unger who was also my teacher at the wedding when I did my unrest and he told me that if I stick to this design the Latin sometimes can overwhelm the Tamil it's got less stroke density and it can occur bigger when you put both the scripts together I condensed it a little bit I think it appears and you was right it's a lot more harmonious now you don't see any script dominating over the other so you reduce that script dominance which is very important when you design a harmony now some of what I was telling you about earlier the joints we wanted to make sure were natural when you normally write it you don't actually see a disjointed point there but we wanted to show a little bit of a pen lift over there so you see like the second last letter the knee you see that the E mantra actually starts slightly above the headline likewise the last letter so it shows a little bit of touching but not so much joining now for definitely blocks we had some we explored I had a lot went back to my old days of writing assembler code you know so I was trying how do I make these things work so one idea I thought of was to have different length of headlines and then match them programmatically based on the length of the word but that was too much work and it's arbitrary we don't know how long a word is going to be and how many of those we need to design it's not like the E mantra that we designed for really limited number of places so we abandoned that idea we ended up doing this I'm giving you different clips in different colors so you can see there are a lot of little components that join together to give you that blob effect we can discuss this if you want we have questions I can talk about this later on conjuncts we had a lot of discussion about this and Pooja Saxena some of you may be aware she and I had some very interesting exchanges on this and the decision was do we make the parts of the conjunct touch or join I know the new trend is to have them joined have them developed fully as a as a glyph instead of using half forms that are like half touching which was done those days before all this open type stuff came about but I wanted to show off my blogs you know because that's like the highlight of this whole typeface so okay yeah I understand and I agree that you know we must have completely drawn glyphs for all these conjuncts but having them touch instead of join gives it a little bit of difference that little imperfection is I consider a unique feature of this typeface so we reach to compromise okay we don't disjoin them but we join them but we touch them but we not necessarily join them so as a design decision then when will it be ready well if you have the macOS Big Sur you can download it now it's available some of the updates have not gone in there but it's usable all the three scripts are there not yet they're extended let in but you can download it now so with that thank you and I look forward to questions thank you very much thank you very much for your wonderful talk we are all looking forward to hearing about this multi script typeface it is a very interesting concept which is very much in need of today graphic designers only are very excited to hear about multi script thank you very much for your wonderful talk we are all looking forward to hearing about I will just before I go further I would like to take one moment to make a small announcement to all the viewers of typography society today I'm extremely happy to give you information about the next speaker of typography society Dr. Fianna Ross will be talking to us on research based practice and designing type for south asian scripts this will be on the 27 months Saturday at 5pm okay now I will start reading from the questions one is Muthu sir the first one is that when we discuss a multi script font like you have mentioned you are designed now how do you manage the inherent anatomy of three different cultures because we are talking about English Devnagari Marathi Tamil tomorrow you might be having another multi script font which might be of Aurya also of Malayalam also Kannada also so how do you look at the visual characteristics of four different cultures and then make them look harmonious in your design that's an excellent very good design very good question it is actually a challenge especially when you want to design or when you want to include a script that reflects the cultural or the linguistic or topographical heritage of that particular writing system and we all know that even though the languages are in the Indian sub-continent they all have different historical backgrounds the tools that were used to write those scripts actually differ and that actually influenced the shape of the letters in a big way what more if you want to include alphabets from the other side of the planet or down south when you go down to well the Indian the Brahmik derived scripts may have some things in common so you can somehow reach a compromise but you know what we want to do include Urdu at some point which is written in completely a different direction than in scripture so we have to somehow find a compromise and that's extremely challenging but equally interesting one example I would show you is Tamil has a traditional italicized appearance if you look at the old palm leaf manuscripts the writing or the written form those manuscripts had some italicization or slant not the angle slightly different not the regular slant angle that you see on computer you don't see that in Devanagari for example but in this case we have come to a compromise we can't have Devanagari italicized and then Devanagari upright and Tamil italicized and call them that they see a harmony in them we can't do that so we introduce a slight harmony in Devanagari here as well we reduce the italicization of the slant angle of Tamil so it doesn't look too foreign to Tamil and it doesn't look too foreign to Devanagari as well so this is one of the ways we found balance when we combine scripts from different cultures Latin I just I was mentioning earlier during my talk the Latin in is slightly condensed it's not a regular Latin it's like a condensed Latin in a regular type of that's because it has to make way for the harmony to coexist so these are the kind of tweaking we have to realize that and we're very extremely excited to look for these challenges when we start incorporating other scripts into the family as well and you know when we talk about the conscience which you have shown in your slide that you were thinking about joining them and some of them you know you think you have a decision to make whether the conscience joined or touched but this kind of design challenges occur in all the scripts when you're talking about multis is it possible to make that kind of a decision consistent throughout or again it depends on the structure of each language I think the priority is to realize the harmony we as I mentioned the primary intent is for the design to be harmonious across multiple scripts so we have to probably look at it from that angle and what kind of changes or what kind of design decisions we have to make to ensure that that harmony exists when we add the new script to the family for example the next ones that I'm working on is Malayalabin and Guru Mukhi maybe because they have less complexity in the systems but Guru Mukhi has a very clear presentation so that decision doesn't really come in between and Malayalam has very clear presentations of course we go into traditional orthography then you have a lot of those conjunct forms in separate individual clips but even then the design decision is not that difficult to make I see a challenge when we do Bengali for example one of my favorite scripts and it's got different hands the way Bengali I'm so very happy Fiona is going to be the next speaker she's like the authority when it comes to designing Bengali scripts and she was my teacher at heading so and she was she will show the different hands in writing Bengali so how do you incorporate that script into the family without losing the essence of the script it's going to be a challenge I'm actually quite looking forward to that that is because it is a real tough thing for a designer to look at because the grid structure itself is different in Guru Mukhi and Malayalam and Bengali and to make it harmonious in a multi script font and you know traditionally Malayalam and Tamil was written with a stylus Guru Mukhi and Dev Nagari were not they were using tools for that think about getting that original flavor of that culture of Dev Nagari, Guru Mukhi and Bengali and Malayalam and Tamil it is one of the real toughest challenges for us that's true Malayalam is the excited harmonious in all of them correct, I think there are two parts to it one is of course the design and you know I will have to engage local speakers as well I'm very familiar with Malayalam Guru Mukhi I'm quite familiar because there's a huge culture I've got lots of Punjabi friends myself in Malaysia there's a community here so both the scripts I'm very familiar so it's not good I have some ideas already so it's not going to be very difficult to achieve them but for the others like Aurya for example it's I know the script I know the the workings I've done that is Aurya font before but how will a native Aurya speaker look at something like an Anne influence design in an Aurya correct so I will have to engage and I'm actually greatly looking forward to that opportunity which is why in front of jumping and doing all the scripts at one time I'm doing it one at a time to study that I think the outcome of the entire project is going to be extremely satisfying because I know we will have materials that we can pass on to budding researchers and design students who would like to study and look at and probably take it even further we have to start somewhere I'm hoping that this will be a start I'll just read out some of the questions has it gone to Kannada glyphs somebody has asked somebody has asked well I mentioned all of the scripts are in the pipeline they are in my list I'm just doing Malayalam and Guru Mukhi as the next scripts because I'm very familiar with them probably Kannada and Telugu will be done together they have some similarities so some design decisions can be applied across both the scripts so yeah certainly definitely we'll get there there is something from Kimya Gandhi she's saying this is Muthu another one from Sreyesh Mram Sreyes very subtle Muni Anandakrishnan saying truly commendable and unique initiative Muthu great lecture Muthu inspiring to watch that's Professor Anandakrishnan the former vice chancellor of Anna University Suihil thanks Muthu for the great and inspiring presentation there is another question from Sreyesh Mram what inspired you to do this project in the first place and could you please explain to why we need such a phone great I was hoping for a question like that what inspired me to do this was you know I write a lot of articles not a lot but I do write articles in Tamil and every time I want to mention something in a different tone for example you know I want to put a quote I want to quote a verse from that you know put in one of my father's poems he's a poet you know so what I want to do that I want to say that in a different voice right so in English what we do is you can paste and if it's time to do in Roman we just click on the italics button it gives us a completely different typeface it's not just slanting an upright Roman you know it's a different typeface but you know I couldn't do that and italics you know just taking an Indian typeface any language for that matter and just applying italics to it I was thought it was too cheap an approach you know just because there was a button there word processor I just used that so I was actually exploring this design of okay what I want what if I want a casual style that I can use for emphasis for example so that's what inspired me to do this and like my all other designs in the last 10 years whatever new design that I took I would like to see how it can be applied across all scripts some of them yeah I can you can realize how many in some but some you can't but this one I wanted to because I did not see that many designs that were done for emphasis in Indian languages so there's also an area of research in there which I'm you know hoping to explore and enjoy there is some more Nana wants to say that it is a well designed font with harmony and another question is how to become a member of TSI from Facebook that is to me there are two ways to do it one is in Facebook you can find facebook.com slash groups there is a group called typography India in that you can send a request to join and we will approve the request another is about we have so many whatsapp groups whenever a group gets full with 256 members we start a new world so we have so many groups of that so if you send your mobile number in your email id I will email id Sampark.tsi at gmail.com we will add you to the list whichever whatsapp group has that membership mainly mainly we discuss things through those whatsapp groups and our facebook and all the announcements about all the things are done through this and you can read our blog also typographyindia.blogspot.com and I would like to request something more about the other fonts which are done for activity and all that that if you can share some of the experiences with that okay there are two family of fonts that I did for all the other scripts one is a Sangam family which is actually meant for the original intent was web browsing and user interfaces so the Sangam family you would not see that much variations of color or features they are just to make sure that the script works as it should and they are all like low contrast designs which is what they use for user interfaces like the San Francisco or the Notosans series of fonts that were used for the android devices so that's the goal that was the Sangam thing that I did that in the year 2007 2008 where there weren't enough specifications available on how the scripts work and there wasn't enough sample fonts available the correct shaping of this tags so I did that in Apple Advanced Typography AAT and not OpenType but later on I added the OpenType features to that the other one is MN series whatever the script name followed by MN so you have Tamil MN, Devon Agri MN it goes like that that's meant for documents so those will have contrast like your Times New Roman or Georgia or something like that again the goal was not harmony but to make sure that each font meets the requirements of that script and that they properly render the text correctly when you compose on that these are the two family of scripts that I did for multiple languages the rest of my work were previous work that was done in Tamil let me look at the other questions how do the traditional calligraphers react to this kind of because when we look at a font designer so we do a lot of adaptations of traditional font we need to balance the technological requirements, communication requirements also so I just wanted to know for example in Tamil the kind of improvisations you did in this particular font how do the traditional calligraphers and the artists and designers there how do they react to such a good very good question the more I am in one of those whatsapp groups I was probably in the early whatsapp groups and probably not full already and I see a lot of very interesting shares of beautiful calligraphic works done by many calligraphers in India the more I see the more I realize that they are actually two different fields of study I don't know because calligraphy it encompasses the entire message that you want to write and it's usually very short so it could be a phrase or a small poem that you want to calligraph so everything is connected and then you even have a swash that goes from the bottom line to the top line and all that that adds beauty to the presentation so you have to see the entire content in a holistic approach that's my opinion whereas in calligraphy you look at small pieces and make sure that they fit into one another harmoniously when you use them in text so that's definitely going to be a lot of compromises and particularly Indian languages you're going to realize a lot of what you call contextual forms particularly when you're doing cursive style high faces you may have end up having multiple variants of the or the e-matra for example depending on what letter sits before or what letter sits after so there's a lot of research some technical work that's involved in getting a typeface to work with each letter that is adjacent to it that's where the difference is so I don't think the role of the calligrapher is oscillated by typography it never will be because the approach correct no I think some of them understand the situation that warrants such compromises in fact I'm a typographer I'm a typeface designer so every calligraphy presentation that I see the first part that comes to my mind is this typeface will it be possible for you to realize the typeface I can do these things and I'm also a font engineer so even more exciting when it comes to seeing contextual forms so that's my view a calligrapher looks at the entire content and think of how to present them in a single sitting but as a typographer look at smaller pieces and I think they understand each other's requirements and when you do a multi script font like this you have already laid down certain roles because you have done Devanagari there is Latin Devanagari and Tamil now when you add more languages to this for maybe 2 years you will add 4 of them so you have already drawn certain playground markings in when you did this sure if you look at when you do Gurumukhi now it is a restriction also because you have already written down roles of the game so you manage that I don't want to pre conceive a decision yet if you look at the choices that I made 3 different scripts from 3 different regions so you have Tamil which more South India Devanagari which is Northern Indian calligraphic tradition Tamil is South Indian farm leaf stylus tradition and Latin which is from the western tradition so there are 3 different groups already so I think that's one of that was probably the biggest challenge now when we add Gurumukhi for example doesn't differ too much from Devanagari I mean of course it's not the same as Devanagari but you know it has some similarities it has the headline so that's one there already so we look for similarities when you want to design for harmony we look for similarities when you want to bring out the characteristics of the we look for specifics what's good for example if you look at Bengali for example the triangle is the specific triangle so you want to highlight that you want to bring that up you want to promote that to give that from far you can look at it hey that must be Bengali the grid sense is so different exactly the font grid sense varies drastically so when you look at multi-script and when you look at harmony then you look for similarities and the joiner is the scaling of the joiner is that philosophy or the SOP also might have changed from every script which you have done because it also can't be okay I think we can we can use the same there are possibilities there are possible areas where we can reuse the technique in specific scripts the script that I'm most concerned about not there yet but the one that I'm most concerned about is Oriya I think that it's a northern Indian script that has some south Indian resemblance so it's very unique in the way it's written so I haven't figured out what kind of treatment we need to make to make those letter forms synchronize or harmonize with what we already have in our name that's going to be a challenge how do you manage the excite issue the excite changes drastically when you go to look at any Indian language font and when you compare it to Latin there is a lot of difference in the excite for example if you take Delugu there are a lot of characters which come on top of one another or below and then a mantra will come so the excite proportionately reduces and might not be the same with Tamil it will be very different in Bengali also so the excite is a drastic variation in excite when you look at the Indian scripts so how do you manage when you do a multi script font because you need to look at the excite correct I try not to use the excite as a benchmark or as a marker and when you talk about harmony you also talk about avoiding script dominance for example in Annay the Cherarika actually is above the excite it doesn't sit on or below the excite it's above the excite so if you use a ruler and measure the Devanagari may look taller than Latin or Tamil but if you put the Devanagari on the excite for example then the most important part of the glyph gets condensed the excite steals the show then you will see that Devanagari looks very condensed when you compare to and then the other scripts may dominate so you need to move that up a little bit but we are not going to see that many lines of text that will have characters or letters from different scripts intermixed into the same line that's not going to happen but you have words that are inter placed between a sentence the goal is to see that the script is not drowned or it's not overwhelming the other script that is next to it so what I do is instead of using the excite as the measure I take the overall middle portion of the salient part of the glyph I give you an example there's this old Tamil newspaper in Malaysia called Tamil Nates 6 years old so when I started doing typography I was very interested in some of the display faces they were wooden type wood types and I looked at one of them and then I tried to copy that design I mean I didn't look at that I tried to copy the design and make it into a text type face it didn't work that's because all of the marks that went on top drastically reduced to just bring out the most important part of the glyph visible prominently visible so when you read a headline from far you can read the text without losing its meaning right so it didn't work for text type face when you read in close up so like that when you look at different styles of type faces look at the most important part of that glyph what actually gives meaning to that glyph which is the part that makes ker look like ker not the headline it's not the x-height but it's the stem and the two kerf that goes next to each other so I try to highlight that and make that appear in the middle so the Cherarika can go above the x-height or the baseline that's okay but as long as when they are in the same line they appear harmoniously so that's the rule of this the game of this particular type there is one question do you start solo and then get a team together or there is a team since the beginning for this project a lot of this is done at a hobby fest I think like all designers all creators musicians people who create art you know a lot of the dreams start in their head solo the sparks get triggered when you are walking in the park or while eating some food or watching a movie and then you start catching doing some group studies as much as I like to work on all this individually because I like to touch and feel them I'm actually passionate about designing that business for any language there is a practical limit that you can't do beyond and then I work with people who are very interested and that can be challenging because you need like-minded people because it's your baby and you want people to really take it with care so that much of passion must be in that to realize it together so Sveli and Sinjin who are my good friends in Malaysia they've been very helpful in providing feedback because they wanted to make sure that the concept of my design is not lost when they extended my Latin design to include the extended Latin character so we had constant exchanges in doing that the short answer is no I don't have a team to start with in my head and then I look for people who can give life to that idea and then we build it together I'll just share screen for the concluding slides and I'll come back in a minute because many people are asking about the email ID and how to become on behalf of the organizing team myself Farondi, Giridhar Dr. D. Uday, Kumar and Chirag Gandhar we would like to thank Muktu for accepting our invitation we want to specially thank the Haskig team and all the group members and this is the blog ID and the website ID and the email ID so whoever wants to join and can write to us and the details about the Facebook group everything is in the blog and we have a youtube channel also where all the previous lectures can be seen sumbark.tsi at gmail.com is the email ID so with that I will conclude and thank you thank you very much for joining us