Creating a Digital tool for Designing Devanagari font

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Interaction design project 2
Creating a Digital Tool for Designing Devanagari Font
Aksharchitra : Over a period of time various physical aspects of the Roman script have been explored extensively through several applications and computer mediated tools. This eventually resulted in a number of the typefaces being designed for the roman script, as compared to any other scripts (Devanagari script). And they are available for printing. This project involves designing a suitable tool for people to design Devanagari fonts starting with letters followed by a process and grid pattern.

The project aims at creating computer mediated tool that will help designers to design Devanagari fonts with the help of an interface. A comprehensive set of interactive tools are available for font design. With the minimal interaction the designer can describe his forms, edit them, visualize them singly or in combination and then create full letterforms for use.
A user community consisting of designers, type designers or artists. This abstraction enables one to bring new innovative and artistic letterforms in a hand designed quality.

Chitra Gohad (M.Des. Interaction Design)
Guided by: Prof. Pramod Khambete, Prof. Ravi Poovaiah
Industrial Design Centre (IDC)
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay,
Powai, Mumbai
2012

Initial Research

What people wish to peruse is not font but various aspects of Devanagari type design, what is devanagariness of devanagari fontdesign. So I decided to broaden my scope of study from font design to Devanagari.

I decided to interpret software tool to include a much more inclusive canvas/ scope of investigation to look at the aspect of tool not just as a tool but as a computer platform for designing Devanagari font.

Typefaces are not mere chunks of text or information, they have a personality of their own. They communicate not just with the content they carry also with their form. They convey a specific message and a typographer should make sure that they convey the appropriate message.

User Study analysis - Explored font design methods

Observation

• Facing problems in proportions while designing letterforms.

• Feel of medium extremely important (people were connected to their own medium, had a specific set of pencils, colours etc).

• Every person had an own method of designing a font on software.

• Joinery problems in letter strokes when it gets intersect.

• People used to do constant experiments while designing.

• Data loss in the process

• Our languages follow a different structure as compared to Roman script, as our scripts are highly phonetic and graphic form in terms of structure and design.

• People used to design one letter from each group and then adopt characters to remaining letters.

• Creating a type people had used or rather gone through with grid pattern and guidelines.

Focused Problems

• Data loss in the progress (many alterations are happening)

• Facing problems in proportions.

• Exploration and comparison

• Not supporting Devanagari grid

Problem Statement

Designing an interface which gives the designer a suitable environment while designing Devanagari font and that will allow experimentation.

Design Goals

• To create a Suitable Environment for designing Devanagari font.

• To design the interface that will be used across the font designers.

• The interface should be suitable for experimentations, explorations in the font design process.

Initial sketches

Wireframe

Interface Design

Form-wise classification
Default unicode layout of Devanagari letters according to similar forms and that is from difficult to simple letter. Its makes easy to visualise letters once the difficult one is designed. And various features are placed on another side.

Spine approach- Spines are built by default in all glyphs. User can edit existing spine or create new one with providing editing tools.

Brush gallery- Facility to assign various calligraphic brushes to set of spines. User can experiment with different parameters like pen width, angle and thickness according to his design in the Metrics. Tool allows to assign multiple brusheset of calligraphic brushes to apply on spine