Tamizh Letterforms    

We started with an emphasis on form and proportions, getting to the pencil and paper drawing out letterforms with proportions of classic tamizh with references from akshraya and other typefaces. The brush and ink drawings over the week and half made me notice and observe the weights, contrast and other particulars.

Weight : Book
Stems : Straight
Contrast type : Translation
Contrast : Low
Width : Compact

Along with the studies of caligraphy, we had to construct the letters as part of a typeface of a place or a city in an indic script. After which the type parameters were set and the letters were first physically drawn according to that.

The initial construction happened on Glyphs with the overlap of the actual drawing. Detailed critiques of form and refinement happened over a period of time printing the letters multiple times. Every single aspect was looked into and learnt from. 

All letterforms went through a lot of refinement in every single draft trying to learn the close eye for constructing detail and working with type as form.

Consistency in letterforms and styles was given a lot of importance and in trying to be politically correct of the script proportions.

The drafts 5-6 were visual correction changes digitally done. The final letterforms was arrived at then. I would love to take this forward and create all the tamil glyphs soon enough and then the latin.

Varkala is a quiet sleepy coastal village in the Malabar coast of Kerala. It is a two hour train away from Trivandrum which i had been to as part of a solo backpacking trip to the entire stretch of Kerala’s coastline. Varkala is known for its cenozoic warkalli formation which makes it a cliff beach.