When I started work on my new typeface some time ago, I wasnt running out of inspirations to be honest. Having said that, I am in no way a type designer. This would be my first attempt to design a typeface, more so, this would become great learning exercise that would enlightened me in understanding the finer aspects of typography in graphic design. There was no urgent need to looking for fake reasons that I can tweak based on my final sketches nor was there a need to identify the purpose of the typeface. Did
Martin Majoor know that Scala would become a standard as a literary typeface? Scala did have a purpose though, to be the official typeface for Vredenburg Music Centre in Utrecht which can be used for concert programmes, booklets and posters and such. It is the breadth in which Scala (or any good typeface for that matter) can be used in various applications best left to the judgment of the designers using it.
That said, I started to outline what the typeface would be. I knew I wanted to design a working typeface, that has Modern, Contemprary, Stylish attribute. Being in India, I had the curiousity of a world far away, where great names and great masterpieces have marked the history of graphic design and the design that we know of today. By taking inspirations from Indian vernacular forms (in Hindi, Marathi, and to my surprise, Punjabi) and then exploring them based on the forms of two of my favourite typefaces - Erik Spikermann's Meta and Adrian Frutiger's Univers, helped establish a foundation to my work in progress.
This journey, as I would want to call it, begins with Emil Ruder from
the road taken long before.
Typographie: A Manual of Design.
