Graphik now supports three Indic scripts

Graphik, one of our first releases, has steadily grown in popularity and language support over the years. Now Christian Schwartz’s original design has three Indic companions: Graphik Bangla, Graphik Devanagari, and Graphik Tamil. Shiva Nallaperumal of the Mumbai agency November provided creative direction for all three script extensions, with mastering and technical assistance from Universal Thirst. Each script interprets Graphik’s low-contrast plainness in its own way, and can be used for both text and display.

Designer Arya Purohit has brought Graphik’s “vanilla” qualities to the Bangla script, retaining the typical ball terminals alongside clean, simple stroke endings. Bangla proved particularly challenging because it needed to adopt the highly calligraphic script to the monolinear, neutral(ish) environment of Graphik while matching form, texture and the Latin version’s characteristic warmth. Preserving the ball terminals —usually removed in sans-based designs—was the answer to the puzzle. Graphik Bangla blends classic and modern genres to achieve Graphik Latin’s warmth while weight distribution and optical correction do the heavy lifting to create a smooth texture and high readability.

Independent designer Hitesh (Rocky) Malaviya has translated Graphik’s subtle blend of geometric forms and organic warmth into the Devanagari script, finding natural ways to simplify the forms—particularly stroke endings and “knots”—without forcing the shapes to appear overly synthetic. Graphik Devanagari is an attempt to create the “perfect” default monolinear Devanagari typeface.

Rocky has also ported Graphik’s low contrast straightforwardness into the Tamil script. Tamil presents a unique challenge among the Indic canon: its letterforms vary widely in horizontal width and are noticeably less dense than Latin (most north Indian scripts are denser). The script also features characteristic loops, ascenders and descenders, the pulli (dot diacritic), and open counters. As with Graphik Devanagari, Graphik Tamil was an exercise in weight distribution and optical correction. In addition, the team designed a Tamil-specific space unit that reverts back to the original when used with the Latin glyph set.