Namrata Goyal, a type designer based in Alwar, India, found herself inspired by lettering in a book in her aunt’s library of Hindi titles from the 1960s and 70s. That lettering was the seed that sparked Goyal’s exploration, which would grow into Splinter, a unique modular Devanagari script. The display typeface is a work-in-progress, Goyal says; she is collaborating with Frederik Berlaen and Universal Thirst, a foundry specializing in Indic and Latin typefaces.
What struck us was Splinter’s graphic quality. The font plays with the limits of legibility, presenting itself as a sort of futuristic dot matrix with opportunities for patterns and graphic flourishes.
Splinter’s visual presentation aside, we love the ride-along on Goyal’s process, which she outlines in the Splinter Diaries. The series is for Universal Thirst Gazette, an online resource for designers, researchers, and students to encourage discussion and interest in Indic type (and type generally).
In her first installment for the Splinter Diaries, Goyal lays out her initial exploration of a grid-based system and how to render the shirorekha (or the horizontal line above the characters), diacritics such as matras (vowel modifiers), conjuncts (adjoining consonants), and symbols such as the kana (क, ठ, with a central vertical stem).
Top: found lettering, the title of a book by Hindi author Devendranath Sharma. The creator of the cover design is unknown;
Bottom: the digitized version.
For now, Splinter supports the basic Devanagari character set and some support for Hindi conjuncts and Marathi and Nepali glyphs. The typeface will expand as it develops to cover the Latin upper case, followed by other Indic scripts. Find Splinter on FutureFonts.
Namrata Goyal pursued her love of type at TypeAtCooper in New York and TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, Netherlands (her thesis explored newspaper type and multi-script typography). At Universal Thirst, Namrata primarily focuses on North Indian and Latin scripts. She also publishes independent projects on FutureFonts.