InDesign in India

David Blatner

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This article appeared in Issue 128 of InDesign Magazine.

A review of publications created with InDesign using Indic scripts.

Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the exotic and mysteriously connected characters that make up the ancient language of Sanskrit—usually written in a script called Devanagari. But Devanagari is just one of dozens of scripts that, together, are called Indic (or Brahmic) scripts—a collection of related “alphabets” used by dozens of languages, including Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, Sinhala, Kannada, and Punjabi. They are among the most beautiful, flowing, calligraphic scripts in the world—read by more than a billion people, and yet rarely seen and used outside the Indian subcontinent (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Indic scripts span a wide variety of glyph styles.

Of course, we are all accustomed to seeing ads or documents written in Latin scripts (such as the so-called Romance languages, the Nordic languages, and hundreds more). Similarly, it’s common to see printed work in Chinese, Arabic, or even Cyrillic (Russian) characters. But we rarely see Indic scripts in professional design—which seems crazy, as Devanagari is the third most-common script in the world!

So this issue of InDesign Magazine is devoted to these amazing languages and writing systems. Let’s take a look at some of the marvelous work being done in these languages and created with Adobe InDesign.

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