Anek is an award-winning variable font designed for 9 Indian languages (Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, Telugu) plus Latin. It was created by a collaborative team of 12 designers working across India. Teamwork and giving equal value to each script were keys to its success in winning design awards.
The designers communicated remotely during COVID lockdowns, establishing processes like weekly video calls and annotations to foster collaboration. Working separately also allowed more creative exploration.
Rather than starting with Latin and matching other scripts to it, the team designed all scripts simultaneously. This first approach better serves India’s multilingual environment.
Anek scripts share common circular shapes and features like consistent weights and widths. However, each has unique characteristics reflecting its writing tradition, like different vowel diacritics in Devanagari, Gujarati, and Gurmukhi.
With 40 styles per script, including different weights and widths, Anek offers excellent variety for multilingual designs. This makes it well-suited for applications across India involving multiple languages and scripts.
