AJ: Khang is a pretty unique name for a typeface, how did you decide to name it that?

SN: Matthew Carter once said that the hardest part of making a typeface was naming it. I couldn’t agree more. So I have been experimenting with how to name typefaces for a while now, even with my previous release, Pancho. But with Khang it started as a deal/inside joke. During my thesis year at MICA, my exhibition used a lot of vinyl. Being a noob I was quite terrible at the art of fine vinyl application. So I told my friend and collegue Daniel Khang that if he helped me put up all the vinyl, I would name my next typeface after him. He did help me with it and essentially saved my ass and I bet he never gave it a second thought. The first typeface I started after graduating was a calligraphic sans and I decided to keep my end of the promise. Though it took seven months to deliver, I think he’s quite happy with the results. 😀

AJ: What did your design process look like for Khang? Just how long of a timeframe are we talking about?

SN: I started the typeface with the idea to explore the contradictions between monolinearity and calligraphic flair on the same plane. I posted the first iteration on Instagram exactly 42 weeks ago which is like 9.7 months. So collectively I would’ve worked on it for 7 months. I had no idea what I was getting into really, and it was quite challenging.

Khang’s first public peek.

I was clear from the start that I wanted to have a typeface that explores the contradiction between monolinearity and calligraphic in the same typeface, before starting to draw. The shapes themselves hadn’t formed in my head though, so a lot of drawing and editing (in RoboFont, not so much on paper) was done before the true logic of the typeface emerged. There were a lot of calligraphy excercises in between just to understand how contrast and stress angle works—I’m not a very good calligrapher. I also wanted to maintain the stress in the same ratio in the lightest weights and not have the contrast evolve among the weights, which was an interesting challenge. It was very fortunate that I’ve always had good guides to help me when I get stuck, and this time it was Satya who spent hours with me in conversations and critiques about Khang. His input changed the entire feel of the typeface (as you can see from the above Instagram image) to the polished thing it is now.

AJ: What got you hooked on type design on the first place?

SN: Well its a long story. In undergrad—at DJAD, Coimbatore, a modest little design school—we didn’t have a specialization like graphic design or illustration. We only had the option between two generalized courses: Communication Design and Industrial Design. Having picked the former, I had three years of indulging in diverse class projects from graphic design to film to illustration etc. Each semester I dabbled in something and typography was an undercurrent interest that grew stronger over the years. In my junior year I attended the famous Design Yatra conference in Goa where I received two things that eventually led me to where I am today: an ITF Poster for the release of the massive Multilingual family Kohinoor and Commercial Type’s fold out specimen (one of their earliest).

Kohinoor, Indian Type Foundry

I had a eureka moment. On one hand, for the first time I saw a typeface as a concept, a set of shapes and characteristics applied to a variety of glyphs and even scripts in the Kohinoor poster that had Malayalam, Tamil, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Bangla, and Devanagari scripts in the Kohinoor typeface where I first understood that “Oh, they all seem to match…but also respects each script’s unique shapes!” There was an over all “Kohinoor visual language” that was applied to all these scripts that are so widely different. This was a typeface for India. I was proud, happy and in love. Commercial Type’s variety of types especially Guardian, Giorgio Sans and Stag blew my mind. No images, no crazy display effects…Just type, traditionally set and sparkling. Till this day I don’t remember what the text says really, because I only looked and never read. And I looked long and hard.

I started sketching letterforms the day I got back to my dorm. I started making small uninformed illustrator letterforms and started using them here and there. But everything changed when I discovered Typotheque’s articles page that had amazing articles and i saw that there was a conceptual/theoretical side to type. This was what really interested me. From this point on, I started exploring foundries, sites, specimens, history and started being able to distinguish type etc etc. you know the feeling. 😉 I made a simple, circles+straight lines based set of letters on illustrator called Struktur in the end of my Senior year. Ultra Types from Barcelona saw it on bechance and offered to make a working typeface out of it and publish it. Juan (the founder) was very kind and helpful and published the damn thing! This gave me incredible confidence and first opened my eyes to the possibilities of collaborating.

When I came to MICA, I enrolled in Tal Leming’s Graduate Typeface Design class that changed my life and career forever really. Here I met peers who were into this weird little field and a mentor who was too patient and too kind for his own good.

AJ: Now that you’ve designed a handful of typefaces, how would you say your process has evolved?

SN: It has certainly evolved in terms of drawing skill, because mastery of the tool is a very important factor of course. The practice helped me make better decisions on how to draw things, where and how to place points…the nitty gritty stuff that really makes a big difference. I discover new things in RoboFont all the time. Outside of the technical making the font process, each project demands its own I guess. For example, Khang required me to do a lot of calligraphy first, to understand the logic or broad nib angle, contrast and stress before starting to get on the computer. Labyrinth and Manifesto involved research into the specific styles that they are part of to understand the playing field better. Pancho was completely impulsive design and began and ended on the font editor. I really like this aspect too, that there’s no formula or rigidness to how or why a typeface is born. I’m currently working on the serif version of a sans designed by Satya. This is a super interesting and new challenge for me, as there are strict constraints. The stricter the better sometimes.

AJ: What are your tools of the trade?

SN: I use RoboFont for Drawing and spacing, Prepolator for checking compatibility between masters and Metrics Machine for kerning. I’ve experimented with several tools that do all of this in one place but I really think for something as specialized as type design, I prefer multiple programs doing specialized things (and working together seamlessly) than a jack-of-all-trades program. I really love RoboFont’s simplicity and bare bones approach and that it has a community of dedicated users always creating new and useful plugins to make the workflow more interesting. Prepolator and Metrics make things that are excruciatingly painful into something seamless and interesting. I can’t imagine how kerning was before it. Superpolator, I’m not too familiar with yet. I used a simple interpolation tool (that Tal made) for my thesis fonts and have just been playing with it for now. I’ve been relying on our post production head here at ITF to help with interpolation because of the workload but I’m excited to learn more and integrate it into my workflow.